BOOKS: Where The Blind Horse Sings

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2007:

Where The Blind Horse Sings by Kathy Stevens
Skyhorse Publishing (555 Eighth Ave., Suite 903,
New York, NY 10018), 2007.208 pages, hardcover. $22.95.

What, if anything, do most of us know about the
personalities of the animals raised for slaughter?
Pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens are not colorless,
characterless creatures, emphasizes Catskill Animal Sanctuary
founder Kathy Stevens. Rambo, for example, is a sheep whose
intelligence and communication skills are an inspiration to all who
work with him.

Writes Stevens of one incident involving Rambo, “I received
my graduate degree from Tufts University in 1989. In the three
years of the program, I read over a hundred books by noted public
policy experts, politicians, historians, sociologists, teachers
and philosophers. The influence of a few of them–John Dewey, Noam
Chomsky, Jonathan Kozol–on my thinking about education was
profound. But somehow the lesson I’d just received from a sheep far
surpassed in its impact anything I’d read, discussed, or debated at
one of the country’s top universities.”
Darwin and Petri are ducks who had never seen water. Over
the course of several months, they ventured ever closer, until one
day Darwin entered the water, only to splash out and make a mad dash
back to safety, screaming all the way.
“I did it! I did it! I’M A DUCK!” interpretated Stevens
of the vocalization.
The title story concerns Buddy, a blind horse who arrived in
such a mental state that he was terrified to move at all. After only
four weeks of love and encouragement from Stevens, Buddy had built
up sufficient trust to allow her to ride him, and would gallop
through an open field. –Beverley Pervan