And Then There Were Ten
Earlier this week, Ross Andersen for The Atlantic considered the current state of comparative thanatology, or the question of how similar or dissimilar is the understanding of death from one species to the next. The current state mostly is the same as it’s been for awhile: there are glimpses of possible understanding on the part of animals other than humans, but it remains simply too difficult to tell for sure.
At issue is both whether or not an animal of a certain species understands that it will die and whether or not an animal of a certain species understands when another animal has died, and what, if anything, being dead means, exactly.
This was on my mind today as I thought about The Belmont Goats having lost two more of the herd just in the past week and a half, after losing its first two early and then late last year.
(Disclaimer: For five years from its inception in 2013, I was the herd’s project manager. After leaving in early 2019, I returned for a few months in 2023 to help with social media for its tenth anniversary, but left again that summer in an ethical dispute that had nothing to do with the care of the animals themselves.)
It was a year and a half ago that The Belmont Goats had their first death, when Phil, one of the herd’s original pair in late 2012, died after an illness. Then that September, Atho, one of the second pair born into the herd in late 2013, died after an even longer one.
At the start of this September, Hickory, one of a pair of brothers who joined the herd at just four months in early 2013, died due to an undetected mass. Then just this week, Cooper, one of a sibling pair who joined the herd as bottle babies in early 2013 and who had ongoing concerns due to urinary tract issues, died of unknown, apparently unrelated causes.
Andersen’s piece on death awareness has been on my mind because I was thinking about the statistical likelihood or unlikelihood that in a herd of fourteen goats, the first four to go each would leave behind a congential or found sibling.
Phil left behind his bonded buddy, Carl. Atho left behind his sister, Winter (in addition to their mother, Duchess). Hickory left behind his brother, Dusty. Cooper leaves behind his sister, Bambi.
Do any of these sibling survivors have any real sense or understanding of the absence being permanent? How much of that would depend upon the empty shell lingering on-site, absent any animating force? Who knows. Not me.
I’m writing this all out here primarily because the circumstances of my last departure from the herd and its nonprofit (as I explained in my post about Atho) were the sorts of things that I knew required me to make a firm, and final, break. Since then, I’ve not even included the herd’s field on any of my walking routes, even prior to my presumptive ME/CFS scuttling my capacity to walk that far in the first place. Nonetheless, I was told the news of both Hickory and Cooper before they became public as a courtesy.
All of this, then, quite necessarily is happening at both a physical and a psychological remove, but it perhaps would be somewhat unseemly to let the most recent deaths go unremarked upon here, given that I’d written about the others.
I’m not going to belabor it, because I simply can’t. Suffice it to say that what people most likely will remember about Hickory are the fact that visitors always asked if he was pregnant, and that if you were lucky enough to catch it, his bleat was akin to what one former volunteer described as an old lady screaming, “My purse!” after a thief had snatched it. To many, Hickory was the teddy bear of goats.
I’m not sure what people will most likely will remember about Cooper, probably because my own history obscures any sense of that. Some probably will remember that he was a bit the Dennis the Menace, always right there eating your keys or wondering what you were doing with that circular saw.
When I say that Bambi and Cooper were bottle babies, I mean that literally. I know because I’d bottle-fed them, having started to hang out around the herd when the two of them joined at just days old. The two of them when they were young were lap goats, and since then were as attuned to people as they were to other goats, if not more so. For the existence of the herd as a nonprofit, Bambi and Cooper were the go-to goats to attend events around town, from farmers markets to student “de-stressing” events, to a late-night talk show at Dante’s.
In some sense, Bambi and Cooper are The Belmont Goats. It was the appearance of those two goats in that original field on SE Belmont that sparked the deep and abiding love the neighborhood came to have for the herd. Goats were one thing, but baby goats? Once inside, however, people fell for all of them. There were six other goats in the field before they arrived, but it’s more than fair to say that it was Bambi and Cooper who really launched Portland’s resident herd.
Some cursory glances at their social media suggests that the nonprofit still hopes to continue the project beyond the population of the current herd. I admit that with the latest news I’d wondered at what diminished number the herd becomes unsustainable as a public-facing thing. Thinking those thoughts yielded another: instead of trying to expand and continue, perhaps the herd should be allowed naturally to dwindle, until the issue simply becomes how to locate and care for the few remaining in the end.
Maybe this never was meant to run somehow in perpetuity. Maybe, at some point in the coming years, we should let Portland’s resident herd pass into a beloved memory, only ever having been of a certain time and a certain place, and of a certain and particular herd of urban goats.