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Livestock can be vulnerable and helpless during these storms too.

Jared Carter, from tornado country, has a poem “Early Warning” in his first collection (Work, for the Night Is Coming). The last four lines, about seeing a cyclone “peel the roof off some / Prefabricated egg factory,” have stuck in my mind:

Thousands of hens, who’ve never seen

The light of the sun, or

Touched earth with their beaks,

Go up the funnel like souls to God.

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Absolutely. One of my encounters with a tornado when I lived in Louisiana involved getting a cow who’d been spooked into having her calf a little early back into the field and carrying this calf, who wasn’t quite strong enough to walk through the area he needed to, back into that same field without getting knocked over by the momma cow. Unfortunately the calf never thrived because it was too weak to suckle properly.

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