In the Village

AT ONE POINT during the incendiary race for mayor of Corrales, which she just lost, Chris Allen heard one of her six sheep calling out in distress. The animal bleated and stumbled in a way that suggested she could not see. In fact, poor old Calico had gone blind overnight.
    It was a fitting omen for how things would go in the mayoral race, which raged not only over Corrales’ notorious sewer system, but also—as a troubling side show—over the perennial argument about coyotes in the Village. Both topics get endless play in letters to the editor of the local papers, but in the course of the campaign the coyote debate turned mean and personal.
    Allen was publicly accused, first on Facebook and then in the Corrales Comment, of ordering a trap set on her property while she was Village administrator, as revenge for losing her chickens to predation. A coyote captured in the trap strangled to death before Animal Control arrived—a sight that, according to rumor, Allen had relished watching with her children.
    The truth, she responded in her own horrified letter to the editor, was that she had called her veterinarian in tears after the coyote died, not knowing this would be the outcome. Her children were not home, one being in college and the other in high school. Furthermore, she had always advocated hazing, not eradication, as a way to manage coyotes during her tenure as Village administrator and on the Village Council.
    During her nonstop campaigning, Allen periodically had to run home and dose Calico with thiamine—but the sheep’s vision did not return. “Now, remarkably, she has completely adjusted,” Allen said a week after the election, visibly relieved at an end to their respective calamities. The old sheep stays in her corner of the pen and waits to hear the thump of hay hit the feeder. Being blind no longer seems to bother her.
    Allen may take a bit longer to recover from her own bruising, which had her carrying a sheaf of annotated emails to our interview. It was especially galling, she said, because a love of animals had been the reason her family moved to Corrales more than 30 years ago.
    “I grew up with animals,” she said of her youth in Massachusetts. “We always had horses, ducks, sheep, poultry. I raised sheep in the Village, I’ve had horses for years. My kids were raised bottle-feeding lambs. And I always worked hard to support animals in the Village.
    “So to be attacked in this way was shocking. Without getting into the people behind it, I was stunned.”
Not one to back down from a fight, Allen had her own accusations to make about the genesis of the tale, exhumed from an incident in 2001. Certainly, for anyone opposed to her candidacy, a coyote killing would seem tailor-made to excite passions in a community known for its love of (and disagreement about) animals.

OVERWHELMED, LIKE MANY Village residents, by accusations hurled in daily emails from both sides in the campaign, the Bosque Beast invited Scott Kominiak, after his victory, to share his thoughts on animal issues facing the Village. Kominiak responded that he would await recommendations from his transition team before speaking with the press.
    Allen, on the other hand, was eager to set the record straight about her positions. “I will continue to live in Corrales,” she said in an earlier email, “and I do not want people to think the story is true.”
    She won’t go so far as to say the coyote flap influenced her defeat. “I don’t know what kind of effect it had,” she said, adding that campaign tactics by her opponent probably had more to do with it.
    But she won’t gainsay the frustrations she has expressed publicly over the last year about trying to raise poultry in a coyote crossing. In a series of letters to the Corrales Comment, Allen jumped into the debate over whether it’s possible to “coexist” with coyotes, citing evidence of cat and chicken massacres, and the prohibitive cost of erecting fences and gates. This made her an instant target when she announced her run for mayor, especially to those who saw the 2001 coyote trapping as an abuse of her position in government, one marked by controversy and ending with her resignation.
    Allen protests that she had done as advised, consulting first with Animal Control and then Wildlife Services to set traps. She says she did not know then, as she does now, that “non-lethal” traps often kill; that coyotes who survive are euthanized; and that removing coyotes has little impact on predation.
    “If you look at my letters in the Corrales Comment, I have never advocated eradication of coyotes,” she said. “I am concerned when they become habituated. I think coyotes should be wild.”
    She says she still feels a need to defend her position “from the poultry side”— the sadness at not being able to let her birds range free except when she’s home to watch over them. Most of the day her chickens and ducks are cooped up, and jump for joy when she opens the cage door.
    “I’m sorry I was not elected mayor because I think there’s a lot I could have done for animals in this community, as I have done in the past,” she said. “I love animals. I find them fascinating.”
Allen insists she did help the late Susan Weiss print brochures about coexisting with coyotes, at Village expense, and that she was not against the proposed municipal animal shelter, but only had questions about how it would be financed and run.
    She does not hesitate to align herself with the equestrians who mourn every road that gets paved in the Village. And she firmly believes that attracting more “horse people” to Corrales is the best way to safeguard its rural charms.

OUR INTERVIEW OVER, Allen shares a springtime anecdote from her farm that happened a couple of years ago.
“I had a turkey that was setting eggs. Unfortunately, the eggs kept disappearing, and she was down to two.” One egg hatched into a healthy chick. The other cracked slowly, and her husband reported that a black chick seemed to be emerging. “But I didn’t have black chickens,” Allen said.
    What hatched out of the egg was a baby duck, to everyone’s complete surprise. No one could say how a duck egg ended up underneath a turkey. Even more comical was how the hatched duck instinctively joined the turkey flock.
    “The mother accepted it as one of her own, except when they walked by the pond, the one would veer off, and the turkey was like, ‘No! No! You’ll drown!’” Allen chuckles, giving no indication that it’s a parable about flocking with turkeys and becoming one, or that what quacks like a duck must be one.
    She only shakes her head and says it will be interesting to see what happens in the Village—meaning, ominously, with the next administration. Don’t count your chickens—we might paraphrase it—before they are hatched.