View from the North 40: I'm just following the letter of the law

I just spent a week on a tractor cleaning my corrals and doing some dirt work, which gave my brain far too much time to get lost in philosophical contemplation, and this week my brain settled in to ponder the Law of Unintended Consequences. I know, that sounds intriguing, right?

Most of us are familiar with Murphy’s Law — Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong — but Unintended Consequences is like Murphy’s intellectually deeper and marginally more optimistic cousin. First notably written about by English philosopher John Locke in the late 1600s, Unintended Consequences is a sociological idea literally about consequences one does not intend to occur. It is broken into three categories: “perverse results,” “unexpected drawbacks” and “unexpected benefits.”

Perverse results are unintended consequence that actually make the situation worse.

I created perverse results a year ago when I rented the small tractor the first time to clean my horse pens. This project was a first for me, having never kept my horses in pens before, so I rented a small tractor and I cleaned the bejeepers outta those pens. I’m not going to say you could eat off that ground because, well, even I have higher hygiene standards than that, but you get what I mean relatively speaking.

The perverse result was that I pulled the manure out to make the ground healthier, scraping the earth down to the clean hard pan. But along with the manure I took out soft dirt, so the horses got feet sore and some scrapes and raw patches from laying on the hard ground until I could rustle up some bedding. Not the healthy environment as I was working toward. Lesson learned.

This year I cleaned without scouring the entire three acres into a moonscape. And just in case I couldn’t contain myself, I already had a large, soft bed of straw out for the horses.

This brings us to unexpected drawback, which is an unrelated detriment that comes along with the benefit. Or as I came to think of it: creating an annoyance by ridding myself of an annoyance.

A few years back, we hauled in a large pile of gravel to use as needed around the shop, but when I put the fences up for the pens, that pile was right in the middle of one fence line, exactly where a post needed to go. But, we said, maybe we’ll put a large gate in that gap, and left the gravel where it sat. I hung a temporary, heavy-duty pipe in the gap that allowed for the pile of gravel underneath but still kept the horses where they were supposed to be.

With that gravel pile in the way, it was the one spot along the fence that my overly tall horse couldn’t reach over to eat grass — stretching the wire like it’s a bit of decorative string I tied between posts for her amusement — it still bothered me, though, that the fence was unfinished in that spot.

This week, I figured out a use for the gravel pile and hauled it out of there. Even with just the pipe there, it looks nicer. I can see a finished fence in the near future.

But also, now that the gravel isn’t blocking the way, my horse gigantor is leaning into the pipe, threatening to bend it with her mass — or push over the two posts holding the pipe, which has no give like the wire does.

Yeah, sitting there on the idling tractor, watching that horse stretch her long neck over the pipe and press her weight into the barrier is what got me contemplating the Law of Unintended Consequences to begin with.

But it’s not all negative, right? We did have an unexpected benefit — and when I say we, I mean someone else benefited off our work.

Last year’s composted manure pile was ready to be moved to where it could be mixed with some dirt, and, since it was easy and mindless work, we used that project to fill short bits of work time, or when we were too tired to operate machinery in tight quarters. So there was a definite benefit for us to be able to take our time with this piece of the project, but it was a bigger help to a cottontail rabbit.

I was working on the composted pile early morning on day 2, a simple project while I was waking up, and spied a cottontail hanging out at the pile while I was working, then it dawned on me that the rabbit wasn’t just being brave or super chill.

During the cover of night, that ninja rabbit had dug a hole in the compost mound and she was in the process of padding a little nest in there for birthing some babies.

Despite all intentions to get that project done, one-quarter of the mound remains, waiting until the rabbit and babies are gone — and, frankly, until we get the tractor again next year.

I’m not going to evict an expectant mother from her newly developed home, and Montana probably has some sort of laws on squatters’ rights anyway. So, state law or philosophical law, the mound stays and she stays.

Why not? The horse benefited unexpectedly from the law. And my pens look great perversely because I messed up last year. We’ll just call the week a philosophical experiment to prove John Locke right.

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Besides, it’s better than proving Murphy to be the better philosopher, right? At http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .)