Yesterday, the second shabbat of Chanukah, our horse Terra gave birth. Like almost every Saturday, we were getting ready to go to shul. By the time we noticed something - way out in the field we could see something white on the ground, like a bag that’d blown in from somewhere - and ran out to check, it was too late. Horrified, Pablo ran back to the house to tell me that it was ‘the baby’.

We spent the day first coaxing Terra - by now we had a vet and her assistant - to let us come near her, then lead her away to check her out and examine the little foal that never got a chance. This was our first experience with an animal’s birth - both Pablo and I grew up in relatively urban settings.

Certainly, I’d known about the steps involved in birth, but never seen it up close. This was a shocking and devastating way to start. As new animal keepers we were trying to do our best. The natural way, we have researched and were guided, was to keep the horses on pasture, which we have plenty of. The catch here is that there exists a type of grass, called Fescue, that is toxic to pregnant mares and their foal at the end of the pregnancy. If they’re eating fescue while late in their pregnancy, things get confusing. The mare may never develop enough milk, her alarm for ‘time to give birth’ may not signal her at the right time and she may overcarry the baby. The fetus may have trouble developing, may be weak at birth, or have some physical abnormalities. All this is to say, we were not prepared, and it took a tragic event to shake us.

By the time the sun was getting ready to set we got the placenta out, after much struggle on both the vet’s part and Terra’s, and on my part, strong prayer. She is a strong horse, and she did a good job through it all. We ended the night by burying the foal.

This is a really tough part of farming, is dealing with death. As a good friend of ours pointed out last night, we deal with death all the time on a farm. We are familiar with dying plants and insects, with chickens and with rodents. It can wreck you to see beds of broccoli, or tomatoes, dessimated by a predator. So much work, so much care and attention is in those stems, leaves, and veins. It is disturbing and humbling to lose baby chicks that you’e seen snuggling under their mother hen’s wings. But something profoundly different occurs when you lose a being that was just born. You can not say, ’she had a good life’, or ’she enjoyed some time with her mama’. There is very little to say, yet the loss you feel is profound. So what can we do now? I want to give up. I want to announce to everyone our failure and just give the horses away and never have this happen again. But maybe the foal that never lived had a lesson for us?

We are capable of learning to be better stewards of our animals. This terrible experience must have a lesson, a positive call to action, to change, and a new chance. Farming is as much about learning and paying attention to mistakes, as it is about doing. Some lessons are easy to forget. This is a lesson ‘from Above’.

Esther is a farmer in Northern Virginia.