Chapter 9 Heifer Project Animals in Poland

What a Difference an Ear Tag Makes

In the spring of 1945, Greece became the first European country to receive Heifer Project animals. The first Heifer Project animals arrived in Poland at the end of the year, in December 1945. In total, and until February 1947 (toward the very end of the UNRRA period), the Heifer Project delivered 841 heifers to Poland in five transports: 150 on SS Santiago Iglesias (which sailed in November 1945 and arrived a few weeks later in Gdańsk, in December), 228 on SS Woodstock Victory in the winter of 1946, 95 on SS Robert W. Hart (which arrived on August 19, 1946), 328 on SS William S. Halsted (which arrived on December 6, 1946), and 40 on SS Mount Whitney (which arrived February 8, 1947).¹ This last sailing, uncharacteristically, also included forty-four horses provided by the Methodists and shipped by the Heifer Project; these constituted a “special shipment” to what had recently been East Prussia.²

The Heifer Project animals were met at the Baltic ports by a representative from the Brethren’s Poland headquarters, which were located in Warsaw on 35 Hoża Street. This was a busy office given that, in addition to the Heifer Project, the Brethren Service Committee ran other aid projects in Poland that delivered food, seed, clothing, and harnesses to people in need. Many of these relief goods were stored at a distribution base in Ostróda, in northeastern Poland a little west of Olsztyn; there were Brethren Service Committee staff at this location too.³

From the port and with the assistance of a Brethren representative, the Heifer Project animals were directed to their final destinations. Placing each animal “right” was a priority for the Heifer Project from the start, and to facilitate this the Polish government had agreed to allow the Brethren Service Committee to be involved in the animals’ placements. What this meant in concrete terms is that the Brethren Service Committee assessed specific requests for animals and chose animal recipients. Most of the requests were made directly to the Brethren using the Hoża Street address (but, reflecting the chaos and confusion that marked animal distribution in this period generally, some requests were misdirected to local government offices instead.) Requests came from individuals as well as from institutions like orphanages and schools or, in one case, from the Sisters of Virgin Mary Family Home for the Aged in Izabelin, not far from the city of Warsaw. Regardless, applicants invariably invoked the war’s destruction, established experiences of hardship, and repeated the ubiquitous claim that the milk that the Heifer Project animals would give was clearly the best possible nourishment for weak and sick children and the elderly in particular. In the Izabelin example, the request, which is dated November 8, 1946, was for one dairy cow to help sustain the “22 old women” who lived at the institution and whose children had died in the war or in the Warsaw Uprising specifically.⁴

What the Brethren did not agree to do was determine placements in advance or deliver specific animals to designated recipients on behalf of the American donors; this, they said, was just too difficult to arrange. At any rate the Brethren felt that decisions about placement needed to be made in-country, after an assessment of the local context, which they rightly understood to be an evolving one. Like UNRRA, the Brethren favored giving animals to farmers and institutions that did not have a cow at all but that desperately needed one or, alternatively, to those who could show a solid reason for needing an additional animal.⁵

But in contrast to UNRRA animals, Brethren Service Committee heifers were distributed as real gifts to individuals and institutions without any cost at all to the recipients.⁶ This was a major difference between the aid programs. Not charging for the animals (or for any of the goods they distributed) was extremely important to the Brethren Service Committee.⁷ “Cost-free humanitarian aid” was also precisely what Americans might have expected from charity projects, and indeed many other smaller voluntary relief agencies that operated at the time similarly did not expect payment for the aid they gave. As the previous chapters have shown, incoming UNRRA animals (and other types of nonemergency aid from UNRRA) worked differently: UNRRA aid was surrendered to the receiving governments upon arrival, and it was the government, in turn, that handled distribution and sold whatever it wanted to sell at prices it determined.⁸

A document titled “Act of Transferring the Heifer from American Gifts to the Polish Citizens” formed part of the record related to Heifer Project animal placements. The awkward English title suggests that this document was prepared in Polish rather than English and that the Brethren had the Polish original translated; it is this translated and typed-out version that remains available in the Brethren archives. Handwritten and somewhat modified versions of this document also exist, albeit for the post-UNRRA period when the Brethren continued to work in Poland on their own for a short time.⁹ (It is likely that the exact content and format of the paperwork related to the animal transfers were left to local government levels to handle as they saw fit.) The name and address of the person or the institution that had received an animal were listed on the “Act of Transferring,” and the animal’s ear tag number was also indicated. Ear tags were unique identifying numbers that had been attached to every Heifer Project animal when she (or occasionally he) first entered the aid chain in the United States, usually at a collection center. The names and addresses of donors back in America could in turn be matched with the ear tag numbers so that donors and recipients could always find each other if they so wished and if circumstances permitted. In one example of a completed “Act of Transferring the Heifer” dated July 19, 1946, the recipient is listed as having received “heifer No. 4317-H 684962” from Windsor Lloyd of Idaho.¹⁰ While this arrangement created technical and bureaucratic links between givers and receivers, it also arguably brought the parties into much closer emotional contact with one another and confirmed their places in an imagined global community. Even if connections between givers and receivers were not followed up, the very possibility of doing so carried a measure of symbolic importance. This also very much differentiated the Heifer Project animals from those in the UNRRA animal relief program. UNRRA animals did not have traceable links to individuals.

The “Act of Transferring the Heifer” also included two “promises” (this was the word used in the document) made by the recipients to the Brethren. The first was that the recipient would keep the heifer on the farm to which she had been assigned as well as take good care of her and not sell her without the explicit consent of the local Agricultural Chamber, with whom the Brethren cooperated in an administrative capacity to handle the animal placements. The second promise was to summon a veterinarian should the heifer become sick and to “follow his orders exactly.”¹¹

Recipients of animals were also informed about the standard Heifer Project requirement to give away the first healthy female calf born to the heifer they had received. Male calves were not part of the agreement and could be kept by the owners of the animal or sold off. This new recipient was likewise to be a person in need.¹² The benefits to the secondary recipient of a Heifer Project animal were of course obvious. The appeal of Passing on the Gift to the American donors was that it extended the value of each donated animal and, theoretically at least, widened the donor’s reach. This no doubt strengthened donors’ identity as givers of charity: each heifer that arrived from the United States could be seen as helping a greater number of families. The benefits of the original gift would multiply as time went on and generations of new animals were spread across a single region.

The Brethren Service Committee also liked that this arrangement allowed aid receivers to become aid givers. This evolution of identities, the Brethren argued, permitted people to “contribute to their own welfare” and to the well-being of their broader communities.¹³ Dan West was himself of the view that relief was “degrading” but that giving was “ennobling,” and that “blessings” came through giving rather than receiving.¹⁴ Arguably, too, this reinforced a sense (on the American side, at any rate) that solutions to hunger and poverty could be relatively simple as long as they were organized and managed well and as long as everyone participated with a view of the collective good in mind.

Seeing Is Believing

The Brethren’s assessment of how their program functioned in Poland was very positive at the time and has remained so in the years since. In Brethren Service Committee records and personal cowboy reminiscences, it is clear that Brethren administrators regarded their relationship with the Polish government as cooperative, collegial, and successful.¹⁵ That this government was increasingly dominated by the Communists was certainly noted and discussed but did not cause a great deal of alarm; the Brethren Service Committee did not dwell on this fact or acknowledge, especially in its public pronouncements, that they were working in what was fast becoming a dangerously repressive context. Instead, the Brethren praised the Polish government for being respectful of the Heifer Project’s priorities and preferences in terms of aid distribution. They also openly appreciated the government’s help in making sure recipients knew that the gifted animals came from the Heifer Project—from a small group of Christians working together on a good cause and helping other Christians—rather than from the larger (and more impersonal) united governments.¹⁶

Even though everyone understood that Heifer Project animals had a special status, it could be quite difficult to differentiate them from UNRRA animals on the crowded docks. When “mistakes” happened and Heifer Project animals ended up with the UNRRA animals, it was the Polish government’s response that mattered most to the Brethren. In one instance the 228 Brethren heifers that had arrived on SS Woodstock Victory “lost their identity as gift animals,” as the Brethren said, and were taken for UNRRA animals instead. As such they were sold by the government in the usual way.¹⁷ The Brethren Thurl Metzger protested and contacted the government about the error. At the time, in the fall of 1946, Metzger was a lead representative of the Brethren in Poland whose job it was to oversee animal placements; during his six months in this monitoring role, Metzger did some work for UNRRA too. The Ministry of Agriculture investigated Metzger’s complaint, and though they did not find the animals and rehome them (this would have been an onerous task indeed), they did provide what the Brethren regarded as fair financial compensation for each animal that had been misdirected, to a sum total of over four million złoty. The Brethren were convinced that the error had been an honest one, and they considered the government’s solution to be fair. The Brethren later used the money to sponsor ten Polish students to travel to the United States to study modern American agricultural methods.¹⁸ For their part the Polish government used these moments as opportunities to burnish its reputation, both inside of Poland and abroad, and to show its integrity as custodians of international aid.¹⁹

The Brethren continued to define their relationship with the Polish government as satisfactory. They were pleased that the government was consistently cooperative and that it honored its earlier agreement to permit follow-up visits with placed heifers; the Brethren had made these visits a condition of providing the heifers in the first place. (UNRRA could also complete spot checks of placements of UNRRA animals—and it often did so—to ensure that nondiscriminatory distribution practices were being followed.²⁰) Sometimes recipient farms were visited just once, but occasionally the Brethren conducted additional follow-up visits so that they could get the most current updates about the donated animals, including when the first calf had been born, to whom that firstborn calf had been given, and how much milk the cow was giving.²¹ From the Brethren perspective, these visits ensured that “the spirit of donors” was being carried out and confirmed that the animals were receiving good care and were being used as the program intended.²² The Brethren regarded this less as surveillance on their part and more as an opportunity to build good relations between donors and receivers, between Americans and Poles. Unlike UNRRA—which typically purchased animals in bulk through intermediaries—the Brethren regarded the donated animals as the beginning point of a real relationship and as a living reminder to suffering people that Christians had not forsaken them. For them, personal relationship-building was itself an important component of international humanitarian aid. Arguably the whole arrangement was also advantageous for the animals, who may have had a better shot at a good placement given the scrutiny that could be expected to follow (but which of course did not happen in every case).

Dillon Throckmorton, a minister with the First Methodist Church in Modesto, California, who sailed to Poland in the summer of 1946, visited many recipient families in Poland. Throckmorton had been asked by the Heifer Project to conduct a survey of the already-placed animals and to provide updates on how they were adjusting. In the end Throckmorton visited almost twenty families, and he reported confidently and enthusiastically that in every case the heifers were right where they were supposed to be, were being treated well, and were delivering the aid they were designed to give.²³ For men like Throckmorton, the personal connection that he was able to establish with recipient families during the visits gave him (and by extension the Heifer Project backers back in America) satisfaction that their program was successful; the pleasure came from seeing that the animal gifts did in fact make a positive difference to people’s lives. In an article published in the Brethren’s Gospel Messenger about his farm visits, Throckmorton led with reassurance and certainly. Titled, “I Saw Your Heifers in Poland,” Throckmorton gave his readers concrete evidence of success—healthy animals providing a good volume of milk to their humans when just a short time ago there were no milk-giving animals at all. He also wrote movingly about Poles’ great suffering during the war and about wartime killings and separations. Everywhere, he told his readers, people were full of gratitude: “If you could witness this elderly gentleman as he expressed his thanks to God for what the Americans had done for him, you would be tireless in pressing forward in the support of the heifer project.”²⁴

There were other memorable visits to recipient farms that included Brethren Service Committee administrators and seagoing cowboys too. One group of men was led by Ralph Smeltzer of the Brethren Service Committee; together they visited the village of Suchy Dąb in the Gdańsk region in 1946 to “see some of our heifers.” The farm of Bronisław Arcab and his family had previously been owned by an ethnic German family that had just been expelled from Poland, and Arcab’s family (which included seven children) was moved onto it in May 1945. The Arcab family’s own farm, in the region around Kielce, had been destroyed during the war. Holstein heifer number TB366294, courtesy of the Heifer Project, was intended to give Arcab a good fresh start on his newly acquired farm in a new region that held the promise of a better life. Smeltzer doubted that the heifer was giving the thirty liters of milk a day that Arcab claimed, but he was gratified that the animal looked “good.” Smeltzer and his companions took a photograph of the cow and the family and went on to the next farm.²⁵

The Smeltzer crew visited another village called Krzywe Koło where the brothers Antoni and Adam Kopania lived with their families. They too had recently relocated to the area from Kielce, where the fields were full of mines (a third brother had died because of a mine in a field). The formerly German property that they now inhabited provided a new start for the Kopania brothers and their families just as it has for Arcab and his family; the land was divided in two, and each branch of the Kopania family got fifteen hectares.²⁶ The families had been in Krzywe Koło since May 1945, and each had received a Heifer Project cow: Antoni received Jersey heifer number 2910 (which was giving twenty liters of milk a day), and Adam received Holstein heifer number 2878. The Holstein’s calf had died, but the Jersey cow was due to calf again in a matter of weeks.²⁷ The brothers had also bought three horses between them (quite possibly these were UNRRA horses, but there is no evidence of this), which they used to plow their fields.²⁸

Another visit happened when foreman Lawrence Shultz—who had been the first chair of the Brethren Service Committee and had played a key role in forming the committee in the first place—traveled with a group of cowboys to visit animals that came from the very first Heifer Project shipment to Poland. These animals had arrived on SS Santiago Iglesias. The ship had sailed from Baltimore to Gdańsk with a total of 368 heifers aboard, 150 of which were Brethren heifers (the rest were UNRRA animals and were part of UNRRA’s third shipment of animals to Poland).²⁹ Of the twenty cattle born during the sailing, sixteen survived. The animals were distributed to ten villages within a fifty-mile radius of Gdańsk. Shultz and a crew of almost twenty cowboys—mostly Brethren and Mennonite men but also one Methodist and one Catholic—traveled to visit some of them shortly before Christmas 1945.³⁰ Shultz wrote about this opportunity in an article published in early 1946 in Gospel Messenger and also in a report he filed with the Heifer Project. In both pieces Shultz highlighted the visit to the farm of Josef Truski near Ostrowo (rendered as Ostrovik by Shultz). Shultz called one of the heifers by name; this was Joy, “the Jersey heifer from the farm of Daniel Snyder, New Paris, Indiana,” carrying ear tag number 1891. Shultz described her as having “a good home” and as being “much needed by that family of four.” The photograph that accompanies the article shows some of the men with the heifers “raised on Brethren farms.” As part of their visit, the men also enjoyed lunch at the home of a local farmer.³¹

Shultz was clearly pleased to give readers of Gospel Messenger this evidence of a successful placement. He delighted in being able to trace the donation path of a single animal—again, the ear tags were key to this—and he was reassured to see that all the animals “are well cared for in better, warmer barns than they had had in America.” The animals were doing what they were supposed to do.³² When Shultz expressed his delight about this outcome to E. Wiszniewski, a Polish agricultural expert at the Polish Embassy in Washington, Wiszniewski repeated what the Brethren knew already: “Well, no cattle, no children.”³³ Without cattle there was no foundation for settled family life or for the type of small-scale agricultural production that dominated in Poland.

Sometimes there were also special banquet suppers where the men’s work as cattle attendants was recognized and celebrated by the various parties involved in the humanitarian live aid project: the Brethren Service Committee, UNRRA, Polish state representatives, and local farmers alike.³⁴ Mennonite cowboy David H. White wrote in his diary about having enjoyed such a banquet in the summer of 1946 as the final part of a farm tour that had been arranged for the men by UNRRA and the Polish Department of Agriculture. White and the other cowboys welcomed the celebration for bringing them into proximity with the people they were helping and for exposing them to the surrounding culture. They left with positive impressions of the humanitarian work that was ongoing in Poland and of the Polish people’s determination to rebuild their lives.³⁵ Art Meyer’s cowboy crew also enjoyed what he referred to as an “appreciation dinner” in a hall in Sopot after a tour of some of the farms where UNRRA cattle and horses had been placed. As part of their short tour of the Baltic cities, the men also stopped in at the Oliwa Cathedral and listened to the famed pipe organ.³⁶

Sometimes the Brethren Service Committee made arrangements (including the necessary translation services) to facilitate the writing of letters back and forth between donors and heifer recipients.³⁷ In general Polish letter writers celebrated their cow’s good health and provided evidence of this by indicating how many liters of milk she gave daily.³⁸ From time to time, recipients also included photographs of their well-cared-for cow standing beside the whole family.³⁹ This—showing the relief animal and the human family in a single frame—has become iconic in humanitarian aid photography and is familiar from modern-day humanitarian agencies’ promotional materials, too, including those of Heifer International (the successor to the Heifer Project).⁴⁰

One detailed and touching letter of thanks came not from an aid recipient but from a county animal inspector in Działdowo named Witold Tanski. Tanski wrote to the Brethren on behalf of the eighty-nine local farmers who had received a Heifer Project animal. In his letter Tanski assured the Brethren that he knew the recipient families and the heifers personally and that he could therefore say with certainty that the Brethren gifts were in fact giving people the help that they so desperately needed. Another letter of thanks reached the Brethren from Antoni Lewandowski in Pułtusk. In his letter, Lewandowski remarked how strange he found it that he knew the heifer’s ear tag number but not the name of the heifer’s donor, and he wrote in part to get this information so that he could thank the donor directly (there is no indication that this happened).⁴¹ Another particularly striking display of gratitude was received by the Heifer Project Committee in late 1946 from children living at the Institute for the Blind in Laski, west of Warsaw. The children, some of whom were orphans, expressed their great happiness at receiving cows and heifers because they “like milk very much.” The children’s letter included musings about how difficult it must have been to transport the cows all the way to Poland “because we heard American cows are very wild and jump even out of a lorry. We would like very much to go to America to the wild prairies to catch wild cows and mustangs.”⁴²

In one instance Brethren Service Committee cowboys had an opportunity to meet the photographer John Vachon. In February 1946 John Vachon traveled with M. E. Hays, the chief of the Agricultural Rehabilitation Division of UNRRA in Poland, plus a veterinarian, from Warsaw to the port areas and to the Bydgoszcz region. The men inspected a newly arrived aid ship, SS F. J. Luckenbach, visited the receiving barns, and watched the reloading of the animals onto what Hays described as well-stocked train cars that would move the animals into the Polish interior. The UNRRA men and a group of twenty-five cowboys then traveled together to visit a state farm that was producing milk for delivery to children as part of a rationing program, and they also toured an agricultural school that had received eight cows and nine horses form UNRRA. Vachon photographed the cowboys outside the school (see fig. 15). It was only at this point, during the field trip, that Vachon seemed to learn about the Brethren Service Committee and the seagoing cowboys program; he wrote about the cowboys in a letter to his wife Penny (Millicent Leeper). Vachon, like the cowboys and UNRRA too, was “favorably impressed” with everything he had seen and with the standards of animal care in Poland. As Hays wrote in his report, the effect of this field trip was also to dispel “rumors which they say are current in the States as to what is happening to UNRRA livestock delivered to Poland.”⁴³

These examples of encounters between recipients and the Brethren, whether through in-person visits or through letters of gratitude, and whether mediated by UNRRA staff or not, were important and revealing. No doubt some of the recipients had to go to considerable effort and expense to write and send the letters, develop photographs, or host the visitors with food and drink, and this alone is testament to the importance Poles attached to giving gratitude. There was no reason to expect that these small actions would have brought them any additional benefit. The letters and the visits established a meaningful connection between giver and receiver, and when recipients professed their own Christianity and recognized the Christianity of the donors in their letters of thanks, this strengthened the connections further still. Significantly, too, the encounters allowed aid providers to answer honestly that the animals’ conditions at their destinations were “good.” UNRRA Director General Lehman was pleased that both the letters and the farm visit reports could reassure the American public that the aid program was in fact running smoothly: “Everyone who has had the opportunity to see the care given these animals,” Lehman said, “has reported that these conditions are excellent.”⁴⁴

Despite satisfactory field trips and repeated reassurances from UNRRA and Brethren administrators that animals ended up where they were supposed to be, there was evidence of problems that even the cowboys—who were generally very eager to believe that everything was running as they hoped—could not ignore. For example, when a group of cowboys visited a widow who had received a Holstein from the Heifer Project, they were shocked to learn that the animal often stayed inside the house, with the widow, so as to prevent “the Russians” from seizing her.⁴⁵ Though even here some Brethren argued that keeping cattle in the same building as the family was less about fear of theft than it was a sign of Poles’ great appreciation for the animals. Other cowboys reported hearing similar reports from other recipients: the Russians, they were told, took whatever they wanted when they wanted.⁴⁶

It was also no doubt easier for cowboys to treat evidence of corruption as an outlier or oddity and to emphasize successful placements and positive stories instead. It was also much easier to do this in 1946, when the political situation had not yet been definitively settled, than in 1947, by which time the Communists had eliminated their opposition and the new political framework was up and running. As one seagoing cowboy wrote in Gospel Messenger in 1946, Brethren communities wanted this assurance that, simply, “the stock we cared for is now helping to provide food for hundreds of people.”⁴⁷ And even if those people that were being helped were sometimes Communists (or for expediency pretended to be Communists), this did not mean that the animals they received were wasted; the animals were still helping someone to farm and survive.⁴⁸ Heifer Project internal documents also reinforce these views; the confidence was not only manufactured for public consumption. As late as the summer of 1947, in a summary statement written by staff at the Heifer Project about the Brethren Service Committee’s work in Poland, we can read that “after many investigations there was not a single instance of Russian confiscation of American cattle in Poland.”⁴⁹

That UNRRA Director General Lehman and various UNRRA bureaucrats provided their own reassurances about the integrity of their much larger relief program was interpreted by the Brethren as a positive sign as well. The Russian Mikhail A. Menshikov, who was the leader of the Temporary Mission to Poland in 1945 and who later served as deputy director general at the Bureau of Areas at Washington’s UNRRA headquarters, also affirmed in public forums that reports of red tape and misappropriation of both UNRRA and Heifer Project animals (and other donations) were simply unfounded.⁵⁰ The Canadian Charles Drury delivered a very similar message to The New York Times in 1946, as did Lehman’s successor as UNRRA director general, Fiorello La Guardia.⁵¹ All aid organizations were on the same page in this regard and largely just dismissed the view that aid was being stolen or wasted. No doubt this refusal to believe in the real possibilities of corruption and political manipulation contributed to an assessment, at the time and even today, of mid-century aid providers as naïve and as too easily duped by the Communists.⁵²

The Heifer Project’s Next Phase

As UNRRA started closing its operations in 1947, this left charities like the Heifer Project to pursue relief work on their own, in Poland and of course elsewhere as well. Perhaps this was a mixed blessing for the Brethren. The Brethren generally appreciated that they benefited from UNRRA’s considerable resources—most notably its ships but also its in-country contacts and its access to translators, guides, and administrative help. The Brethren administrator Thurl Metzger was of the view that UNRRA did categorically “good” work in Poland, contributed to internal political and social stability, and relieved suffering. Metzger saw this himself during the time he spent in the country from late 1946. Then again, Metzger continued, working with UNRRA came with certain challenges for the Brethren Service Committee too. During a time when so many of the local people were making do with so little, UNRRA staff stood out for their privileges. “There was also the embarrassment,” Metzger said, “of being associated with the group that lived in the best hotels, ate at the best restaurants and traveled through the country like high officials in an occupation army.” For his part, Metzger walked to work and took every opportunity to socialize with the locals and visit their homes and institutions.⁵³

A total of sixteen charitable groups, the Brethren included, were working in Poland in the middle of 1946, and that number doubled by the end of the year as it became clear that UNRRA would soon depart and that there would be both room and a need for additional relief providers.⁵⁴ The Danish Red Cross had a presence in Poland, as did Swedish aid groups and CARE (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe). Many of these groups were small and religious in nature, like the Brethren Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Methodist Committee for Overseas Relief, and the Anglo-American Quaker Relief Mission. In 1947 the Friends Service Council (UK) and the American Friends Service Committee were awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize for their work in postwar aid provision in Poland and elsewhere.⁵⁵

Given that UNRRA aid ships had stopped sailing to Poland by the end of 1947, as UNRRA itself ceased its operations, it became much more expensive and logistically complicated for the Brethren to send large numbers of animals (or any other large volumes of aid) on their own. Yet Poles continued to ask the Brethren for additional animals. Orphanages, for example, continued to write with requests for a “free cow” and underscored in their letters what by this point was obvious: that milk was critically important to children’s health. Too often the Brethren had to respond that they did not have enough stock in Poland to distribute to the many Poles that still needed cattle, and that they had no way of bringing cattle from the US to Poland.⁵⁶ Moreover, in the post-UNRRA period the $150 that UNRRA had paid each attendant for the trip no longer existed; cattle attendants would need to be paid by the Brethren themselves, or they would have to choose to become real volunteers without receiving any payment whatsoever. Then again, the need for volunteers was not as great after UNRRA closed down; the scale of the Brethren operations by necessity became far more modest. By the spring of 1947, the Brethren Service Committee had 175 interested volunteers lined up, even though estimates were that only 16 would be needed every month.⁵⁷

From late 1946 until March 1949, the Brethren Service Committee’s director in Poland was Clara Chaloupka Wood. Chaloupka Wood’s husband Bruce ran the Heifer Project for the Brethren Service Committee. Paul A. Getz, a teacher specializing in agriculture, took over for a very short time in 1949. The Brethren maintained their main office in Warsaw and their aid distribution center in Ostróda until August 1949, at which point they packed up and left for good.⁵⁸ Until the last days, the Brethren continued to place whatever animals they had with people and institutions that needed them. In addition, the Brethren in these last months were involved in setting up a home economics program at the Central Agricultural College (Szkoła Główna Gospodarstwa Wiejskiego) in Warsaw. The initiative in expanding agricultural education was an important one, the Brethren said, given how many agricultural leaders had been killed in the war. It was a matter of replacing lost skills.⁵⁹

During this post-UNRRA period, the Brethren also arranged for a shipment of 160 black and red Danish Red cattle—known to be good milk producers—from the port of Naevsted, Denmark, to Poland; the cattle arrived in May 1948.⁶⁰ The Danish animals were purchased by the Brethren Service Committee for $40,000 or $250 per animal (with shipping and animal care costs paid in this case by the Polish government). This donation was negotiated directly between the Brethren and Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture, and the animals were earmarked specifically to help children, whose milk needs everyone believed had been well established; the animals were directed to households with three or more children or to orphanages. The imperative to “pass on the gift” was part of the new agreement as well, just as it had formed part of the original Heifer Project donations. And recipients were encouraged to share any extra milk that the animals produced with nearby needy families.⁶¹

The total number of cattle shipped to Poland by the Heifer Project until the end of 1948 (so well past the period when the Brethren worked with UNRRA and ran the seagoing cowboys program) was 1,013.⁶² That was a small number compared to UNRRA’s many tens of thousands, but it was an earnest number behind which lay a great deal of community-level organizing and genuine desire to affect positive change. The fact was, though, that even at this point the Heifer Project still had hundreds of heifers in holding centers in the United States: 250 at New Windsor and several hundred more across the United States. The care the animals required was burdensome. With no way of getting them to Europe, the Brethren soon sold many of the waiting animals and kept the money in reserve to buy more heifers later, once shipping became possible.⁶³

Despite affirmations that Poland deserved much more aid than other countries due to the extent of wartime devastation—and certainly more than it had already received—the Communists had no intention of tolerating representatives of foreign charities in Poland, just as they had no intention of allowing the Americans or the so-called United Nations to stay in the country.⁶⁴ All aid coming from outside of the country’s borders—and all foreigners who brought that aid—became increasingly suspicious and threatening to the Communists. The Communist authorities came to regard foreign charities in the country as an affront to the country’s sovereignty.⁶⁵ Unlike in the immediate postwar period when national governments were weak and battered and when there was just a little bit of space for international bodies to shape lives in sovereign countries, by 1947 national boundaries were more rigidly drawn, and there was comparatively less enthusiasm for outside help. Simply being present in the country, by some definitions, constituted unwelcome interference.⁶⁶

As a result, Polish Communist Security Services undertook investigations of the foreign aid groups that operated in Poland.⁶⁷ That many of the charities and aid workers active in Poland were Protestants further raised alarm bells for the security apparatus of the Polish state. The Polish security services feared that the aid workers fostered a “German spirit” among the population they worked with, particularly in the north of the country, which had some historical links to German Protestantism. The aid volunteers were sometimes accused of being spies. Of course, those Poles with whom the foreigners worked also came under suspicion.⁶⁸ In the summer of 1949, Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture formally gave notice to the Brethren Service Committee that they no longer wished to cooperate with them on bringing cattle to Poland.⁶⁹ The Brethren Service Committee left Poland in 1949. And this despite the fact that as late as the fall of 1948 the Food and Agriculture Organization insisted that Poland still had the greatest need for milk cattle in all of Europe.⁷⁰

Heifer International

By the end of the 1940s, the Heifer Project Committee that had formed in the midst of World War II as a temporary relief agency designed to address specific postwar needs had been transformed into a significant humanitarian aid organization with a proven track record.⁷¹ The Heifer Project’s continuation past the UNRRA phase was by no means certain, however, as going it alone, without UNRRA’s resources and with the need to cover cattle attendants’ expenses plus freight costs, posed significant logistical and financial challenges. Yet the Brethren believed in the ongoing need for the work they were doing, as agricultural renewal remained key to postwar rebuilding. Moreover, the Brethren Service Committee leaders continued to believe in what they described as “the Christian’s opportunity and responsibility” to engage in humanitarian relief work. And besides, the idea and the reality of the Heifer Project had quickly earned an important place in Brethren identity, and no one was prepared to give that up quite yet.⁷² “Is it a duty or a privilege to share our material blessings with those who have so little?” one internal Heifer Project document asked. Clearly it was both.⁷³ The Brethren John D. Metzler, who had been part of the formative phase of the Heifer Project and at one time director of the material aid program at the New Windsor Brethren complex, offered his opinion at a committee meeting of the Brethren Service Committee in August 1947. Metzler said, simply, “The name of the Heifer project Committee is too well known to be sacrificed.”⁷⁴ The BSC was proud of its work in Poland and elsewhere, and they saw themselves as making an important contribution to relieving suffering.

The Heifer Project continued its rehabilitation work after the UNRRA period and indeed expanded its engagement into other areas of the world.⁷⁵ The first major shipment that the Heifer Project made independently of UNRRA (UNRRA’s last shipment of livestock from the US happened in April 1947) was to Japan that same month. Transportation was provided by the US War Department aboard SS Alfred DuPont.⁷⁶ Heifer Project cattle were also shipped to West Germany from 1949 to 1961. Remarkably, the Heifer Project also shipped cattle to the Soviet Union in 1956. Well-known men from within the organization—Thurl Metzger, Milo Yoder, Mark Schrock, and Paul Miller—accompanied the animals and were guests in the USSR of the Ministry of Agriculture. “You can go anywhere on the back of a heifer,” M. R. Zigler said about this unlikely turn of events.⁷⁷ And then in 1960 the latest incarnation of the Heifer Project again struck up a relationship with Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture to deliver heifers, along with beef cattle, to Poland.⁷⁸

The versatility and utility of cattle—the opportunities they provided—were repeated throughout the life of the Heifer Project; according to the Brethren, it was cattle specifically that had made the Heifer Project such a success: “Heifers are better than howitzers in making steady friends abroad,” offered one cowboy.⁷⁹ By 1950 the Heifer Project had shipped eleven thousand animals—heifers, mainly, but also bulls and goats—to approximately twenty countries.⁸⁰

In 1951 Thurl Metzger replaced Benjamin Bushong as the executive director of the Heifer Project Committee. As we have seen, Metzger represented the Brethren in Poland and oversaw animal placements. Before that he served in the Civilian Public Service and later worked for the Heifer Project at the Brethren’s New Windsor center. Metzger was thus already experienced and had proved his commitment to the Heifer Project.⁸¹ The Heifer Project evolved and expanded under Metzger’s leadership, and in 1953 it incorporated as an independent nonprofit organization, Heifer Project Incorporated. This marked a functional and formal separation of the Heifer Project from the Church of the Brethren and the Brethren Service Committee. It also marked the transformation of the organization from a Christian one to one with no formal connections to any faith-based bodies.⁸² And of course with the Brethren-UNRRA partnership long over, it was the job of the Heifer Project to recruit men for the sailings (and to pay for the sailings as well). Peace church men continued to volunteer, as did men from other Christian denominations, and eventually women were eligible to work as volunteer animal handlers as well. The scale of the organization’s activities was much smaller and less rushed, not surprisingly, with fewer and less frequent shipments, and trucks and air travel slowly replaced the large, retrofitted ships that defined live transport in the UNRRA days.⁸³ Today the Heifer Project is called Heifer International and is located in Little Rock, Arkansas. It continues to provide livestock to communities in need around the world, including those in the United States.⁸⁴ The current mission statement—“We work to end hunger and poverty in partnership with the communities we serve”—is direct and ambitious. The idea that “ending poverty begins with agriculture” is a core belief of Heifer International, just as it was of the Heifer Project.⁸⁵ In this sense the logic that led to the inclusion of animals in humanitarian aid programs at mid-century remains in place in our contemporary period too. Rehabilitation in largely agricultural societies continues to rely on animals.

What is arguably changing, however, is nonhuman animals’ place in our ethical, cultural, and social worlds, and this, in turn, is shaping humanitarian aid programs. Today aid providers recognize that for a variety of reasons, including environmental ones, animals should be sourced locally when possible rather than shipped tremendous distances at enormous cost. The environmental impacts of shipping animals across oceans, as well as the environmental impacts of keeping and feeding livestock to begin with, did not register with mid-century actors in the ways that it does today. An understanding of animals’ biology and adaptability has evolved with the times too. More recently too, of course, the idea that cows’ milk is a nutritious food has been challenged, with many arguing against the consumption of cows’ milk entirely. Critics contend that milk’s advertised health benefits are overrated or even false and that the dairy industry is built on animal suffering; the demands of modern industrial milk production mean that cows are confined for the duration of their productive lives and subject to unrelenting cycles of forced impregnation.⁸⁶ And the very concept of “animal aid” has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the last few decades too. Animal rights advocates argue that, as sentient creatures, nonhuman animals possess basic rights and intrinsic value and are owed moral consideration.⁸⁷ This in turn means that they should not be used as means to an end or treated as objects to be bought, sold, donated, or traded to benefit and serve humans. And they should also not be used as diplomatic props or as symbols of international cooperation or goodwill. Instead, and in pursuit of ethical and environmentally sustainable alternatives, plant-based solutions to hunger should replace approaches that rely on the exploitation and abuse of nonhuman animals.⁸⁸