Friday, September 06, 2002

The Beauty of Beasts at the 2002 St. Joseph County 4-H Fair

I go to the 4-H Fair for the barn animals, and I’m never disappointed. While others are tossing softballs into buckets or being whipped through the air on giant tinker toys, I am mingling with the goat people, the sheep people, the pig and cow people, the chicken, duck and rabbit folks. In the barns you learn a lot just by looking; but if you’re lucky you can also talk to the people who trained the goats to pull carts and fed the geese every day. Some of them are quite young but speak with authority. From one middle school girl, I learned about raising pygmy goat wethers as pets. She was carrying her own little goat around on her hip as we talked. I began to imagine the day when my wife and I would own a parcel of farmland and I too would be truly happy, carrying my own little goats around on my hip.

Admittedly, I go to animal shows for the art. I dream of having several breeds of goat, because each has its unique aesthetic appeal. La Manchas hardly have any ears, just stunted little curls of flesh flattened to their heads. They are as sleek as swimmers. Nubian goats have big pointed ears that fall to the sides of their heads like wings. Their spotted coats are a picture of wind-shorn clouds in a black sky. The stuff of daydreams. Pygmy goats are my favorite, though. What you have to love about them is their upright ears, which give them, even when they don’t have horns, a mischievous, almost diabolical appearance. Like clowns and other performance artists, goats seem to have a mysterious connection to “the dark side,” which is partly a reflection of their intelligence.

In this regard, could two animals possibly be more dissimilar than goats and sheep? At a glance you can hardly tell some of them apart. Get up close to them and look them in the eye, and you may be astonished to see that each animal has horizontally rectangular pupils. In the sheep, though, these pupils suggest an opium-induced stupor; whereas in the goat, they twinkle and laugh and give to each individual a touch of the maniac. The most delightful scene I witnessed in the goat pens this year was also the most maniacal: a frisky young gray pygmy goat skipping around its cage and periodically springing into the air to perform an aerial bank off the side of its mother. When it wasn’t doing its circus routine, it was sleeping curled up in the food bowl.

But the chickens are far and away the most amazing works of visual art. You haven’t really seen chickens until you’ve been to the 4-H Fair. These are not your grandmother’s laying hens. Alongside Rhode Island Reds and Orpington Buffs were such Vegas acts as the White Silkie and the Hamburg Silver Spangle. The White Silkie is a puffy bird, fluffy down to the feet and with what can only be described as a bouffant hairstyle from the late ‘Fifties. All chickens strut around like they know they’re hot stuff, but this one really is. The feathers of the Golden Laced Cochin are gold trimmed round in brown. The Golden Starbright, also a designer chicken, has golden-brown feathers trimmed in black, each one as distinct as a link in a coat of mail. The Buff Brahma sports a cascade of pointed black-and-rust feathers flowing down its ruff. Others aren’t so fortunate. There were some odd Silkies with helmet-like brick red combs and more toes than a bird needs. But I’ll never forget Brett Horein’s Black Fancy Rare Shamo Chickens, the roosters an iridescent blue and green. Or the elegance of Jessica Cartson’s Silver-Laced Wyandott hen.

My favorite birds at this year’s Fair were Sarah Horn’s champion White Runner ducks. Runner ducks are great layers, but that doesn’t interest me. What I admire is the Runner’s extreme, upright stance, more like a heron than a duck, with a narrow head and a down-curved beak just as wide as the head, altogether like the crook of a walking stick. Their slender bodies always seem to be straining upwards like a Brancusi sculpture. In fact, I’ve noticed that so many farm animals at the Fair have the beauty of works of art, that I’ve begun to reassess the standard assumption that the countryside is lacking in high culture. As we grow more distant from the farm, its aesthetic potential increases. The plants and animals that grow in the country are as surprising, their forms as radically diverse and every bit as fine, as the work our best artists produce. I can only hope that the young people who devote their time to caring for these animals are at the same time, like artists, learning how to praise. 

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on September 06, 2002
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