Animals
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silky terrier bitch, Tippy, became so deeply attached to another small dog,
Mate, that they were inseparable. When Mate died, Tippy simply pined away.
Although she had always been timid and afraid of cars, she would lie down in
the middle of the road as though she wanted to be run over. Eventually, she
stopped eating and died. Few human beings are even remotely capable of such
devotion. Psychiatrists would call it
‘neurotic’.
When Prema was introduced to the
house as a mischievous kitten, our resident cat, Sai Ram, resented him deeply.
Later, as he matured, she became attached to him and would follow him
everywhere. They slept together, licking and grooming each other
affectionately. When Prema was run over by a drunken driver, at the age of two,
Sai Ram was disconsolate. Though always an indoor cat, she took to living
outside on the drive, in bushes close to the spot where he had been killed, and
was not restored to normality again until we moved to another house over two
years later. She reminded me of a traditional Chinese widow, who was forced by
custom to sleep next to her husband’s grave for three years. Sai Ram, however,
carried out this mourning ritual of her own accord. More neurosis, we would
say.
“Animals do not whine about their condition”,
wrote Whitman. Our cat, Jaya, who came to us as a forlorn, frightened stray,
began to grow thin and shed fur in clumps all over the house. The vet could not
diagnose his condition, but prescribed various forms of treatment, all to no
avail. Jaya was as affectionate as ever, purring endlessly. I noticed, however,
that he would lash his tail from side to side at times, a sure sign that he was
in pain. Eventually, his condition grew so severe that the vet decided to
operate. He died on the operating table. He had inoperable pancreatic cancer,
invariably fatal even in human beings, probably acquired during his years of
living rough on the streets, eating garbage and drinking contaminated water. He
must have been in agony, so the vet told us. His purring, which I had
misinterpreted as a form of content, was in reality a sort of mantra with which
to comfort himself and dull the pain. “He was such a brave, loving cat”, said
my wife, tearfully. Descartes, who taught us to regard animals as machines, a
doctrine evoked by vivisectors, overlooked something important.
The devotion and affection given by
dogs to their owners is only rarely found in their owners. It is not
transferable.
‘Dogs have masters, cats have
staff’. Agreed. But don’t forget that cats pay their staff in a rare coinage.
When I was seven, my pet cocker
spaniel, Judy, ate Oscar, my pet tortoise. I had thought they were friends, for
they both slept on my bed, but came home one afternoon to find Judy had turned
Oscar over, bitten through his shell and had her blood-stained muzzle deep in
his innards. Horrified, I was inconsolable for days and could never feel the
same towards Judy again. Children’s characters are often shaped by incidents
like this, which suddenly bring sharply home to them that life is not a
fairytale, appearances can be deceptive and death is final. This is one reason
why children who have pets grow up to be better adjusted that those deprived of
them.
There exists a confraternity of dog
owners, some of whose members subscribe to Madame Roland’s dictum, “The more I
see of men, the more I like dogs." [1] No feminist has ever rushed forward to correct this bon mot, on the grounds that it is sexist. “The more I see of
wimmin, the more I like (the) bitches”, clearly won’t do. Nor will this
observation translate into PC-Speak. “The more I see of persons, the more I am
equally attracted to both dogs and bitches,” could never be considered
politically correct, if only because it sounds suspiciously deviant. After all,
some of these animals might still be immature, which could lead to accusations
of puppy paedophilia.
While driving, I frequently encounter trucks full of
wretched, dirty sheep, jammed together remorselessly on their way to the
abattoirs or worse, to the ships of the live sheep trade that transports them
to the Gulf for Halal ritual
slaughter. Their pitiful bleating reminds me of Mencius’s dictum about “the
gentleman keeping his kitchens at a distance”. I believe the king in question
(Hui of Liang) did so, not out of compassion, as Mencius thought, but simply
out of squeamishness. Had he been truly compassionate he would have been a
vegetarian. Like many others, I have a bad conscience about eating meat. But
having tried a vegetarian diet, only to find it made me ill, I am forced to go
on doing something which I find highly distasteful. These sheep trucks,
reminiscent of the transports used in the Holocaust, awaken my conscience,
reminding me continually that the Buddha was right; all life is suffering and
we ourselves cause a great deal of the distress and despair that permeates this
planet.
When I feed the birds in my garden,
I notice how the alphas among them spend so much time driving off their rivals
that they hardly have the chance to eat. They remind me of exhausted
executives, so busy frantically fighting off their competition that they barely
have a moment’s leisure. Watching birds and animals closely can tell us a great
deal about ourselves; for instance, that alphas, though necessary, generally
make life a misery for themselves and others and often die prematurely.
I was eating my lunch under a tree
in the university gardens when I noticed a solitary rabbit browsing contentedly
about twenty metres away, heedless of the cars that passed it. However, when I
scratched the grass slightly with my fingers, it froze, instantly alert to
danger. I marvelled at the evolution, over tens of millions of years, of a
brain that could detect a virtually inaudible noise amid the hubbub of the
passing traffic and interpret it as a signal for possible flight. If only we
could learn to recover that sense of relaxed alertness which we must once have
had but now have lost, we would not succumb to the stress that kills many of
us.
Experiments have shown that animals
deliberately infected with disease pathogens often stay healthy, provided they
are frequently stroked and petted. If they do fall ill they tend to recover,
while the neglected animals in the control group almost invariably die. No
better proof could be given of the universal need for affectionate body
contact. Yet we have evolved a sick and paranoid social system which
increasingly discourages such contact. Like most grandfathers today, I dare not
kiss, hug or caress my own grandchildren, especially the girls, for fear of being
accused of abusing them. I even avoid being left alone with them, which means I
can never agree to act as a babysitter. I am far closer to my dog and cat than
to my grandchildren, for the animals trust me while my grandchildren have been
systematically trained at school not to trust any adult except their mother. Some
fathers have told me, in confidence, that they feel much the same way about
their daughters, from whom they are becoming estranged. From what we have
learnt from these experiments with animals, the consequences of this
deprivation may eventually be deeply detrimental to the physical and mental
health of the children concerned.
[1] This actually derives from A. Toussenel
(1803-1885), L’esprit des betes (1847).
Madame Roland seems, commendably, to have borrowed and shortened the original.
COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM
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