Chapter 5 The Making of “Relief Animals”

The UNRRA Animal Assembly Line

The demand for American agricultural products during the war and after was high. The United States was virtually the only country in the world that did not experience significant food supply problems during or after World War II.¹ Economically speaking, times were good in postwar America, and this was important when assessing support for humanitarian aid.² The thousands of cattle and horses collected in the US and delivered abroad as part of the Heifer Project and UNRRA were living symbols of this prosperous America.

UNRRA worked with the Department of Agriculture, and specifically its Inspection Section and the Assembly and Inland Movement Section, to procure the right kind of animals. UNRRA purchased its animals on the open market, typically either from large firms or from individual contractors with access to plenty of stock.³ This procurement process, in some ways, was straightforward: UNRRA was a motivated buyer prepared to scoop up large numbers of horses and cattle and quickly move them on to the port areas. Sellers were plentiful, and the supply of horses was good, as the modernization and mechanization of farms in the United States meant that fewer animals were needed to do agricultural work. Motivated sellers wished to “liquidate holdings,” as UNRRA described it.⁴

In other ways the buying process was anything but simple. The first challenge was finding sellers that could assemble a large number of the right kinds of animals very quickly. Next came the challenge of physically moving the animals at once across great distances; each animal weighed hundreds of pounds and needed to be cared for along each step on the route.⁵ The animals’ cross-country journeys to the ports were often long and complicated and came with risks to the animals’ health.

There were several specific vulnerable points in UNRRA’s animal procurement program, and the first of these was arguably at the point of purchase. Though UNRRA critics then and since have evoked examples of corruption and waste in the receiving countries, particularly in the increasingly Soviet-controlled east of Europe, there were rumors of “irregularities” involving the procurement of UNRRA aid at the point of purchase in the US as well. One interesting allegation of corruption came from a Polish agricultural expert at the Polish Embassy in Washington, Dr. E. Wiszniewski. Wiszniewski’s job was to confirm the suitability of specific animal breeds for Poland’s agricultural program. In 1946 Wiszniewski claimed to his superiors in Poland’s Department of Agriculture that he had “secret information” about how UNRRA’s livestock buyers were paying the sellers less than the established ninety-dollar maximum per horse but were nevertheless charging UNRRA the maximum amount. What this meant is that UNRRA received a lower-quality (cheaper) animal and that its designated buyers pocketed the extra money after using some of the supposed surplus to bribe the sellers and, later, the inspectors. It was these animals, already weak and sick, that were most likely to suffer and die on the ships that took them abroad or shortly after landing at their destinations. Wiszniewski did not say where he got this information, and his specific accusations cannot be verified. There is of course also the possibility that Wiszniewski’s report to the Polish Ministry of Agriculture was politically motivated to show corruption and dishonestly in UNRRA and to make Wiszniewski himself look like a very conscientious bureaucrat watching out for Poland’s best interests.⁶

We do have evidence, however, that UNRRA was well aware of corruption and dishonesty in the various parts of its procurement system and that it took some steps to mitigate problems. UNRRA warned its buyers to be on the lookout for assorted tricks and deceptions; some of the warnings broadly supported Wiszniewski’s claims. UNRRA cautioned its buyers, for example, that unethical sellers would try to sneak sick animals into the group they were selling. UNRRA also warned buyers to be wary of prepurchase inspections that the sellers organized in dark barns; the lack of light could easily mask some signs of animals’ poor health. Inspectors were directed to insist on good lighting conditions and to stop work early during the short days of winter. In other cases, UNRRA told its buyers to watch for vendors who placed too much straw or shavings on the barn floor; the absorbent and soft material would make it difficult to properly examine the animals’ feet, meaning that lameness would be rendered less obvious. Lameness, weak ankles, and leg deformities were all reasons to disqualify an animal. Another deception involved vendors presenting horses whose teeth had been “worked on” so as to give the impression that the animals were younger than they actually were.⁷ All things considered, bulk animal purchases were simply risky. In one instance a group of horses that had been purchased by UNRRA was found to have ticks. The horses needed to be first treated and then quarantined for ten days before ultimately being released for the program.⁸ Though the ticks themselves would not have caused the animals’ deaths, the need to quarantine meant longer confinement periods, and this, in turn, meant more physical stress for the animals and a greater chance of developing other illnesses that could conceivably lead to death. Again, it was the animals that were already weak or sick in the United States that had a low chance of making it alive to their destinations, especially given the normal challenges that long transport periods posed.

The animals that UNRRA ultimately selected and purchased were tagged and put in specially prepared holding yards to await shipment to the ports. Under ideal circumstances this journey would start right away, immediately following purchase, and quite often that was in fact the case. According to the terms of the standard contracts that UNRRA’s procurement agents signed with sellers, it was the sellers’ responsibility to care for the animals until they reached the ports; the care was part of the purchase agreement. There needed to be attendants on the longer journeys, and provisions needed to be made for the animals to have rest stops and access to water and food during the trips as well.⁹

The selection, purchase, holding, and transport of the animals was regulated by legislation passed in 1944 that pertained specifically to animals designated for export.¹⁰ It was the job of inspectors from the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Industry to ensure the health, humane treatment, and safe transport of these animals. Inspectors examined the animals at the point of purchase, at the holding pens, and then before they were loaded onto the waiting ships.¹¹ Vaccinations and inspections needed to be up to date before animals would be permitted to leave the country. Cattle, for example, needed to have been vaccinated at between four and eight months of age, and the vaccinations could not be older than twelve months; expired vaccines needed to be updated before export could be approved.¹²

In March 1946 the UNRRA Livestock Inspection Section came into being to help evaluate animals’ suitability for the program. The UNRRA inspectors worked in an advisory and monitoring capacity only, however; the Department of Agriculture had the final say on matters related to animal purchase and export. Nevertheless, UNRRA inspectors hoped that they could influence decisions in some basic ways, and they tried to ensure that the animals considered for purchase met UNRRA specifications and conformed to the types of animals that receiving nations needed and wanted.¹³ But assessing suitability and overall quality was difficult for everyone, especially at the speed required by an emergency humanitarian relief program.

Typically, UNRRA inspectors provided a summary of their assessment of the animals that had been presented at purchase points in reports filed with UNRRA. These reports were informational only, however, as, again, it was Department of Agriculture inspectors and not UNRRA inspectors that had the final authority to include or reject an animal. An experienced Department of Agriculture inspector could assess the health of approximately three hundred horses per day (and a smaller number of cattle due, mainly, to the method of assembling the animals). UNRRA records show that rejection rates were lowest in the earliest months of the program when the focus was on sending as many animals as possible quickly, and then again at the end of the program when there was a mad rush to send “everything,” even, as UNRRA said, “the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel.”¹⁴ From August to October 1946, United States Department of Agriculture inspectors rejected 15 percent of all horses that were presented to them for purchase; this means that 5,699 horses were rejected out of 38,159. UNRRA livestock inspectors believed that an additional 2 percent should have been rejected, but of course they did not have the authority to demand this. In a retrospective report on the subject of animal purchases, UNRRA argued that differences between their own assessments of livestock and the government’s inspectors’ assessments were “representative” of a broader pattern. UNRRA generally would have wanted to be even more selective and careful.¹⁵

The pressure to get the animal program going and then to move animals quickly through the various stages en route to the ports was immense. This was true for many reasons, including logistics and cost, but also because the Department of Agriculture inspection results were valid for only thirty days.¹⁶ In practice the time between purchase and sailing varied for the animals, but the ideal was for it not to exceed a couple of weeks; delays were both expensive and hard on the animals, and animal illnesses, injuries, or deaths ultimately translated into another high cost for UNRRA. As it was, animals died at all of the possible stages during the American part of the process, from point of purchase to the ports.¹⁷ The discovery of existing or new illnesses at the ports further complicated timelines as some of the animals needed to be moved at the very last minute into temporary hospital areas. As a result, planned sailings, with specific animal groups, needed to be changed at the final moment, and this was always complicated to organize.¹⁸ Typically, too, sailings could be delayed because of a shortage of feed supplies, mechanical problems on the ships, or a lack of bottom cargo to complete the ship’s load.¹⁹ Sometimes delays and interruptions were entirely out of UNRRA’s control, as when, for example, a May 1946 rail strike halted transport to the ports and therefore delayed sailings.²⁰

The time pressures and the coordination challenges were especially enormous given that, at its peak, the UNRRA program moved up to ten thousand animals per week. One UNRRA report summarized the assorted logistical challenges that came with these high numbers like this: “The process followed in assembling livestock for export is very similar to the assembly line of an automobile plant. Once the process is started, it cannot be stopped suddenly without causing considerable financial and death losses.”²¹

UNRRA and Animal Welfare

The functioning of the UNRRA animal assembly line was monitored—albeit completely unofficially—by the American Humane Association (AHA). The AHA was a national animal welfare group with branches spread across the United States. Even before the US had entered the war, the AHA was already thinking about the war’s effects on animals and was advocating in favor of banning the sale of horses (to any side) for military purposes (this did not happen).²² A couple of decades earlier, in 1916, the association had founded the American Red Star Animal Relief program to provide assistance to animals used by the US Army during the First World War. The Red Star program remained active into the Second World War and funneled money and supplies to animal welfare societies working in Allied nations so that those groups could better tend to local animal victims of war.²³ After the Second World War ended in 1945, the American Humane Society got involved in a new project: monitoring and inspecting the transport, holding, and shipping conditions related to UNRRA’s animal program. It was the AHA that had initiated contact with the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Industry and asked for permission to visit the UNRRA animal holding centers and loading ports.²⁴ The permission was granted, but the AHA was allowed to work in an advisory capacity only; it had no authority to implement its recommendations or to enforce any changes that it might have wanted.

Christian P. Norgord was the Washington representative of the AHA, and it was he who met with UNRRA to discuss what the relationship between the two bodies might look like in a specific sense. During these meetings, Norgord—who was also a professor of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin and an agriculture commissioner in Wisconsin—was assured that the humane treatment of animals was a priority for UNRRA. In fact, UNRRA representatives told Norgord that its staff had been directed explicitly to “prevent all inhumane treatment of animals.”²⁵

The AHA carried out inspections of UNRRA holding centers to test this claim. AHA inspector James M. Ross made a 1946 inspection of Rigby Yards, an UNRRA stockyard near Portland, Maine, managed by Charles and Frank Griggs. Ross reported that he saw plenty of good food for the animals, proper ventilation, roomy corrals in the holding shed, and comfortable walking surfaces that did not collect mud and that absorbed the animal urine adequately. Ross further reported that veterinarians from the Department of Agriculture were reliably on hand to look out for, and to treat, if need be, sick animals.²⁶

Ross wrote a very positive assessment of UNRRA’s stockyard in Maine and published it in the AHA’s newspaper, The National Humane Review (which Ross also edited). “We found conditions as near perfect as it is given to man to make,” Ross wrote. “Every care is taken to see that each animal is well treated, made safe and comfortable on the journey across the waters.” The title of Ross’s article in The National Humane Review reflected absolute confidence in UNRRA’s high animal welfare standards: “Kindness and Comfort Paramount in Shipping Horses and Dairy Cattle Overseas to Replace Losses in Farm Animals.” Ross was evidently very moved by the grand purposes of the UNRRA aid program, by the fact that, as he said, the animals would be “given homes” in war-ravaged countries, that they would “help people,” and, lastly, that they would “have their part in restoring the necessities of life.” Tellingly, Ross also referred to the UNRRA animal shipments as constituting “a hegira of mercy”: a holy journey in which the resources required for civilized life were shared between friends.²⁷ Ross’s use of Christian-inflected language was typical of American animal welfare activism (which had roots in nineteenth-century Christian evangelical social reform movements), as it was of contemporary humanitarian rhetoric more generally, as we have seen.²⁸

The AHA did not question the choice to send animals across the ocean (just as the Heifer Project and UNRRA did not), and they did not problematize the notion of animals “as aid.” Their understanding of nonhuman animals was entirely anthropocentric and answered the question of what animals could do for “us.” Contemporaries used the terms “aid animals,” “gift animals,” and “relief animals” in uncomplicated, unproblematic, and overwhelmingly positive ways. We should not expect anything else for the mid-1940s. Even in the mid-1960s, Our Dumb Animals, the paper of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, actively supported the more modern incarnation of the Heifer Project, advised it on best practices in animal care, and published articles about the good work the organization was doing by sending relief animals abroad.²⁹ The Massachusetts Society’s Livestock Department even funded the construction of a step-type livestock loading ramp at Logan International Airport in Boston to facilitate the Heifer Project’s work. By the 1960s Logan had become a departure point for many Heifer Project animals destined to help “deserving people in foreign lands.”³⁰

Animal welfare societies of the immediate postwar period and beyond were composed of relatively conservative animal welfarists rather than radical abolitions who might have called for a revolution in relations between human and nonhuman animals. A broadly Christian worldview, which believed that God had created animals as lesser beings for human use, also informed the content of this activism. These animal welfare advocates showed themselves to be loyal supporters of UNRRA, of the government, and of “America’s program of helping hungry millions in Europe.”³¹ Though it was “regrettable,” according to AHA inspector James Ross, that “hardy and healthy horses must be taken from wide Western ranges, thrust into crowded box cars and sent on long journeys to seaports, thence dispatched abroad,” this was a necessary sacrifice; one had simply to accept that some animals would die on these trips, despite good planning and the most conscientious care.³² The greater cause—of providing humanitarian aid to humans in need—outweighed any concerns for animal welfare.

Indeed, even the best facilities and animal handlers could not mitigate the effects on the animals of long journeys to holding centers and from these centers to the ports; some animals did die on their way to holding barns, at holding barns, en route to the ports, at the ports, and then, as we will see in the next chapter, on the ships. At most what the AHA called for were improvements to general animal shipping laws in the United States. According to the AHA, the Department of Transportation rules did not adequately outline animal welfare standards in terms of watering, feeding, and resting.³³ Similarly, the AHA said, the concentration of diverse animal species and breeds from different regions (whether in holding barns or in transport rail cars) meant that diseases spread quickly, as the immune systems of animals from one area of the country could not easily handle diseases that affected animals from another part of the country. These “shipping diseases” already afflicted some of the animals even before they left the United States, which of course made animal deaths on the seas more likely. These deaths in turn jeopardized humanitarian goals. But these were relatively quiet recommendations and warnings and were not reflective of a concrete campaign for action and change in the present. The AHA seemed quite content to work within current structures and legal frameworks and to continue existing practices; it accepted the hierarchy established by humans in their perception of and treatment of nonhuman animals.³⁴

Like the AHA, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals concluded that UNRRA’s animal shipments did not compromise the animals’ welfare. The Massachusetts Society reported in Our Dumb Animals that though it had received a number of complaints and queries from the general public about the UNRRA animals, there was no evidence to substantiate concerns about mistreatment or negligence.³⁵ Any risks and problems that did exist were simply an unavoidable part of moving thousands of animals quickly across great distances and were justified by a belief in the inherent value of the effort itself; without cattle and horses, rehabilitation efforts in Nazi-devastated Europe would simply be impossible.

From Animals to Relief, the Brethren Way

There is no evidence that AHA inspectors ever visited any Heifer Project holding centers. In all likelihood such visits did not happen, as the Heifer Project was a private affair, was not managed by the government, and was far smaller in scale than UNRRA’s animal relief program. The Heifer Project cattle would only have been subject to the government inspections that were obligatory for all export animals. This constituted one important difference between how the UNRRA animals and the Heifer Project animals interacted with the state.

The differences in how each of these groups was transformed into relief animals began earlier still, however. While the approximately four thousand Heifer Project cattle shipped abroad during the UNRRA period became relief animals through donations, most of what UNRRA delivered as aid (including animal aid) had been purchased through the intervention of livestock procurement firms. That said, there were also some opportunities for American charitable and nongovernmental organizations to donate money to UNRRA, which UNRRA would then use to purchase animals (or other relief goods) and add to the overall relief effort. Resolution 14.9 of the UNRRA Financial Plan outlined the regulations that governed voluntary contributions from such organizations, and the logistics of this were overseen by the Contributed Supplies Branch, Bureau of Supplies.³⁶ One particularly large and notable donation came, for example, from the Polish-American Rebuilders of Poland Association, which had raised over $600,000 that was then used by UNRRA to purchase over eight thousand horses for the relief effort in Poland.³⁷ The advantages of this arrangement to the Rebuilders of Poland Association and other such groups were clear: UNRRA organized procurement and paid the considerable shipping costs.³⁸ Donations to UNRRA came from other organizations, too, such as from the Polish Supply and Reconstruction Mission in North America, whose head was the noted Pole and UNICEF founder, Dr. Ludwik Rajchman.³⁹

Donations to the Heifer Project were different; they were made on a much smaller scale and were more direct, personal, and ultimately profoundly local. From its inception the Heifer Project made appeals for donations by running stories in peace church community papers like the Brethren’s Gospel Messenger, Brethren Missionary, and The Mennonite; these were the same publications than ran “help wanted” advertisements for the seagoing cowboys program. These papers had a targeted and admittedly narrow readership, but at the same time they invited participation, through donations, in an enormous imagined global community. Posters at local churches also advertised the Heifer Project and appealed for donations from congregants. Sometimes, respected peace church community members made direct and personal pitches to church members asking them to give generously. Appeals often included the display of powerful photographic images of wartime ruin as a way to solicit empathy while also reminding people that their seemingly small individual actions could in fact make a significant difference and alleviate suffering abroad.⁴⁰

Positive responses to these Heifer Project appeals reflected the faith that people had in their own churches and in the leadership of the aid effort; people believed that the Heifer Project would act as a competent custodian of their material and financial gifts.⁴¹ And people did give generously. M. R. Zigler, the executive secretary of the Brethren Service Committee, estimated that a quarter of all Brethren heifers donated to the Heifer Project came from purebred stock, while the remainder was “good grade”; these were not farmers’ rejected animals.⁴² In fact, the Heifer Project even wrote to breeders of purebred cattle to solicit donations of the very best stock.⁴³ Philip West, Dan West’s son (born in 1938), remembered going with his father to visit some of the Mennonite and Amish heifer donors in Elkhart County, Indiana. Some of those early heifers, the younger West recalled, “were better than some of our own cows. They had ‘papers.’”⁴⁴ The generosity of donors was all the more remarkable given that donations to the Heifer Project came on the heels of the peace churches’ substantial financial responsibilities in maintaining the Civilian Public Service camps during the war and the early postwar period.⁴⁵

Even before there was a viable opportunity to send cattle to meet specific European needs, and before the partnership with UNRRA had formed, the Brethren mobilized their communities and began collecting animals for the Heifer Project. In addition to the national Heifer Project committee, local Brethren congregations maintained their own Heifer Project committees, and heifer donations often ran through those local committees. Donated animals came from individuals and from small and large peace church congregations, from other Christian denominations like the Methodists, and from service organizations or social-cultural institutions like the Lions and Rotary clubs and the Kiwanis club. They also came from school groups. Donors were responding to need in “hungry Europe” and were inspired by descriptions of deprivation and suffering and by the sense that they had the ability to make a positive difference in the lives of others.⁴⁶ For the Brethren, the act of donating itself formed a fundamental part of their devotion; time and goods were offered “in the spirit of Christian friendship and service to those in need.”⁴⁷ Donors thus became an important part of mid-century relief.

The first calf donated to what would become the Heifer Project happened in April 1942 at a meeting of the Northern Indiana District Men’s Work of the Church of the Brethren. This district, which represented forty-eight congregations of the Church of the Brethren, was the first one to support the Heifer Project, and in so doing it helped pave the way for the Heifer Project’s formal adoption by the Brethren Service Committee the following year, in 1943.⁴⁸ That first calf was named Faith, and she had been donated to the program by her owner, the farmer Virgil Mock of New Paris, Indiana. There were many other people besides Mock involved in ensuring that Faith would eventually reach someone who needed her; raising this animal was part of a wider community affair. The calf’s feed was donated by Ora W. Stine, mentioned earlier as an important figure in the Heifer Project and as the father of Carol Stine, Bushong’s secretary in New Windsor. Faith was cared for by Ora’s teenaged son Claire. Faith was thus one of the earliest “symbols of the idea behind the gift.”⁴⁹

Faith was put on the earliest Heifer Project shipment, which, as we saw, was to Puerto Rico in July 1944. Faith gave birth en route, and her calf survived. Reports indicate that she lived a comfortable life close to the ocean in Puerto Rico and was well cared for, as was her calf.⁵⁰ Hope, a two-year-old Holstein and another early donation to the Heifer Project (though she was not the only donated heifer called Hope), formed part of a shipment to Poland in 1946 on SS William S. Halsted, and she and another Heifer Project animal ended up at an orphanage not far from Warsaw, in Konstancin.⁵¹ That the animals’ fates are recorded in the documents is in itself remarkable, and even though we cannot know for certain whether these animals ended up with “happy lives,” as the Heifer Project claimed, the assertion itself forms an important part of the Brethren humanitarian aid narrative. Securing good conditions for their animals—by which they meant standards of care that were similar to those that prevailed on American farms—was at once a part of their obligation and a measure of their success.⁵²

Other donated animals came with special stories too. For example, the Quaker Stanley Hamilton of the Rural Life Association bought a yearling Guernsey heifer at an auction for $155 with the intention of dropping her off at a Brethren collecting farm and thereby donating her to the European relief effort. The young farmer who had sold the animal to Hamilton—“a German immigrant”—ultimately decided to tear up the check he had been given by Hamilton and to make the donation himself. It turned out that this immigrant from Germany was Jewish on one side and that he had left Germany shortly after Hitler had come to power. The Gospel Messenger article that reported on this story delighted in the evident interdenominational cooperation and empathy on display here: a Quaker, a partially Jewish German farmer, and the future recipient family of indeterminate “race or creed.”⁵³ Another celebrated donation—“one of the greatest contributions to the heifer program yet,” according to one observer—was one dollar that came from a young American man of Japanese descent who had recently been released from a tuberculosis hospital. This act was extolled by the Heifer Project administrators: “He is now working only for his room and board. Yet he shared one dollar. That is real giving.”⁵⁴

In addition to these at once modest and remarkable donations from individuals, there were group donations that flowed from grand and public gestures, often with the type of extravagant celebrity endorsements that we more typically associate with our own day. In one instance the Heifer Project Committee of Southern California put on a stage show at the Pasadena Civic auditorium. On May 7, 1946, stars such as Bob Hope, Rudy Vallée, and Jerry Colonna donated their time and talent to raise money for the purchase of heifers.⁵⁵ In another instance we see members of a specific congregation pooling their resources to make a group donation to the Heifer Project: the Lancaster Church of the Brethren in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, gave six heifers and a bull to their local donation drive.⁵⁶ Members of the First Baptist Church Sunday School in Weston, Massachusetts, collected enough money to buy one purebred Holstein heifer “for the relief of hungry youngsters in Europe.”⁵⁷ St Paul’s Catholic Cathedral in Boston raised a stunning amount of money—enough to buy 124 heifers at $125 each—to donate to the Brethren Heifer Project.⁵⁸ One particularly remarkable group contribution to the Heifer Project came in the amount of $482 from men who had become seagoing cowboys after having served for a period in the Civilian Public Service. This amount was especially significant, as one Heifer Project administrator wrote, “when you consider that the cattle boat trip was the first income most of these fellows had for a year and one-half to three years previous to the trip.”⁵⁹

Money was also raised at special livestock auctions. In February 1946, for example, Brethren and Amish farmers organized a sales barn for Poland specifically. Cows, horses, pigs, ponies, dogs, rabbits, roosters, and even “a magnificent team of Belgian mares” were all put up for sale along with vegetables, wagons, buggies, clothes, and home furnishings. There were five auctioneers who worked for free, and people scooped up animals and goods that they sometimes neither really wanted nor needed, often for extravagant prices, because they knew the money was going to the Polish relief effort.⁶⁰ Dairy cows—the recognized symbol of the Heifer Project relief effort—were especially prized, with each selling for $100 and up. An event like this, one pastor described, “is a social act, and an act of their religious freedom as well as of their religion. It is entirely of and by the people, and in their view it is for people in the name of God. It is a community act.”⁶¹

Specific animals destined for the Heifer Project were also sometimes featured in newspaper articles. In one article we see Helga the Heifer posed between Victor Borge, an entertainer, and Mary Anderson, an actor. The two humans sit at a beautifully decorated dinner table at the Biltmore Hotel with Helga between them looking directly at the camera while munching on the lovely flower arrangement before her. The caption reads, “Bon voyage party given Europe-Bound Heifer.” Helga’s job, we are told, will be “to provide milk for starving children.”⁶²

The Heifer Project paid for Helga’s expenses just as it paid for all other donated animals’ expenses; these included food and care, as well as transport to the ports in the US (the transport fees ran at over ten dollars per animal). To feed a heifer cost approximately forty-five cents per day (or $3.15 per week); this amount provided for alfalfa hay, a lower-grade hay, plus a grain mixture. On top of this, the bedding straw cost was eighteen dollars per ton.⁶³

The first leg of the Heifer Project animals’ journeys after donation or purchase brought the heifers to one of many Heifer Project collection centers; these centers or farms were scattered throughout the country in approximately two dozen states. The Heifer Project suggested that communities or churches get together to send many animals to these centers at once; sending just one or two animals at a time was too costly, especially if the distances were significant.⁶⁴ The Heifer Project also advised sending someone from the donors’ circle to accompany the animals to the collection farm, and it reminded donors of the importance of having the requisite health papers signed by the local veterinarian, the state veterinarian, and a federal inspector. If the animals did not have the legally mandated veterinary inspections and inoculations (against tuberculosis, shipping fever, and Bang’s disease) it was possible (though not ideal) to have the shots administered at the collection center.⁶⁵ The animals would be moved again, this time to a holding center close to a port. For many of the animals, this was the farm of Roger and Olive Roop located near Union Bridge, Maryland. The Roop farm was just several miles from the Brethren Service Committee Center in New Windsor, only a couple of miles from the railroad, and forty miles from the docks in Baltimore.⁶⁶ The Roop farm was the main Heifer Project receiving and holding center; it was the last major stop before the cattle boarded the ships that would define them most clearly as “relief animals.”

Roger and Olive Roop were members of the Church of the Brethren who had given 15 acres of their 130-acre farm to the Brethren Service Committee to use for the Heifer Project. The Roops had about twenty head of cattle of their own. In addition to the grazing land that the Roops provided, free of charge, to the Heifer Project, they also permitted the project to use a barn, pens, and a loading chute. According to the Roops, they had been motivated to donate their farm facilities to the Heifer Project because of the substandard conditions and chaos that they had witnessed during a visit to a similar animal holding center at the York, Pennsylvania, Fair Grounds; the Roops believed that they could provide far better facilities for the animals, with more space.⁶⁷

The first cattle arrived at the Roop farm on July 31, 1945, even before the war against Japan had ended. By 1948 (so beyond the Brethren-UNRRA partnership), 3,600 animals had traveled enormous distances, from a total of thirty-one states, to this one farm in the eastern US before boarding ships bound for the world.⁶⁸ Not surprisingly, the initial fifteen acres of land that the Roops had provided proved insufficient to meet demand; the space was adequate for only about three to five hundred head of cattle at a time. The Roops eventually sold their own small number of cattle and rented their remaining property as pastureland to the Heifer Project. The rental agreement included use of the building and the equipment, and Roger Roop was hired as the farm manager. Either Roger or one of the volunteers, some of whom were not even from one of the denominations that were part of the Heifer Project Committee, picked up the animals at the train station and delivered them to their temporary homes on the farm. Smaller animal loads came directly to the farm on trucks and trailers.⁶⁹

Roger organized the animals’ stay at the farm and readied them for transport abroad. The Heifer Project paid for the expenses associated with the animals’ stay at the farm, and it also paid for moving the animals from the farm to the embarkation point. Animals were also given medical care as needed by local veterinarians who occasionally gave their services without charge; all animals needed to be monitored regularly for diseases. Sometimes the donated animals were in a poor state indeed, though as Roop said, “That point should not be criticized too much because the person giving a poor quality animal may have made more of a sacrifice than the one giving a purebred suitable for the show ring.”⁷⁰ The work of daily animal care was done by hired hands or by some of the seagoing cowboys who were temporarily billeted at the Brethren Service Center in nearby New Windsor, or even by some of the men from the Civilian Public Service unit who were also staying at the New Windsor complex.⁷¹ Roger Roop summarized this pan-American effort of preparing the animals for shipment abroad with a little example: “An Illinois man [he was referring to one Wayne Keltner, who helped with the heifers on the Roop farm] fed California hay to Wisconsin heifers in Maryland.”⁷² Seagoing cowboys from perhaps another state still would eventually accompany these heifers to their final destination far away from American shores.

The length of time that animals stayed at the Roop farm varied, but the average was forty days.⁷³ The first shipment of Roop cattle left the farm in about a dozen rail cars (loaded with crushed corn cobs for bedding) and sailed from Baltimore on September 6, 1945, on SS Zona Gale, which had been used as a mule carrier during the war. The words that formed part of the dedication service that preceded this shipment reflected the bold ambitions of the Heifer Project; the animals were given so that “the spirit of brotherhood might come into the hearts of men . . . and bring a new dawn of peace.”⁷⁴ Roger Roop accompanied this first group (and subsequent groups too) to the waiting ships at the docks in Baltimore.⁷⁵ The Roop farm stopped operating as a Heifer Project facility in 1948 when Roger Roop became sick with undulant fever.⁷⁶

Last Stages

Final inspections of both Heifer Project and UNRRA animals were completed at the piers just before boarding to ensure that no sick animals were included in the group. These inspections were done through the Bureau of Animal Industry by professional veterinarians—port veterinarians, as they were referred to—and were required by law. A representative from the War Shipping Administration was on hand as well to monitor the process, and the AHA did spot checks of port conditions too. The AHA’s assessment of animal welfare standards at the ports was not unlike its assessment of the holding centers and stockyards; they believed them to be quite satisfactory. This view was consistent with the association’s generally positive impressions of animal welfare standards in the whole relief program. Inspector Ross from the AHA described impressive conditions and careful practices at the ports: nonslip flooring on the runways that led to the ships; good-quality lumber for the lodgings; and compartments that measured eight feet in length, thirty-two inches in width, and nine and a half feet in height. During one inspection Archibald MacDonald, chief inspector of the Animal Rescue League of Boston, described the conditions overall as “the best I ever saw.”⁷⁷

And yet what the AHA reported was not universally true or reflective of actual conditions. We know from other sources (such as cowboy diaries) that the piers were sometimes very crowded and chaotic. Given the numbers of large animals present in a relatively small space and the need to move them onto the ships very quickly, it is not surprising that sometimes the inspectors did not notice just how sick some animals were. Cowboy Jacob Wine, who was on a May 1946 trip bringing horses to Czechoslovakia (and docking in Bremen, Germany), speculated that sometimes the sick animals were loaded onto the ships anyway because to do otherwise would have made “the record look bad at the pier for them to die there.” Animal deaths aboard the ships could be kept comparatively private and out of the public eye and could be attributed in vague ways to sailing conditions like rough seas and bad weather; deaths at the ports, in contrast, would have attracted too much attention and negative publicity.⁷⁸ It was these already sick animals that were, not surprisingly, the least well equipped for their trans-Atlantic journeys and most likely to die during or shortly after the crossings.⁷⁹

Animals that did not pass the veterinarians’ health inspections at this late stage and were in fact deemed unsuitable for shipment were moved into local holding pens that were organized according to what the animals’ subsequent fate would be: a hospital stay (for cases of treatable infectious diseases and pneumonia), surgery (for abscesses in need of draining as well as for wounds and fistulae, for example), diagnostics or convalescence leading to likely recovery, sale (if a buyer could be found), or destruction (for animals that were in no condition to be sold alive for any purpose).⁸⁰ This became complicated after the UNRRA program end date approached; inspections of the very last groups of animals became less strict given that there were no “future shipments” in which recovered animals could be included. At any rate the forced sale of some of the animals would “bring little return,” according to UNRRA, and so there was apparently little harm in including them on the shipments given that they were already at the ports.⁸¹ The greatest cost, instead, was to the animals.

In his written reflections after the UNRRA program closed, Livestock Branch director Robert Lintner expressed frustration that animals sometimes failed health checks at this very late point in the process because, as he said, they had been badly cared for during their trips to the ports. Though the sellers were supposed to have provided attendants that would accompany the animals from point of origin to the ports, these attendants were on occasion “incompetent,” according to Lintner. In addition, rail cars were often overcrowd-ed and schedules sometimes poorly coordinated. This resulted in physically taxing train journeys and long periods of convalescence or even death for some of the animals. In other cases, Lintner said, the mandatory inoculations had been given “carelessly,” and this caused abscesses to develop at injection sites, which led in turn to open sores and infections that had gone unattended for too long. According to Lintner, this showed that part of the problem was that the animals were considered to be “general cargo”; it took a while, even within UNRRA circles, for people to understand that the animals really did require special care and effort.⁸² Lintner was of the view that throughout all stages of the program, cooperation and communication between UNRRA and Department of Agriculture inspectors could sometimes have been better. What was clear to everyone is that while good health at embarkation was no guarantee of a successful sailing, poor health at this last stage in the United States would almost always result in animal deaths aboard the ships.