Audrey’s Story

This auction in the rural Southwest relies on teenagers to work its auctions. They are high school students who mostly bring only the experience they have from the farms they live on. The town where the auction is located, as of 2021, had a population of less than 2,000 people. If you need groceries there, you can pick between two stores. It’s at least an hour to the closest city life if anyone has an interest in such a thing. 

It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. The workers at the auction know the customers selling and buying animals. Everyone knows the auction owner, who is on a first-name basis with the kids and few adults he hires. One of the adult workers lives on-site in a trailer. I was told that he’s tolerated by the kids more before he gets drunk during the workday than after. 

During the sale, most kids either stuck together to talk or sent texts, which they yelled and laughed about over the cries of nearby animals. But one kid was different. Audrey was a teenage girl focused on her job. Other kids didn’t approach her, and she didn’t say anything to anyone. I noticed how much she struggled to keep up with the impossible pace of her job. 

Audrey had to get all of the animals that had just come out of the auction ring, at the height of their confusion and panic, to move out towards the rest of us so we could put them in their proper pens for designated buyers. Some lambs and goats were small and slipped past Audrey through a hole in a fence to run in the wrong direction. Audrey would have to climb the fence, sprint at full speed, and bring the terrified animals back towards us. All the while, more animals had just come out of the auction ring, and Audrey couldn’t allow the one she was bringing back to get mixed up with those. 

As the hours piled on, Audrey grew exhausted and dehydrated like the rest of us. At one point, during a rare moment when the auction took a break to sort out a paperwork discrepancy, I approached Audrey and said, “You’re doing a good job.”

Normally, such a comment would get a tired nod or thumbs up. But Audrey straightened up with her eyes wide, as if she had no idea what to do with a compliment, and responded, “You know, you’re doing really good, too! It’s your first day, and I think you’re doing great!” Despite being overworked and overlooked, Audrey’s response to someone being polite was to be just as polite back. 

Day turned to night, and the work didn’t let up. We struggled to separate animals from different buyers that had mixed together because animals were coming out of auction faster than we could pen them. A twenty-something-year-old manager in a clean, white cowboy hat came out of the auction ring to scold us, yelling, “Motherfuckers, do the fucking job!” 

Nobody brought Audrey anything to block the hole in the fence. Animals kept slipping through. Her chases became fits of anger, and she began to drag baby lambs and goats along by their legs so they couldn’t escape her. The animals screamed and thrashed in her grip before she would sling them onto the ground and turn away to get more.

If you look only at the footage of Audrey’s actions, she seems like an abusive person who cares nothing about animals. But Audrey was a good kid. She was just in an impossible situation and copied what she saw other workers do as they slung animals toward the auction ring or dumped them over fences instead of corralling them through gates. Nobody scolded her for her behavior, and if anything, she was worried about being scolded for not keeping up the work pace by any means necessary. I don’t blame her for her behavior. I blame the auction.