Harvey 1 - 1

Harvey 1 died yesterday. He was a little bull, only the size of a big calf, and years ago (5, 6, 7, 10? I can't remember) I raised him from birth after his mother died, feeding him with a bottle every day, and then later, when he was older and wouldn't take to feed right away, he got to eat nice neat little squares of cold solid rolled oats (which he loved).

He'd been looking a bit listless over the last week, but not enough to worry about. But then yesterday morning he was lying on his side, all four legs stuck straight out along the ground, and he couldn't get up. Cutting to the chase, he got worse during the day and I called a vet and Harvey got a needle of something (anaesthetic, I think?) into his neck and was dead in seconds.

It's not that I'm trying to understand it - there's nothing to understand: he was sick, now he's dead. And I'm not upset - the decision to kill him was not hard: he was suffering, now he's not. It was his suffering that was hard, not his death; or, it was watching his suffering and being unable to do anything about it that was hard, and as soon as he died that was over.

Needless to say, all of it was hard for Harvey. I keep forgetting it was actually about him, not me. If only cattle had blogs.

Anyway, I might write about this in instalments. There are so many big things in it and I don't want to struggle over trying to turn them into something that all fits together. I don't know though; I can't decide whether I want to write about anything at all. Maybe just saying this much will have been enough. It feels like I've had too much to eat and can't digest things, if you know what I mean, and this has been an attempt to chew more thoroughly.