In
the wild, he would be dead. But as a domesticated animal receiving care
from humans, one runt lamb in a set of twins, being rejected by his mother, showed his will to live... Viktor Frankl would have been proud of him.
This happens sometimes when the ewe “knows”
something is wrong with her lamb. It's an uncanny ability shown my mothers who are either "bad mothers", and therefore destined for the market, or "good mothers" who realise something is definitely wrong with her child. She accepts the healthy one, lets him suck, and
pushes the frail one away quite cruelly (to our eyes), lifting her leg and
walking away to prevent him suckling. And then another ewe did the same with an
even runtier ram lamb that we though wouldn’t even survive the first night.
But both
survived. The first one, whom we can call “Willy” (no picture), showed such a determination
to get on his tiny feet and suck, willy-nilly, that we humans held the mother
for a few days so he could grab onto her teat while his brother was nursing. He
was so insistent that within two days, he had learned how to run in from behind
while his brother was feeding and steal his mother’s milk. His will to live was
so strong – despite being a little runt – that he found out how to survive, and
his mother eventually calmed down and let him do his own thing. It was quite a
lesson in sheer grit and determination.
The
second one (shown above) never even tried his crazy mother’s milk. Big sister got it all, and
although the mother cried and cried for her boy lamb, when he was presented to
her, she kept on rejecting him. He had to be kept away from her, as he was so puny
she might have hurt or killed him. Such is the law of the wild. But this boy
soon became a bottle baby. As soon as he was shown the bottle and teat, he
grabbed onto it for dear life and started sucking – which was a surprise,
because some babies don’t get around to sucking a rubber teat for a day or two!
So here was another case of determination to live despite being born with legs
too spindly and frail to hold himself up at first. And the story ends for this
baby quite happily, as he was donated to a family that wanted a pet lamb and
were willing to bottle feed him.
So with that, all the lamb issues were solved and the
farm settled down to the normal routine of mothers grazing, lambs suckling and
then playing in the sunshine, jumping over tree roots, and skipping down the
slopes in herds of little white and brown balls of fluff.
If
the human will to Awareness were as strong as these lambs’ will to live, we
would be basking in enhanced consciousness by now.
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