Sue Silverstein is a close friend; she teaches theology and art at Bishop Maginn High School, a tough job with some demanding and challenging students.

We became close friends working on refugee projects for the Army Of Good together.

(Next week we will launch an Amazon wish list campaign for desperately needed books for the new English teacher coming to the school.)

Zinnia and I are going to see Sue next Tuesday. Tonight, Sue and I were yakking on the phone when she made another mysterious mention of her friend “Alvin.”

I asked, “who the hell is this Alvin, and why have you been hiding his existence from me.” I told her all sorts of odd thoughts and suspicions had been going through my brain.

She caved. “Okay,” she said, “Alvin is my baby Chipmunk. He has been living here in the basement for several years.”

Her relationship is more significant than she knows. I was fascinated by it, and not because it is “cute.”

Biologists worldwide are sparking a revolution in the way we see animals in our troubled world and how we are coming to learn about their complex relationships with human beings after so many years of being isolated from them.

Although she doesn’t yet know it, Sue is a good example of this new and important trend.

Lots of people, animals lovers and scientists, are going deeper than cute and forging real friendships with animals.

In the winter, Sue said, Alvin winters in her garage where there is just enough room under the corner of the door for him. He loves washed and salt-free peanuts and will sit and look at her for hours while he eats.

The two have known each other long enough to get to know each other and reach across species lines.

Alvin squeaks at her all the time when he wants peanuts. He squeaks when people get too close when she moves or leaves the garage.

She said he thinks it’s his garage, but I think he and she have found a way for people or to be close to their animals without having to turn them into furbabies or therapists or surrogate children in need of rescue.

Alvin watches Sue closely while he eats and is upset when she goes away. He squeaked in protest when she cleaned out the baseball shoes where he stored his seeds.

Sue has been feeding him for several years now. To an animal, that is life and death.

They have a relationship that has solidified over time. The media, social and otherwise, love “cute” animal stories and videos.

But these kinds of relationships are growing more and more frequent, and they are anything but cute.

As the Amish people and the New York Carriage Horse drivers have learned and shown, the way to get close to animals is to keep them around us and to find ways to work and communicate with them.

The animal rights movement focuses on human cruelty and animal abuse, they have no plan of any kind for keeping animals alive and among people, their last great opportunity for survival.

Sue and many others are realizing this, but they don’t always grasp the significance of it.  In her best-selling new book Fox and I, biologist Catherine Raven writes about her remarkable friendship with a mangy fox, who came to visit her in her remote Montana home every day without fail at 4:25.

They sat together and ate together. The friendship deepened.

Raven is a scientist, not a person “who adores animals,”  and she was amazed at how close these two became, mostly because she allowed him to be with her, as Sue has done with Alvin.

They don’t need to be kissing each other or even speaking to one another. In his wonderful book Mama’s Hug, biologist Frans De Wall writes of the difficulties human beings have separating feelings from emotions with dogs, cats, and other animals.

Scientists can see emotions in animals like dogs (or chipmunks, but feelings are out of sight and harder to see.

“One day, we walk to be able to measure the private experiences of other species,” writes De Wall, “but for the moment, we have to content ourselves with what is visible on the outside.

In this regard, we are beginning to make progress, and I predict that a science of the emotions will be the next frontier in the study of animals behavior.”

This frontier is beginning to be breached by people like Sue and Cathering Raven, even though they are reluctant to be branded as animal nuts. The truth is, they are so much more than that.

Sue does not anthropomorphize her chipmunk; she is quite level-headed. But she is establishing a new kind of boundary between animals like chipmunks, which most of us ignore and know little abut, and open-minded human beings.

I highly recommend Fox and I  Catherine Raven) and Mama’s Hug (Frans De Wall) to anyone serious about animal emotions and human-animal friendships.

In 1940 most Americans lived among animals and understood that working horses like to work and are good. The animal rights movement has persuaded millions of people – mostly those who have never been near a horse – that work is abuse.

Today, most Americans never see animals away from YouTube, and then, it is usually in too-cute and highly emotionalized images.

Sue Silverstein ([email protected])  understands that her chipmunk is not a human and can’t behave like one. She had to accept that to maintain her friendship with Alvin.  She’s still embarrassed to talk about it.

Once, she mistakenly stored a five-pound bag of bird food in the garage and found it empty a few days later. he must have worked tirelessly, she said, to eat it all.

She laughs about it.

He also once filled his son Gabe’s old baseball shoes with sunflower seeds. He was forgiven.

“There is just something about his cuteness that makes me smile even when I’m stressed,” she says. She frames Alvin in terms of his being “cute,” but it is clear that the friendship has gone deeper than that, and means more than that, as it did with Catherine Raven’s fox or de Wall’s deep relationship with a chimpanzee.

Sue had a rough year last year dealing with Covid-19 and keeping her students.

Sometimes, she just came home and watched Alvin eat and stare at her, and she couldn’t help smiling. He would lock eyes and stay with her even when he wasn’t eating.

He makes her smile whenever she is stressed, and she has a stressful job. Only Alvin seems to recognize the toll it takes; Sue hides that from almost everyone else.

She offers him safety and shelter and food and companionship and work. He is quite content with his life in her garage. It is dangerous out there for a chipmunk.

In my friendship with the Amish, I see we share many values when it comes to living with animals. They don’t talk to their horses and dogs, and mostly, neither do I.

I think of Zinnia. Our relationship is not emotional, not verbal. We show our connection by being with each other, not by throwing balls and cuddling.

As I write, she sleeps with her head on my foot, an emotional connection she works to keep.

This is the new frontier for understanding animals, I hope to be a part of it. Alvin and Sue already are.

(Alvin Photo By Sue Silverstein ([email protected])