The naturalist John Muir wrote that any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way. Muir could not have imagined a world where the very notion of animal rights and animal welfare is to war against the people who love and live with them, drive the animals out of sight, and make it difficult to own them and keep them.
Have you ever thought about what the animals have given to our imaginations, of what the animals are in our histories, our longings, of the messages we have always received from them? Of the books they inspired, the music, the work, the travels, the paintings, the stories and lives they changed?
Perhaps you have considered what will be lost when they are gone.
Animals are disappearing, the wild and domesticated, our genocide against them is nearly complete.
First, we destroyed their worlds and living spaces, we refused to share the earth with them, as every God has commanded us to do, and now we are refusing to share even our work and cities with them, as we always have. Animals are nearly gone from the every day lives of people, replaced only by images of them on computers or in books and photographs and paintings.
The rarer they become, the less we see them, the fewer left to work and live among us, the fewer messages they give us, the fewer inspirations for our imagination. They are no longer making history with us, or sharing our world, or being a part of our everyday lives. It seems that day by day, all they are made of in our minds are images of abuse and their own rarity.
We have not come to a wiser and more mystical understanding of animals, as we were called upon to do by the naturalist Henry Beston a century ago. In fact, our notion of them has narrowed to the smallest and least mystical of understandings. We have reduced the animals to piteous and fragile beings whose only acceptable work is to be abused, who can only live on preserves farm from us. Their purpose is, more and more, make troubled souls feel better about themselves, and superior to others.
Everyone who has ever lived or worked with an animal – writers, philosophers, carriage drivers, hunters, hikers, naturalists, biologists, mule drivers, circus handlers and trainers, dog rescuers and breeders, cat loves and Dolphin scholars – tells us what they have learned from the animals, what they have to teach us if only we will listen. Love, endurance, acceptance, healing – the wisdom of the earth. Animals connect us to Mother Earth, to the natural world. The cows, a farmer told me, taught fidelity and humility. The elephants, a trainer wrote me, taught the wisdom of the ages, the horses, a carriage driver wrote, taught patience and faithfulness. The ponies, said the owner of a farmer’s market, saved her when her life had no purpose.
Animals are important, we need them more than we know.
“Our task must be to free ourselves, ” said Albert Einstein, “by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” But we are not widening our circle, we are narrowing it. They have come for the horses, and the animals in Hollwyood, and the ponies in the farmer’s markets, the elephants in the circus and the chickens on the farms and the sled dogs in the snow. They are taking the animals away.
Soon, there will be no animals for us to save and abuse, but so many of us are learning how to judge and hate and the power both bring. Will we give up doing it? That is not the legacy of animals, that is not their message, that is not what touches the imagination.
You can find these animal messages everywhere – in poetry, literature, art and museums, movies, schools and libraries, on TV an YouTube, in the nascent and fragile imaginations of children. Is there a child on the earth who wants to see the the big horses, the ponies, the elephants, disappear from our joyless and anxious world? Is anyone listening to them?
Our only idea for the future of animals in our world is to drive them away, to take them from the dwindling numbers of people who can and wish to care for them, live with them, work with them, open their imaginations, hear their messages. An 75-year-old widow in Chicago writes me to say she has been denied a small and sick dog in a rescue kennel because she is too old to guarantee the dog won’t outlive her. A carpenter in Queens is denied a dog because he can’t afford a tall enough fence. The beloved companion of a homeless man in San Francisco is taken away from him because he can’t afford to see a vet, and his dog is killed. A handicapped student in Boston is denied a dog because he will not be able to get to the door quickly. A carriage driver is denied a dog because it is cruel to drive a horse carriage. A struggling mother of three in the Bronx is denied a dog who has languished in a crate for nearly a year because she can’t afford a tall enough fence. A horse lover and dog breeder and animal lover in Bucks County, Pa. is denied a cat because she wants it to live in her barn and help chase mice and rats. A farmer in Glenville, N.Y. is arrested because his water tanks froze in bitter cold, and his pigs don’t have heated barns.
We have become morally inverted, we have taken the idea of compassion and selfishly twisted it to our own advantage. Our moral compasses are out of whack, upside down. We can no longer see animals as anything but suffering, or the people who love them as anything but abusers. Human beings are good at judging, poor at taking responsibility for what they have done. It is easier, after all, to blame the farmers than it is too look in the mirror and ask ourselves what we have done to the world.
The author Alice Walker wrote that “the animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.” And they were surely not made so people could exploit them to feel better about themselves and use them to batter and frighten and persecute other human beings.
Every day I get messages that begin with these words: “what can we do?”
I wish I were God at those moments, and could know what to say to those people. But I am the farthest thing from a God. All I can do is say what I think I should do, and what I will try and do.
To me, every animal is sacred. Every animal driven from the earth, taken away from people, out of sight, hidden away in preserves, is a loss for humanity. We must keep every single one of them that we can among us, well-cared for, seen by as many people as possible, especially children. It is an urgent mission. Every animal that remains in a town or city or comes to visit one is a victory for human beings and Mother Earth, every one taken away a defeat. If they take the big horses out of New York, they will destroy them in order to save them, they will never be seen again, like the horses in Hollywood, the ponies in the farmer’s markets, the elephants in the circus.
It is a tragic mistake to banish them when their lives can so easily be made safer and better.
We could keep animals in our imaginations from disappearing, not just from the wild, but even more importantly now, as the wild itself disappears, from our everyday lives. They have always adapted to us, the horses, the elephants, the dogs and the ponies, this is what they do. It is we who cannot adapt to them, who will not make room for them, who chose greed and pollution over them. We have failed to understand that loving them means keeping them, not taking them away. Farmers and animal lovers are their salvation, not their enemies.
The definition of genocide is the deliberate and systematic extermination of a body or culture or group of living things. We are exterminating the animals of the world one species by one, one pony by one, one carriage horse by one, one un-adopted dog by one, one elephant one by one. No one seems to care that these spectacular animals have nowhere to go, little chance of surviving away from their work. We don’t care to see past our own obsession with their abuse.
This is a mistake that can never be undone. Having destroyed their world, we are doing so once more. We are much more unthinking about animals than we are cruel to them. The horses remind us that we are at a crossroads, either we will support the animals and the people who wish to live with them, or they will be gone forever. We will be tragically diminished. The Native-Americans say the future of the world is at stake, and I believe them.
Chief Avrol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Sioux and the keeper of the spirit of the horses, has said the new Millenium will usher in an age of harmony, or it will bring the end of life as we know it. “Starvation, war and toxic waste have been the hallmark of the Great Myth of Progress and Development.” So has the destruction of the animal world. “To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth,” wrote Chief Avrol, “falls the responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction. We have come to a time and place of great urgency. The fate of future generations rests in our hands.”
As the animals become rare and invisible, we become more and more ignorant about them. We cannot see past the idea of them as abused and piteous creatures, we have no other idea or solution for them other than launching a new Inquisition to find their abusers and take their animals away. We know longer know the beings as animals to touch our imaginations or as the sources of powerful messages.
I will see it this way, this is my choice: One at a time, we fight to save each one one at a time and keep them with us, for us and for the future. It is not an argument or position, but a sacred trust. Every animal pushed out of our world is a loss. For the earth, for them, for us.