Clint Martin's Blog

I pushed the emu up to the barbed-wire fence and thought about how to get it to the other side.  Over was out of the question.  The animal weighed almost eighty pounds and, while I wanted nothing more than to toss the stubborn thing over, I didn’t want it to hit the other side running.  Through the fence wouldn’t work either as threading a large flightless bird through the barbed wire strands would cause more damage than I was willing to inflict even after I had spent almost half an hour chasing it.

Nope.  We were going under.

I pushed down at the base of the emu’s neck.  The four-and-a-half foot bird braced against the pressure and made a noise that sounded like a broken subwoofer.  I pushed harder.  The emu braced more.  ”Go under!” I commanded and threw most of  my weight onto the bird.  Its legs buckled and I landed on top of it.  I pushed the bird’s head under the fence, moved to the its rear, and gave it a shove.  The bird shifted its legs to absorb my efforts.  ”Move, you stupid bird!” I growled through clenched teeth and I pushed as hard as I could.  The bird slid forward on the pine straw until it was about halfway underneath the fence.  I stopped to catch my breath.  When I came home from school that day, I hadn’t expected to chase the second-largest bird on earth through the woods near my home, but I wasn’t really surprised when I found myself shoving one under a barbed wire fence.

I blamed my parents.

They had both grown up on farms: my mom, over two-thousand miles away in Idaho and my dad, a fifteen minute walk from where I stood.  After meeting and getting married in college, my dad became a civil engineer and my mom, after a couple of decades of raising kids at home, became a fifth grade science teacher.  While they had entered the white-collar world of middle America, their personalities remained rooted in the blue-collar world of American agriculture and their kids would bear the consequences.

It started with chickens.  My dad built a coop behind our house in the Alabama woods and stocked it with about a dozen hens and an aggressive rooster that terrified my 5-year-old self to the very core.  After a couple of chicken iterations that involved stocking, hungry dogs, and fence breaches, the chickens were abandoned.

Enter the ratites.

Ratite means “flightless bird” and I didn’t even know that the word existed until my dad came home towing a trailer containing five rheas.  The birds were smaller, grayer versions of ostriches.  They stood about four-and-a-half foot tall and maintained a confusing expression of surprise and indifference – something I previously hadn’t thought possible.  It was like living in a zoo, until I was informed that I would be the one responsible for feeding them.

Every morning before school and every evening afterward I shuffled down to the pen that my dad had built for them and scooped ratite feed into home-made troughs.  Eggs needed to be gathered as well.  Much like the roosters, the male rheas became aggressive during mating season – which somehow ended up being year round.  A hot-and-bothered rooster was, at most, annoying.  A mating rhea, with its inch-long claws and snake-like hissing, was in a completely different league of sexual frustration than the Foghorn Leghorns that I had previously encountered.  The roosters had never pressed themselves against the fence, sputtering and slashing, and demanding that my intestines be spilled onto the ground.  After a series of experiments involving decoys, posturing, and make-shift shields, the best way discovered to collect eggs (and the way that satisfied my own frustrations) was a well timed blow to the head with a rubber garbage can lid.  This was always seen as self defense and illicited zero animal cruelty guilt.  We eventually acquired more rheas and a couple of emus until the herd grew numbered about fifteen.

One would assume a four-foot fence would be sufficient for containing a four-and-a-half foot bird, but one would be misjudging the bird’s vertical leap.  While not extremely common, it wasn’t unheard of to pull into the driveway after school to find a rhea picking at the grass along the treeline of our front yard.  The bird would have been startled by a low-flying plane or a stray dog and would have run in circles in its pen, pausing briefly to slam against the fence.  Occasionally, one of the birds would jump a little too high, flip over the top, and land dazed on the other side.

This time one of the emus had escaped and was milling about in the woods across the road from the house.  It had somehow crossed the barbed-wire fence unscathed – the fence that it now sat halfway under.  I set my feet and pushed the bird under the rest of the way.  I kept one hand on its back and quickly crawled through the fence to prevent it from escaping, but my caution was unnecessary; it didn’t move.  I tried to coax the bird into standing up.  I needed it to get up so I could lead, well, push it back to its pen, but it kept its legs locked tightly underneath it.  It wasn’t budging.

My parents had probably been trying instill a sense of character or maybe they were teaching me responsibility.  If my years of feeding the birds accomplished all that is still to be decided.  As I stared down at Australian flightless bird stubbornly sitting at my feet, I did learn something that I have carried with me throughout the rest of my life.

Animals are douchebags.

All the years of nature documentaries I had watched as a kid had instilled a sense of respect for animals.  They were part of nature, which was unsullied by the evils of humanity.  Their size and diversity inspired in me a sense of awe.  Sure, they could be difficult at times, but it wasn’t their fault, they were just acting according to instinct, right?  But all that awe and respect were destroyed in an instant by an emu throwing a tantrum.

“Fine,” I said and wrapped my arms around the bird in a strong bear-hug.  I lifted the bird off the ground and started carrying it the last three-hundred yards to the pen.  I only weighed about forty pounds more than it, but I was fueled by frustration and anger.

“Open the gate!” I yelled at my mom.  Surprised by the sight of me carrying an emu like a sack of dog food, she ignored the short tone in my voice and rushed back to the bird pen to have it open and waiting for me.  I dropped the bird unceremoniously onto the ground in the pen.

“It was easier this way,” I said and walked back to the house.