Jenna Woginrich and I are very different, and we look at the world in very different ways but there is one thing we share and that is that we are seeking to find our own way in the world, even when the rest of the world seems to be going the other way. It is hunting season and Jenna is hunting on my farm Sunday and Monday. She is especially interested in shooting the 10-poin buck who has been seen around here. There was a neat Facebook discussion about this buck and Jenna, who feels strongly about food and meat and hunting, wrote about how dependent human beings are on killing living things to survival, animal, mineral, and vegetable. Something has to die to make yoghurt, too, she wrote.

It is amazing – fascinating to me – how many strong feels people have about animals, and the farther people get from animals and the natural world, the stronger they feel about them. I believe that humans who are separated from the natural world are wounded, grieving, disconnected from a part of Mother Earth.  It is not natural to live apart from animals, as most Americans now do. The more disconnected they are, the more they struggle to re-connect and we see this in many new ways – the animal rescue movement, which did not exist a generation ago, the curious idea of the no-kill shelter, which would also have seemed ludicrous just 20 years ago.

In most ways, animals like dogs and cats live better than any animals in the history of the planet, yet the idea of the abused animal grows and deepens. Nobody wants to claim an untroubled dog. Yesterday, at Bartleby’s Books, one person after another came up to ask me to sign a book and told me they have a dog from a shelter who was abused. Why this growing need to speak of their dogs in this way, I wondered? One woman cuddled with Red and asked where he came from, and I said from Ireland. And she turned to her husband and said, “see, he was abused in Ireland.” And I said, wait, I don’t think Red was abused, he shows no signs of that. He was probably just treated like a farm dog, and not like a pet. She walked away, no longer interested in me or the dog.

For Jenna, the chance to hunt is the opportunity to connect with a part of human nature and also buy and eat meat that doesn’t come from factories, which kill many more living things than hunters just by existing. An interesting idea for me, and I could not shoot a deer with a big rifle and wouldn’t want to.

This is why I love writing about animals. They tell us so much about people.