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January 8 - January 15, 2020
the donkey’s ears rotated from me to Scott every time we opened our mouths. Sometimes he’d even split them in opposite directions, pointing one ear at me and the other at Scott like a cop directing traffic.
Scott pulled a freakishly huge pair of steel clippers that looked like they’d been designed by Leatherface for use in his murder van.
He’s been abused and abandoned, and that can make an animal sick with despair. You need to give this animal a purpose. You need to find him a job.”
I think most beings need to feel a sense of purpose
how could we bring him peace when we had no clue what he was thinking? Was he fighting for his life, or giving up? Did he see me as his friend, or as just another tormentor? The first rule of healing is “Do no harm,” but Sherman was making me realize that I knew so little about animals, I couldn’t tell if I was soothing or scaring him.
Philly can be cold and bitter, and that’s just the people. If you’re familiar with our monument to Frank Rizzo, one of the most brutal police chiefs in city history, or the time Santa Claus showed up at an Eagles game and we drilled his jolly old ass with snowballs, or the way Eagles fans and the Eagles themselves sang “We’re from Philly, f***ing Philly, no one likes us, we don’t care”
Just a few days ago I watched the Seahawks play the Eagles in Philly, on tv. I’ve never heard a football crowd boo so vigorously. I even commented to my husband “man, Eagles fans are really aggressive!”
“My ass is breaking my ass,” Whip Woman hooted. She slid down from the saddle and swatted her backside. “The Southern End is taking a beating today.” The kids were enchanted by the donkey, and I had to admit I was charmed at the way Whip Woman not only cut straight to the butt jokes, but also introduced Muffin before even mentioning her own name
Love this first introduction to Tanya!
as Lawrence shifted to the left, so did Sherman. When Lawrence spotted a better place to attack the food and moved to the right, Sherman quietly followed. For the rest of the morning, Sherman kept his distance from the other animals. But anytime Lawrence made a move, a long-eared shadow was right behind.
Bless sweet Lawrence for being Sherman's first friend
“We’ve got to clean his penis?” “Not we. You. This is a ‘you’ operation. You better learn now because if he lives, you’ll be doing it every three or four months.” “Seriously?” I’d devoured horse books as a kid, and nowhere in the Misty of Chincoteague saga was there any mention of Grandpa Clarence fiddling around with any of the colts’ junk.
I love Christopher McDougall’s humor!
Apparently if Sherman had a new life ahead, so would I: every three months, I’d be reminding myself to file quarterly taxes and degrease my donkey’s downspout.
For decades after 1949, physicians were still spouting the theory that too much exertion would make a woman’s uterus and ovaries shake loose.
No way.....
Ken recruited two spectators, then another, until five of us with a combined body weight of half a ton were hauling on the burro’s rope in a tug-of-war. No dice. Pissed off now, Ken hitched the rope to his pickup and threw it into four-wheel drive. One balking step at a time, a nearly six-foot donkey slowly emerged. Ken handed me the rope. “This one’s yours.”
The thoughts that must’ve been going through McDougall’s mind at that moment!
I was so bad at burro racing, I wasn’t even good enough to be worst. There’s a special award for “Last Ass Over the Pass,” but you’ve actually got to get to the pass to qualify.
Movement is big medicine; it’s the signal to every cell in our bodies that no matter what kind of damage we’ve suffered, we’re ready to rebuild and move away from death and back toward life. Rest too long after an injury and your system powers down, preparing you for a peaceful exit. Fight your way back to your feet, however, and you trigger that magical ON switch that speeds healing hormones to everything you need to get stronger: your bones, brain, organs, ligaments, immune system, even the digestive bacteria in your belly, all get a molecular upgrade from exercise.
Animals didn’t just feed and protect us; they inspired us. We studied them, drew them, revered them. Religions worshipped animals as gods; moralists looked to them for life lessons; seekers chose them as their spirit guides. We named our tribes and babies after them. Egyptian pharaohs went to the grave with them. Then we forgot them.
As soon as we had electric lights and affordable cars, we moved indoors and locked the animals out.
Thus beginning our ever widening disconnect from nature
Our brains, our bodies, our conscious and subconscious minds—they all evolved in response to the creatures around us. It was eat or be eaten, which meant we couldn’t forget about them for a second.
I wonder what the evolutionary result will be now that we’ve distanced ourselves from the natural world
The human-animal bond is instinctive in all of us, even if we don’t seek it. Or deserve it.
Or deserve it.... like when neglected dogs still seek love from their abusive owners
“If you’re in Lima,” as one case manager put it, “you’re in for something pretty heavy.” But for days on end, one ward was mysteriously calm. Criminally insane convicts occupying an entire ward don’t spontaneously decide to simmer down and cooperate, and when they do, the guards get ready for trouble. Instead, they found a sparrow.
Love this
Normally, up to 75 percent of all prisoners who are released will be arrested again within five years. But among prisoners who’ve worked with animals, the recidivism rate tends to be as low as 10 percent.
whenever we try to outsmart Mother Nature, Mother Nature breaks out the nunchuks.
Mother Nature is a bitch; respectfully.
The real question isn’t what we get from animals. It’s what we lose without them.
“Indians didn’t have donkeys,” Curtis says. “They saw ours and thought they were called ‘Goddamnyous.’
We raced toward home, thrilled by a music that none of us had ever heard before, not even Sherman: the drumbeat of his four flying hooves.
Go Shermie!!
once you see your daughter’s math teacher sprinting her heart out alongside a two-year-old pygmy goat to steal a photo finish from a fifty-three-year-old, four-term state representative who’s lunging so hard he nearly eats asphalt and finishes with his chest heaving like a fireplace bellows but still kneels after the loss and immediately, although he can barely breathe, pets his spotted Boer goat and pants, It’s not your fault, Bobo, it’s not your fault, well…how can you resist?
“It’s all about building a bank of goodwill. You never want to draw down too much. You want to keep adding to the reserve, one good experience after another. Someday, you’re going to ask Sherman to do something he doesn’t like, and because you’ve built up the bank, he’s going to surprise you.”
A trust account. Keep making deposits, so when you make a withdrawal you don’t go in the hole
maybe all we had to do was combine their strengths and weaknesses into one big Swiss Army knife of a support system. Whenever Flower was afraid, Matilda could step up. When Matilda lagged behind, Flower could set the pace. We had three weird donkeys on our hands, but together, they could give one another—and especially Sherman—all the help each of them needed.
Depression was just a phase, he decided, and that phase was behind him. “Then—I don’t know what happened,” he would recall. “It came bubbling up.” It felt like a backpack full of stones, a weight he could barely lift and couldn’t shuck off.
Backpack full of stones...
Tanya’s place would be well cared for, they assured us, and her house would be clean and ready for her return. Once she was home, the Amish community would cook meals for her and mobilize a chicken potpie fund-raiser to contribute to her medical bills. Tanya might live in the middle of nowhere, but she wasn’t alone.
I wish more people were this genuinely neighborly
don’t start with today and aim toward your goal. You start with the goal, and aim back toward today. Do it like that, and you’ll always find a way.”
It’s not even toughness or luck; it’s just math. Spot your finish line, count the steps to get there, and take them one at a time.
Running fast can auto-correct your biomechanics, he explained, while slow leads to sloppy. That’s a big reason I was always hurt; my plodding pace had me balancing too long on each leg, leaving all those tissues and tendons exposed to serious torque as my body weight swayed around.
if you want to burn fat, relieve depression, get stronger, increase mobility, and stay healthier, you might want to start with blue lips.
Iceman theory
I realized what Sherman must have been thinking from the moment he got back on his feet and was given a chance to start his new life: Trust Me. I’ve Got This.
