This auction out west is close to wine country. And wine country is often also livestock country. Almond country, too, and if you go there at the right time of year, you will see white blooms covering the trees. I once saw chicken shit do the same thing. In 2008, I worked at an egg farm nearby, and the manure from the farms was used to fertilize the almond trees that surrounded the egg barns. They just sprayed it all over the place like dirty, disease-ridden snow.

Animal agriculture is a major part of this state and has a huge cultural impact. It shapes the jobs and outlooks of rural life, including the people of this particular town.

The workers at this auction market are very polite, and I saw them treat each other respectfully. They welcomed me with handshakes and smiles and were more patient with me as a new worker than I’ve ever experienced. 

Like at any auction, workers had to keep up a difficult pace. Animals were pulled by their legs, tails, and ears to move them. They were pushed, shocked with cattle prods, and baby animals were lifted by their throats to be dropped into customers’ cages. It was all in the name of working hard.

Perhaps no one exemplified the politeness and worth ethic of the employees more than twenty-year-old Stewart. And, given his physical disability, no one had a harder time on the job. Stewart wore a black cowboy hat and bragged about how he was a bull rider every chance he had. He even tried to entice me into watching him ride at competitions. Though I don’t agree with abusing animals for entertainment, Stewart’s courage and confidence were all the more inspiring, given that everything on the left side of his body didn’t work properly. He limped as he ran at a halting pace, and his left arm moved slowly and inaccurately. None of this stopped Stewart from working as hard as he could or from being anything other than kind to everyone he interacted with.

To the animals, though, Stewart was brutal. Animals kept getting by or running away from him, and he wasn’t able to catch them. One worker showed him how to snag goats by a rear leg and drag the animals, which Stewart did, to dump them onto manure-covered floorings of pens. As we watched a downed cow shocked with a cattle prod while she screamed for the pain to stop, Stewart became bored enough with the situation to talk about his next bull-riding competition.

Stewart and I were tasked with moving newborn baby calves from the auction ring to a holding pen. Such calves have trouble standing and stumble rather than walk on their unsteady legs. Moving the calves, Stewart pulled out his car keys, flashed them in front of me, and said in his slurred speech, “This is a little trick I learned.” He then repeatedly jabbed his truck key into the stomach of a calf, pressing it against the animal’s hide before stabbing again and again. The sharp pain made the animal move forward as quickly as the calf could, which is to say at a slow pace inhibited by not knowing how to actually walk. 

Stewart did this with no anger or malice in his eyes. The calves were just another thing to deal with. Like the downed dairy cow. Or the baby goats that couldn’t walk at all and were carried before being dumped on concrete soaked in urine and feces. Or the goat that showed up dead in a customer’s trailer, trampled by other animals. 

Stewart did cruel things with no cruelty in his heart.  But the nature of animal agriculture is that good intentions don’t matter.