It is easy to romanticize life with animals, I do it all the time, often inadvertently. There are photos of appealing creatures with their wide eyes being affectionate and loved and it is easy to forget how gross, smelly and messy life is with almost all of them. In the morning, we do what I call “picks and ticks,” we come out, give the donkeys some apple cores or bits of carrot, say good morning and first we pick the ticks off of their noses and foreheads – they lower their heads into the grass to graze – and then we brush the manure off them that they have rolled in all night and then we go shovel the fly and maggot infested piles of manure out of the barn.

These are not the things I generally take photos of and they are not what people want to see in the morning. I don’t write about this as a complaint or lament – we love our lives, we chose it, we have no reason to complain about it – but it interesting to me how much we take tick-pulling and manure scraping for granted. It is a part of it, the perfect life is not about being idyllic, it is about dealing with the crap as well as the golden moments. As one who puts up many cute animal photos, I feel obliged to remind people what farm people already know, animals are as disgusting as they are wonderful and fascinating. Always a good thing to know before you get one.