Motley Moose – Archive

Yes, fellow Meese — I’m back with another equinecentric diary, though not, I think you’ll agree, quite in the mold of my previous efforts.

Even worse — it’s a critter diary with no pictures!  Not even one!  You want pictures, go visit my blog (where this essay is my most recent posting) and scroll down to where you’ll find ponies and kitties galore.

It is, however, among other things, a contemplation of life and death, from an abstract yet very real angle.  Follow below the fold and you will see what I mean.

The Internet is home to many communities; indeed it offers a near-boundless smorgasboard of virtual gathering places, from the minuscule to the immense, from the intensely private to the aggressively public; geared to narrow niches and sprawling diversities, to interests, quirks and passions of every sort the human mind can conceive of (and some it boggles the mind to contemplate).

One community I’ve become a part of is Mare Stare – more particularly, the message board called Mare Stare Cams Foaling Alerts and Updates.  The service offered by Mare Stare seems simple enough:  Host streaming cams to watch over expectant mares (and donkey jennets and goat does and sheep ewes and, well, there hasn’t been an elephant – yet), so that the owners of said pregnant critters can keep an eye on them even when they’re not in the barn.  The MS motto is “Because you can’t be everywhere…” and the front page describes their mission thus:

Mare Stare is a family – a community of cam owners and viewers who help each other share the miracle of birth. The camera owners graciously put their foaling barns on line for the world to see. In exchange, they get the watchful eyes of viewers from all over the world, who will call them as soon as their mare goes into labor.

It’s a family relationship that breeds friendship, trust and love among people from all over the world, even though they may have never met in person.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  But the community that’s grown up around Mare Stare is as complex as any other human community, with its own mores, customs, lingo, and traditions.  It’s determinedly positive, for one thing; even a hint of criticizing another person’s choices in breeding stock or foaling practices or animal care is simply Not Done.  When a foaling looks to be going badly, one doesn’t say so outright; one simply offers prayers or jingles or wishes for a good outcome, or zips one’s virtual lips.

Joining that community was a bit of a culture shock.  I came to it via another online community, one that prides itself on fiercely uncompromising bluntness, on argumentation over the tiniest of points, on clever snark and bristling confrontation; one that abhors smilies and sentimentalities, mocking them as abdication of articulate reasoning.  A thread in the least serious forum there about one of the MS cam feeds sucked me in – horses! that’ll get me every time – and from there I found the MS message board.

Well!  “Polar opposites” would barely begin to capture the chasm between my launching point and the place where I landed.  I lurked for a while, absorbing the ethos of this new world, fascinated by the culture whose outlines and nuances I was sussing out.  When I felt I’d figured things out well enough not to make a total idiot of myself, I joined (with a different identity, Janicket, than the persona known to the smartass board) and began to participate.

It was fun!  It was rewarding – I made the alert-the-owner call that mattered a few times; once for a birth that would have gone badly had the owner not arrived in time.  Did that make me feel good?  You damn betcha!  I mastered the art of the MS smilie palette; I saw births easy and hard; I saw foals that were up and exploring their new world quickly, others that struggled in their first hours of life.

And I saw death.  I saw people fight heart-wrenching battles to save fragile foals.  I saw people do everything in their power to preserve the tiny lives they’d hoped for, dreamed of, worked so hard to bring about, worked tirelessly to preserve, and were at the last powerless to save.  I saw gut-wrenching struggles to save, if not the foal, at least the mare herself from the double tragedy of her death in fruitless labor.  I saw the moment when hope was extinguished, when the life left the frail body, when mourners clung to each other over the shell of the vanished soul and wept in each other’s arms.

And it wasn’t all fun and games any more.  It was, it is, quite literally, a community of life and death.  I’ve been a part of this virtual world for about a year now, and while I never have and never will go through the birth of any animal of my own, I have come to appreciate just how stressful, how wearing on body and mind, how nail-bitingly suspenseful, how gloriously rewarding and horrifically devastating the process can be for all who go through it.  The relentless insistence on positive interactions among MS members, I can see, is no mere Pollyanna pose; it’s vital to the wellbeing of the people who allow the world this glimpse into their lives.

I’ve been thinking about Mare Stare, its culture, its hold on me, for quite a while, puzzling out just why I have become so powerfully attached to the place.  Then Sadie at Big Sky Farm went into labor.  This is the thread that followed in realtime the unimaginable tragedy that unfolded: the hard-fought birth of a filly; the shocking, utterly unexpected stillbirth of her twin, a colt (horses don’t do twins! or, rather, very rarely they do; it’s even rarer for both or even one to survive); then the desperate struggle over the ensuing week to save little Athena, crippled in one hind leg by nerve damage but a gallant fighter, whose flicker of life dwindled despite all that could be done to nourish it.  I was there, via cam, when the vet made the last merciful injection; I was there, watching, grieving, as her people embraced and wept over the filly’s body, as the cam went to black; though I’d felt from the outset that her chances were grim, still her death was a kick in the gut.

Why?  Why did it hit so hard, why did it hurt so much?  Why did I care?  What’s it to me, that I should invest so much of myself into this event, this community, this pain?

The answer welled up, poured out into what I posted then in the thread and end this essay with:

We cling to, we cherish the memories, and when we see another suffer as we did, we suffer anew with them.  And so it is that we here on Mare Stare followed Athena’s story so passionately, rode the swings of hope and despair as the days passed, and grieve now at her loss.  Though we never knew her as you did, never knew the gift of caressing her beautiful face, of seeing the light of life and love in her soft eyes, still we mourn her passing, for it rekindles in us our own eternal pain, and we weep with you.