Corralling Care

How I learned to let go and let people love me

I was confined to bedrest in my partner’s LA apartment for the first few weeks of February as my body healed from top surgery. Remaining mostly stationary, surrounded on all sides by pillows of all structural integrities, I spent a lot of time considering the concept of care as it occurs within the restricted spaces of bedrooms, hospital beds, care centers and, somewhat unrelated, corrals. In general, I am not a huge fan of containment. I prefer animals roaming in movable fenced pastures to animals in small permanent fenced paddocks. I don’t believe that prisons should exist. I am intrigued by alternative modes of education that do not limit students to a rigid indoor space and timeline. But I am interested in how containment in certain contexts can act as an expanse of care - the space of the corral, the space of recovery from a surgery, and the space that emerges while being held by a devoted community for a relatively short amount of time in order to maintain health in the longer term.

I spent the morning working lambs in the corral at an eco-high school whose campus abounds with towering stalks of mustard and yellow star thistle, two opportunistic plant species that popped up after the Thomas Fire ravaged Upper Ojai in 2017. These hearty invasives, with their plentiful leaves and robust growth rates, extinguished any possibility of native perennials thriving on these rolling hillsides, so the herd of 500 sheep and goats had been recruited to temper their progress. The mountains in the distance blazed pink through slivers of passing clouds and the sky beamed a brilliant blue. The ewes were a month into lambing season and nearly 100 tiny lambs frolicked across the pastures of colossal feed, using their mothers’ bodies as springboards to reach uncertain heights in their play.

We gathered the herd from their electric fence paddock around 7:30, thermoses in hand, and calmly drove them into a portable corral system where we would spend the bulk of the morning vaccinating and ear tagging lambs and castrating rams. Working the corral is one of my favorite elements of working with livestock. The corral exists as a safeguard. Because the animals spend most of their lives traversing pasture, guided by the borderlands of electric netting, we can’t easily observe every health issue that arises. So we periodically round everyone up and send them through a maze of corrals, evaluating each animal’s health as they pass through, and determining any next steps towards keeping them healthy. Some goats need their hooves trimmed. Some sheep appear lacklustre and need a vitamin B boost. And occasionally, some animals round the corner looking sallow and ill and in need of some dewormer. For the contract grazier, the corral is the best tool for overseeing herd health because it is contained and finite, unlike the open landscapes that the herd normally calls home.

From the Spanish word corro for ring, corrals form a protective circle around that which they contain. Corrals of the old west were made with found materials - railroad ties, sticks and barbed wire scrapped and tied together haphazardly into makeshift rings used to pen herds at night as defense against predators during long journeys. These temporary corrals represented safety and security, mimicking the custodial warmth of a blanket on a cold winter evening.

Every livestock operation has a different relationship to the ecosystem of the corral. Some maintain the corral as a space of calm, practicing low-stress stockmanship with care and intention. Others reinforce more mainstream images of the corral as a site of rugged, domineering and violent masculinity (I’m thinking of Yellowstone, where hooting and hollering and physical force reign). American culture is bonded to the narrative of the corral as a space of dominance, a space that encourages us to exert power over others, as if we cannot stretch our imaginations towards the possibilities for mutual care that the corral can and has always held.

Temple Grandin counters this dominance in her design of more humane corral systems. In considering animal experience and perception, she has revolutionized livestock handling facilities, creating curved chutes and solid walls, both of which help encourage more peaceful and calm environments for the animals. Grandin’s reimagining of the corral was an act of care. Her visions transformed traditional corrals from places of disturbance and groundswell to places of relative calm and flow, places where animals could find a more stable bearing, more stable ground.

As I work the animals, shuttling them forward and quickly manipulating the head gate, I consider the corral as a site of community care and responsibility. It’s a space that has evolved around the act of humans caring for animals, allowing us to observe and determine the needs of each animal in order to foster a healthy collective. Its circular shape represents wholeness and belonging, a never-ending cycle of exchange that blooms when we gather together. These animals are our neighbors, our coworkers and our kin, and in choosing to live alongside them, we enter into a pact of reciprocity - to provide them with beautiful lives and to ensure that they are healthy and safe.

The mild warmth of winter creeps in by 10:00. Some of the animals start ruminating, settling in the dirt to await their turn in the chute. Lambs cuddle up next to their mothers, bellies full of rich, orange milk. Some of the lambs learn early on from their mothers’ dispositions that humans are not predators but beings to live beside in neutrality. These lambs are somewhat docile, legs pliant, bodies resting backwards into my arms, remaining unperturbed through the process and generally going with the flow. Others are fierce fighters, kicking, squirming and exercising every ounce of strength to fend us off, battling us with legs that cut through the air like swords and wielding their hard skulls as shields of protection against incoming rubber bands and syringes.

I gently wrap my hands around a lamb’s torso, pulling him toward me, turning him over and hugging him close to my body. Legs catapult through the air. There are always those sheep in the herd who refuse our help, who are too wise to accept help from predators with static ears and eyes. I have spent most of my life as one of these sheep, unwilling to allow care in from outside, and have been tied so strongly to that American individualist sense that I can do it myself, I can handle it on my own. But over the past few months, amidst the outpouring of support and care from my community as I prepared for and underwent surgery, I’ve been learning to soften and accept the care that flows so generously when we understand ourselves as part of a larger, collective network of beings. We need each other, we rely on each other and sustain each other, and we keep each other safe inside and outside the bounds of the corral.

While swaddled in blankets, propped on pillows and sipping water through straws, while encased in soft wool sweaters and while visited by friends with shepherd’s pie in hand, I thought through my painkiller haze about the sheep and lambs that have sustained me and who have on a more spiritual level encouraged me to make the decision to accept care from others and to better care for myself, setting me up to better care for my community in the future. When sheep feel safe in their environment, they let down their guards, give their nervous systems a break and accept the care that shepherds offer. And it’s no different for us. It just sometimes takes a herd and the nurturing space of the corral to encourage us to let our guards down and to help us understand that we are loved and valued and that we can find belonging in the circular network of caregivers, neighbors, friends and family that surrounds us.

Etcetera:

• Books relevant to the above: Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, What It Takes To Heal by Prentis Hemphill, Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin, and How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong

• Currently accepting submissions for a queer country dance newspaper: The Roundup. Essays, art, ephemera, interviews, photos - the sky’s the limit! Due April 15, 2025.

• As always, see you every Tuesday, except the 2nd Tuesday of the month, for line dancing at Topa Topa Thompson in Ventura, 6:30-9