(Trigger warning: Vegans, beware. Lots of, uh, shall we say, “farm-to-table”-type meat talk ahead.)

The lack of a very specific type of impulse control, it would seem, runs in my family. Because we’re not all genetically related to one another (my mother, for example, has no biological connection to my brothers’ half-brother), I must assume this trait is cultural in its origin. Or maybe it’s some sort of communicable brain disease, the other symptoms of which are arguing too much, talking too loud, loving the sound of your own voice, indulging a weakness for clothes, and acting aloof.

I’ve never taken one of those DNA heredity tests – I’ve experienced quite enough shocking family revelations for one lifetime, thank you very much – though I have done some nonscientific research into my lineage. It’s a little difficult because Phelan is a common Irish surname. (By the way, its proper pronunciation is FAY-lun, which is, of course, the one we use. And I’m sure this will come as a shock to everyone, but we are, to varying degrees, quite snotty about it.) Regardless, it appears our particular subset of Phelans immigrated to San Antonio, Texas via Kilkenny, in Southeastern Ireland, sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s. My half-brothers and I are, on our dad’s side, at least, third-generation Americans.

There’s no way to know how my forebears felt about animals, but I do know they have been a huge part of all our lives. My dad’s parents never had pets that I remember, but they raised cattle, so I had the interesting – and, in my own opinion, enlightening – experience of growing up alongside both pets, whom we considered abnormally small, alarmingly hairy family members, and livestock, about which everyone in our family also cared very deeply, but I understood they were destined for the auction and, eventually, the meat counter at the grocery store. I don’t remember how I came to terms with that realization, but I feel very sure it involved a calm, measured, logical, age-appropriate speech by my incredibly kind but very taciturn grandfather, James. 

He was, in fact, my step-grandfather, but James married my father’s mother before I was born. Despite never having any children of his own (and my grandmother’s four children were adults by the time they married), he was one of the two best grandfathers I can possibly imagine. He had exactly zero experience with children, and he had no earthly idea what to do with a little girl, so he simply treated me as he would have anyone whose company he enjoyed: We listened to the ag report on the radio, we rode around on the tractor and in the beat-up old farm truck feeding the cattle and checking the fences, we visited with other ranchers at the auction barn, and he answered hundreds, if not thousands, of questions from a prissy, rather dour child who was scared shitless of the Holsteins.

I have a vivid memory of Papa James, as I called him, killing a turtle while we were out one afternoon checking the cows. I was alarmed until he explained that turtles dig holes into which cattle can step and break their legs, killing them. I’m paraphrasing heavily here, of course, but he pointed out that the cattle cost a lot of money, and they represented most of my grandparents’ income for the foreseeable future. Sometimes, he said, we have to make difficult decisions where our animals are concerned in order to give them the best lives possible and allow them to die with dignity. 

My parents tried but didn’t last long in the cattle business. The chief reason was simply that the bottom fell out of the commercial beef-production market in the mid to late ‘70s, but my mother’s sentimentality where animals are concerned put the final nail in the coffin. By her own admission, Mother would stand around and bawl right along with the calves as my father et al. castrated them. (Her Louisiana forebears would be appalled; any coonass worth her salt would’ve picked those bad boys up off the ground and fried ‘em for supper. As she’s fond of saying, proudly, “You can’t starve a coonie.”) Her livestock-related shenanigans included, but were by no means limited to, making my father remove the back seats from his Dodge Dart so he could transport a club-footed calf to her parents’ SUBURBAN home in Shreveport. 

Is anyone even a tiny bit surprised my grandparents were like, “Yes, absolutely, we will, indeed, raise a disabled cow right smack in the middle of town”? At least Mother comes by it honestly. In fact, 20 or so years later, she and her father (whose boxer shorts kept getting eaten off the clothesline by the club-footed calf) would rescue a featherless – as in literally zero feathers – turkey off the side of FM 2276 in East Texas, thus saddling us with a weirdly aggressive and deeply unattractive pet. It didn’t help that Timothy (I voted we eat him, so I obviously didn’t name him) spent his first several weeks with us slathered in a yellow medicinal salve provided by the vet that made him look, for all the world, like a defrosted, buttered Thanksgiving entrée wandering around the property attempting, very much in vain, to intimidate every other creature he encountered. 

I’m telling y’all, you can’t make this shit up. And it goes without saying that the local veterinarian probably could’ve built the Phelan Wing of his practice with the money we threw at him every month (read: week). 

Recently, when I called Mother and asked what she’d done that day, she informed me that, on an errand somewhere, she spied a loggerhead snapping turtle in need of rescue. It was about to eat the big one trying to cross Norris Ferry Road, a busy two-lane highway in Southeast Shreveport, and turtles are not known for their wily nature. What’s an elderly lady to do? Well, let me tell you: You stop your car in the middle of the highway, throw it in park, hit the hazards, get out, stop traffic BOTH WAYS, then pick up a foot-long

SNAPPING 

TURTLE

whilst thou art taking for-fuck’s-sake BLOOD THINNERS and relocate him to the other side of the road. That’s what.

If you think dementia figures into this scenario in any way, shape, or fashion, I regret to inform you that Mother, much to my chagrin, has apparently been like this her entire life. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of my farm-animal stories; just wait ‘til we get to the GEESE. 

Apparently, this foolishness is catching, because I, who kind of low-key hate turtles (salmonella), saw a loggerhead snapping turtle trying to cross Highway 90 outside Opelousas, and I turned my car around and parked my shit in the median before I could even stop myself. 

I waited ‘til the coast was clear, then picked my way, in red Mary Janes, across three lanes of Cajun-Country highway. I positioned myself behind the turtle and made sure to grab his shell behind his back legs so he couldn’t bite me, but that sure as hell didn’t stop him from trying. Here I am, getting splattered with mud infected by filthy turtles as I FIGHT this animal, which I will remind you I DISLIKE, in order to save its life. Just in time, I finally managed to hoist him. With traffic looming and unsure what to do with this thing, I sort of Frisbee-ed him into a nearby ditch filled with water (because Louisiana). I made sure he landed right-side up, then I ran back to my car, got in, fished the can of Clorox wipes out from beneath the passenger’s seat, and proceeded to wipe down my whole body with them. “You should’ve brought him home and let Chaya and Alton cook him up for you,” said Charlotte when I told her of my adventures. “Yes,” I admitted, thinking that if anyone saw me with that damn turtle, they for sure knew I was from New Orleans. “But then I would’ve had a testudine in my car.”

Turns out, around the same time, 400 miles away in San Antonio, another set of Phelans was taking a quick detour while running an errand downtown and happened upon a burning car with an unconscious man inside. Without thinking, they stopped, jumped out, pulled the man from the car, which was quickly becoming engulfed in flames, and called 911. They said it didn’t even hit them until afterward what they’d done and the countless ways that scenario could’ve gone much, much differently.

Saving a human life is objectively a million times cooler than saving snapping turtles or turkeys, but I like to think the Why Not Me gene runs just as strongly in this family as the How Hard Can It Be and If It’s Easy It Ain’t No Fun genes obviously do. Our impulsive natures and tendency to jump in the fray get us into trouble every now and again, but I can’t think of a better time to be in possession of the If You’re Gonna Be Dumb You Gotta Be Tough gene. May we all get in better touch with our Why Not Me genes in the coming months.

A few days ago, Mother’s Shih Tzu, a rescue named Ashley, woke up without the ability to move her back legs. As far as Mother knows, no accident or injury preceded this condition, and the vet said this, unfortunately, sometimes happens with longer-bodied breeds like Shih Tzus. Of course, Mother is devastated, and, in the midst of her grief, she’s having to think through the possibilities for Ashley’s life if veterinary medicine is unable to resolve the paralysis. I thought about Papa James and how wise and gentle he was. Sometimes, we have to make difficult decisions for our animals.

Empathy isn’t a weakness, no matter what anyone says. It’s a fire within you that demands justice and compassion for everyone…even every turtle and every Shih Tzu. Nothing imparts courage like fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves, even for those who try to bite chunks out of us as we fight for them in our favorite shoes.

The battle is the reward, after all, and compassion is the mightiest weapon we have.

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