Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Communion
[This is the second in a series of essays on animals. You should read part one first.]
I have always been nervous around animals. All of them, but mammals especially. I'm always afraid of breaking the small ones, and I'm afraid of the big ones breaking me. Big dogs are the least threatening, because it seems like an even match, but they still make me jumpy. They're dumber than humans. That makes them unpredictable. What kind of human bites you when you accidentally step on his foot? Having a dog around is like having a mentally retarded sociopath in your house.
I try to trace my mistrust of animals back to events in my childhood -- being scratched by a cat in the alley behind my house; narrowly avoiding a chipmunk up the leg of my shorts (I screamed, kicked, and sent him flying off my knee into the underbrush yards away) -- but I think it's always been there. Why shouldn't it have been? There's nothing natural about humans interacting with animals except to eat them or run away from them.
I think I understand this more readily than many people by virtue of having grown up in the city. My everyday exposure to animals was limited to rats, pigeons, squirrels, and stray cats. The small park near my house was the domain of the Pigeon Lady, who fed the pigeons all day and screamed at little boys who ran around in the park and frightened her birds. She liked animals, and she was crazy and bad. QED.
Other than those everyday vermin, I knew only the animals in the zoo. On a cross-country trip through dairy country, my older brother is said to have remarked, "Mommy, I smell elephants!" My brother and I were spared the perversion of owning animals and keeping them in our house. Our unspoiled minds could see animals for the hostile aliens they were.
My attitude changed later in life as a result of encounters with two animals. I had to kill the first one, and I had to live with the second.
One night when I was 17, my younger brother and I arrived home to a dark house (our parents were out of town) by way of the alley behind it. We heard a noise coming from our open trash barrel and discovered it empty save for a large rat that had fallen in. After some dicussion, we realized that we would have to kill it. We considered drowning and crushing with rocks, but thought we should consult an expert first. The Humane Society wasn't answering their phones, so we called out uncle Phil, who had grown up on a farm and had no doubt dealt with this sort of thing before. He did not disappoint; he shot down our drowning idea as ineffective (rats are great swimmers) and our rock-dropping idea as messy, ineffective and difficult to repeat if it failed. He told us we would have to find a flat-bladed shovel and pin the rat against the ground by its neck, snapping its spinal column. We followed his instructions, and I, as the elder, wielded the shovel while my brother pointed a flashlight into the barrel. It took several nerve-wracking minutes to pin the creature, who was literally hopping mad: its leaps took it nearly to the rim of the container, and each jump also sent us skittering backwards several steps. Finally, I pinned the rat right behind its skull and pushed down with all my weight. It seemed to take forever to die. I was worried that the corrugated bottom of the bin had prevented me from crushing its neck properly, but finally it stopped twitching and it leaked a small puddle of urine around its body. My brother and I stared at it, shaken and emotionally drained. The intimacy -- the sanctity -- of the act was unfamiliar to both of us, and there was suprising reverence in the way we silently scooped the corpse up and deposited it first into a plastic sack and then into the bin where we had found it. Something of Rat had manifested in that act of necessary slaughter, and I felt like I understood something of the species that I hadn't before.
The second incident came during graduate school. I was sharing an apartment with a woman who "owned" three cats. She didn't get out much. She was a crazy-cat-lady-in-training. She had three cats then, but that was years ago. She probably has fifty now.
The problem wasn't her cats per se; it was how they fit into her life. They were predatory, carnivorous mammals who had had their nuts cut off and their claws pulled out and had been inbred until they were demented, but they were just the right size to be picked up by humans -- I was surprised they hadn't been bred to have little cartilage carrying handles growing out of their backs.
The cats and I maintained an uneasy truce in that apartment. I tried to think of them as just a couple of quiet little roommates who didn't pay rent and who sometimes threw up in the shower. Then one day when my roommate was out for the evening, I had a visitation from Cat. I was lying on the floor of the living room with my head tilted back on the ground, and one of the cats walked up to me and looked at my upside-down face. I had a moment of connection -- identification -- and I saw the bind these animals were in. They and I -- cat and monkey -- were both out of our element. We had both been domesticated and snipped and packaged and trained and put in unfamiliar environments. They didn't seem any happier about it than I was.
After that, the cats and I shared the camaraderie of the oppressed. We became provisional friends across the line of species, but we both knew that our friendship would mean nothing if -- when -- the War With The Animals resumed.
[Read part three.]
I have always been nervous around animals. All of them, but mammals especially. I'm always afraid of breaking the small ones, and I'm afraid of the big ones breaking me. Big dogs are the least threatening, because it seems like an even match, but they still make me jumpy. They're dumber than humans. That makes them unpredictable. What kind of human bites you when you accidentally step on his foot? Having a dog around is like having a mentally retarded sociopath in your house.
I try to trace my mistrust of animals back to events in my childhood -- being scratched by a cat in the alley behind my house; narrowly avoiding a chipmunk up the leg of my shorts (I screamed, kicked, and sent him flying off my knee into the underbrush yards away) -- but I think it's always been there. Why shouldn't it have been? There's nothing natural about humans interacting with animals except to eat them or run away from them.
I think I understand this more readily than many people by virtue of having grown up in the city. My everyday exposure to animals was limited to rats, pigeons, squirrels, and stray cats. The small park near my house was the domain of the Pigeon Lady, who fed the pigeons all day and screamed at little boys who ran around in the park and frightened her birds. She liked animals, and she was crazy and bad. QED.
Other than those everyday vermin, I knew only the animals in the zoo. On a cross-country trip through dairy country, my older brother is said to have remarked, "Mommy, I smell elephants!" My brother and I were spared the perversion of owning animals and keeping them in our house. Our unspoiled minds could see animals for the hostile aliens they were.
My attitude changed later in life as a result of encounters with two animals. I had to kill the first one, and I had to live with the second.
One night when I was 17, my younger brother and I arrived home to a dark house (our parents were out of town) by way of the alley behind it. We heard a noise coming from our open trash barrel and discovered it empty save for a large rat that had fallen in. After some dicussion, we realized that we would have to kill it. We considered drowning and crushing with rocks, but thought we should consult an expert first. The Humane Society wasn't answering their phones, so we called out uncle Phil, who had grown up on a farm and had no doubt dealt with this sort of thing before. He did not disappoint; he shot down our drowning idea as ineffective (rats are great swimmers) and our rock-dropping idea as messy, ineffective and difficult to repeat if it failed. He told us we would have to find a flat-bladed shovel and pin the rat against the ground by its neck, snapping its spinal column. We followed his instructions, and I, as the elder, wielded the shovel while my brother pointed a flashlight into the barrel. It took several nerve-wracking minutes to pin the creature, who was literally hopping mad: its leaps took it nearly to the rim of the container, and each jump also sent us skittering backwards several steps. Finally, I pinned the rat right behind its skull and pushed down with all my weight. It seemed to take forever to die. I was worried that the corrugated bottom of the bin had prevented me from crushing its neck properly, but finally it stopped twitching and it leaked a small puddle of urine around its body. My brother and I stared at it, shaken and emotionally drained. The intimacy -- the sanctity -- of the act was unfamiliar to both of us, and there was suprising reverence in the way we silently scooped the corpse up and deposited it first into a plastic sack and then into the bin where we had found it. Something of Rat had manifested in that act of necessary slaughter, and I felt like I understood something of the species that I hadn't before.
The second incident came during graduate school. I was sharing an apartment with a woman who "owned" three cats. She didn't get out much. She was a crazy-cat-lady-in-training. She had three cats then, but that was years ago. She probably has fifty now.
The problem wasn't her cats per se; it was how they fit into her life. They were predatory, carnivorous mammals who had had their nuts cut off and their claws pulled out and had been inbred until they were demented, but they were just the right size to be picked up by humans -- I was surprised they hadn't been bred to have little cartilage carrying handles growing out of their backs.
The cats and I maintained an uneasy truce in that apartment. I tried to think of them as just a couple of quiet little roommates who didn't pay rent and who sometimes threw up in the shower. Then one day when my roommate was out for the evening, I had a visitation from Cat. I was lying on the floor of the living room with my head tilted back on the ground, and one of the cats walked up to me and looked at my upside-down face. I had a moment of connection -- identification -- and I saw the bind these animals were in. They and I -- cat and monkey -- were both out of our element. We had both been domesticated and snipped and packaged and trained and put in unfamiliar environments. They didn't seem any happier about it than I was.
After that, the cats and I shared the camaraderie of the oppressed. We became provisional friends across the line of species, but we both knew that our friendship would mean nothing if -- when -- the War With The Animals resumed.
[Read part three.]
