My Gentle Barn by Ellie Laks Page A

their heads.
    “Right. So why would it be OK for me to go up to a horse or a goat and start brushing her without asking, or at least telling her what I’m going to do?”
    Then I told them how I’d learned this about animals.
    Both Zena the goat and her baby, Amy, had arrived at the Gentle Barn pregnant. “We didn’t know for the first month,” I said, “especially with Amy. She was just a baby herself. We never suspected she was going to
have
a baby.”
    Amazingly, little Amy gave birth without any complications to a tiny black goat that we named Zoe. Unfortunately, Zena’s labor and delivery did not go so smoothly. The usual birth for a goat was a single kid—just like humans—with the occasional twin birth. But two months after her arrival in our barnyard Zena gave birth to four tiny goats. Two of them were stillborn and the other two were very weak. It became clear very quickly that the two surviving babies were not going to make it either unless there was some intervention, so I placed them carefully in a towel-lined carrier in preparation for a trip to the hospital, then tried to coax Zena into a larger crate. But Zena was not interested in being in a box. I put a harness on her and tried to lead her into the crate. I got behind her and pushed from the rear. But nothing I did worked.
    “So, what do you think I did?” I asked the girls.
    “You put food in the crate,” one of them said.
    “Good guess. I thought that was a good idea too. But I tried it, and it didn’t work either.”
    I went on to tell them how frustrated and exhausted I was. At my wit’s end I finally had blurted to the goat, “Zena, please, please. Your babies are going to die.” I explained to her that I was going to take them all to the hospital so we could save her babies, and then when they were better, they were all going to come back home.
    “Did she believe you?” one girl asked.
    I nodded. “She looked at me with this expression that said,
All you had to do was ask
. And then she walked right into that crate and sat down.”
    The girls laughed, then one of them asked, “Did the babies make it?”
    One more baby died, I told them, but we managed to save one. She was tiny and white like a little fairy, so I named her Tinkerbell. And that baby and Zena came back home, safe and sound. I pointed out Zena and Tinkerbell to the girls. “The important part,” I said to them, “was that I learned that animals understand a lot more than we thinkthey do. Now I always ask permission or explain before I do anything to my animals.” During the rest of the visit I heard the girls saying to the goats and pigs, “Can I pet you?” or to Shy, “I’m going to brush you now, OK?”

    In the early weeks and months of working with groups, my eagerness to teach the kids that animals were not so different from humans sometimes led me a little bit overboard, and I’d end up saying something the accompanying adults did not think appropriate. I sometimes found the parameters of what I could and couldn’t say by walking straight into a wall.
    Right after I got my first turkey, Tommy—rescued from his fate on the Thanksgiving table—I had a group of twenty very bright kindergartners. Their teacher had told them the animals had been rescued, so the kids asked about each and every animal. “Why did you save that one?” Or “Where did this one come from?” When we came to the turkey, they asked, “Why did you save this one?”
    I had learned by this point that I needed to be subtle—especially with young children—so I chose my words carefully. “Well, we rescued him from a place that wasn’t going to take care of him, and so we brought him here.”
    “Why?” the kids wanted to know. “How come they weren’t going to take care of him?”
    “He just wasn’t safe there,” I said, “so we brought him to the Gentle Barn, where he could be safe.”
    “But why wasn’t he safe there?” the kids asked.
    I was running out of