Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Up in Arms

I don't get super frustrated very often. At least not at strangers.  (Little brothers are a other story!)  But these last few days have had me super frustrated...and this time at strangers.
*Rant beginning*
On Sunday morning mom got an e-mail from alpaca farmer in Wisconsin stating that their barn and house had burnt down and that the male owner had also recently lost his hand.  Our first instinct was suspicion as we didn't want to believe it was true...both a house and barn fire and the loss of a hand?  We hoped it wasn't true. We e-mailed the farm and confirmed that it had actually happened.
Being unable to actually take animals (we don't have quarantine facilities so we can't do cross border livestock purchasing) I did what I could to help.  I posted the e-mail and the confirmation that I had gotten from the farm on a couple of alpaca groups on facebook to alert people in the area to the tragedy and see if something could be done to help these folks out.
I was met with great skepticism.  People thought it was a scam. Apparently these alpaca owners had engaged in some less than scrupulous business practices in the past and people thought they were doing so again. Once I knew that I understood the skepticism.  By Monday morning a news story had been published by a local news site, confirming everything we already knew.  People still cried that it was a scam.  They criticized the owners for sending out e-mails asking for help when they should have been looking out for the welfare of their animals.  They criticized the owners for being gone from the farm(!) so soon after the male owner had lost his hand.  They criticized the owners for wanting to sell their animals instead of giving them away to good homes. They criticized the owners for having two tons of feed in their barn for a herd of 110 alpacas (we get a ton at at time for 60 animals...their farm is even more rural that ours.  Two tons for 110 doesn't seem that unreasonable to me).
It made me angry.  I put myself in their situation.  If, by some freak accident, we lost both our house and our outbuildings/barns, leaving us with now more than half our herd (this is the situation these owners found themselves in), we would want to sell what we had, not just give them away.  We would want to sell so that we had something to get us back on our feet rather than give away what little we had. Perhaps we would want temporary homes or at least shelters and food and water, but we would want to sell what we had left in order to get back on our feet.
People are still crying foul and want to see the alpacas given away and not sold so that these owners cannot get back into the business. Right now, I don't think that should be the main concern.  What happened to people having human compassion and wanting to help out other human beings?  Forget about whether or not they should get back into the business.  They've just lost everything.
I wish we lived in a world where people were honest and caring and provided for the needs of others without second guessing motives.  I wish was possible on this side of heaven.
Done rant.

No comments: