There’s a curious intimacy between creatures and their people on display at the county fair.
Of course, the directness with which farmers and ranchers handle their animals invites coarse sheep jokes -- here the judge walks the line cupping wooly ram scrotum with both hands (they’re the size of small melons), over there the 4-H kid suds down his heifer’s teets -- but the frank exchange between animal and human is more like a comfortable old married couple than it is some freaky bachelor party scene.
Like marriages, we saw our share of good ones and bad at the Sandwich County Fair today: some tender exchanges of care and attention, other pure beasts who herded around their four-legged charges like they owned them.
It was the kids that got me, especially the younger ones, holding fast to the halter or rubber baton, trying to guide a creature that was usually much larger than he or she was. With their emotions written baldly on their face you could see the struggle for dominance, the plea for compliance, the frustration when the cow wouldn’t budge, the relief when the animal relented and fell right into line.
And every once in a while there’d be a golden moment when creature and human walked as one, got the job done, and carried off the blue ribbon together.
Flickr slideshow of the Sandwich Fair, past and present »
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