For the past three years, my family has embarked upon the 1.5 hour drive (through the country, past the large signs pleading, "Repent! God will forgive your sins!" Ah, bible pushers...) to Mount Joy, in Lancaster, PA. Our destination? A little B&B/dairy farm called Rocky Acre. There we find kittens to torment, male lambs to avoid, and some mean corn fritters. We only stay for less than 24 hours, but it's always a good, albeit ethically questionable, time. The majority of our stay is spent watching, petting, or rescuing the kittens. It's sometimes hard to decide whether the owners run a cat farm or cow farm. Grace, my 5-year-old niece, and other similarly aged guests at the farm run around trying to catch the kittens and trap them in a playhouse, where they run some sort of dubious cat day care. We found the kids force feeding cat food to the kittens and then putting them down for naps. My sister and I felt bad for the kitties, so we snuck into the playhouse and rescued a few of them. The proprietors of the day care center were not fooled, however. We had to fend them off with protests of, "But this is my kitty!" as they came with grasping hands to snatch the cats back to hellish captivity. The way the children carried those poor baby cats! Though I suppose if the kittens really didn't want to be handled, they would stay away from the kids.
When we weren't involved with the cats, we collected eggs and fed the handfuls of hay to the goats and lamb. My nephew, Carter, made the mistake of going inside their small pasture. Their one male lamb butted Carter's 7-year-old butt all the way across the field, resulting in a very traumatized little boy who will probably hold a grudge against all sheep for the rest of his life. I also hold this grudge. Sheep are the smelliest, most frustrating, most unintelligent animals I have ever worked with. And the males will butt you, which is really frightening until you realize that sheep are herbivores and they're not out for blood.
My favorite part of staying at Rocky Acre (although I kind of hate supporting a commercial dairy) is feeding the baby bulls. The guests aren't allowed to touch the heifers, because someday they will be milked, but the bulls are fair game. If you get up early enough and wander across the street to the calf hutches, the vets will put you to work. They fill giant baby bottles with yellow colostrum milk (the milk that their mothers produce right after pregnancy, full of antibodies and the like) and warm them up. The bulls aren't quite experts at the whole bottle thing...they have trouble finding the nipple of the bottle and some of them can't figure out how to get the milk out. It's all very cute though...even when one of the bulls butted me and I fell on my face. Still cute.
Before I became a vegan, my second favorite part about Rocky Acre was the breakfast. It's the most epic farm breakfast you can imagine. Think scrambled eggs with cheese, cinnamon coffee cake, peach cobbler, pancakes, canadian bacon, corned beef hash, fruit, potatoes...it's absolutely insane. But the crowning glory of this over-the-top breakfast is the corn fritters. I have the recipe somewhere. Made with boundless amounts of lard (I think) and cream and eggs and other such unvegan things, I can no longer partake in the joy that is corn fritters. But I do remember them being crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and perfectly sweet. I miss them something terrible.
Another year at Rocky Acre has come and gone, and my soul is satisfied, although not so much my stomach.
