Cute Animal Post: Complementary Species

It didn’t seem worth quibbling about when I read a recent short-short story, but perhaps it will help those who have not yet learned to love domestic animals, if they can understand: Domestic animals aren’t human. Nobody wants them to be. They are separate creations.

In the story I read, a young Muslim’s employers ask her to walk and handle their dog. Contact with the dog makes her ritually impure; to restore ritual purity she has to wash with special soap after handling the dog, and the soap is too expensive. An older friend, a mutual acquaintance, tries to explain to the dog owners that the dog is “unclean” to Muslims.

The dog owners don’t get it; like many Americans (although they’re not Americans), they think it’s about the dog’s physical sanitariness. They argue that the dog lives in their house and eats off their table. They think that that makes him physically less likely to harbor or transmit diseases than a wild animal would be, although in scientific fact it doesn’t; even if vaccinated against infections wild dogs share with other wild animals, their house dog is, in exchange, exposed to infections pet dogs share with humans. Their intimacy with the dog shows that they’re immune, so far, to the disease-causing agents he probably harbors, as they are to the disease-causing agents they undoubtedly harbor; that doesn’t mean that other people share their immunities, or that their own immunities will last forever.

What they need to understand is that ritual purity is a spiritual thing, not just a matter of the more viable ancient religions having chosen things that did tend to harbor disease-causing agents to declare ritually unclean. Christians and Humanists are free to evaluate the probability that certain things should not be touched for strictly medical reasons. Jews, Muslims, and followers of several minority religions are bound by traditional rules that teach: “You must not touch this if you want to be a faithful, observant Jew or Muslim or whatever.” Asking a Muslim to groom your dog is not like asking person to clean a chimney. It’s more like saying, “Here, when you light the furnace, tear up this Bible and use it to start the fire, and while you’re about it burn this flag of your country.” It’s demanding that person  stamp and spit on per identity. If you are a polite person you don’t ask a Muslim to sit down in a house where a dog (or a cat) is allowed to sit down, just as you don’t ask an Englishman to wipe his boots on a portrait of the Queen. Like duh.

But the dog owners want the young Muslim to understand that their dog is clean because it’s part of their household, and while this is likely to be true it’s irrelevant...and yet the older woman doesn’t think of the words to explain that. She’s not a dog person herself, so she’s disgusted by the fact that they are. They mention a son who died, and she wonders whether the dog was named after the boy, or the boy after the dog, because, in her mind, the only way a dog becomes part of a human household is that there’s some confusion about the dog being a human part of their household.

This misbelief is not confined to either Muslims or Asians. It seems to pop up in all people who don’t appreciate domestic animals and, on closer examination, usually don’t appreciate individual humans much either. Often these people do claim to love “Humanity”—sometimes by setting up improbable lifeboat scenarios and accusing those who appreciate animals of wanting to bring the animals on board and leave humans behind. (And would we? Depends on which humans we have in mind; if we’re talking about a lot of cat haters... ) Some of these people are Humanists and seem seriously to be trying to do something for “Humanity,” but, on closer examination, they always limit their benevolence to humans whom they perceive as like themselves. People who have not learned to appreciate the alien quality of other animals usually don’t score high on understanding the alien thoughts and habits of their own species either.

It’s noteworthy that in the “lifeboat” scenario Christians have (Genesis 5), Noah is told not to decide between saving humans and saving animals, but to build an ark with room to rescue at least a few of every known species. Seven of every “clean beast” and two of the “unclean beasts” quite clearly means, in context, “Save enough of each species to have a chance of reestablishing the species when you next see land, and take enough of the edible species along for a nice variety of meals.” There probably were cats on Noah’s ark...

I believe there was a Noah and an ark all right. Most cultures around the world have an old story, or stories, about how just a few ancestors escaped from a great flood or related events. Geology suggests that the continents we know now used to be just one or two connected continents, that they broke up due to geological events beyond our imagining. Carbon dating is theoretical, unreliable for anything whose approximate age in centuries we know, so we don’t know how long ago those great floods and earthquakes occurred. There might have been humans who lived through continental drift. There might have been an Atlantis, and either North America or Australia might be what’s left of it, for all we can really scientifically know. I think it’s likely that Noah was one of several people who were mysteriously, miraculously led to help others escape, not all in the same time or place—and that most of the living creatures he helped to escape were not human.

I don’t think that even seven animals of each species would account for all the variations, no. I think Noah must have been more isolated than truly alone. We’re not told who hauled the last/first of the surviving species of cats. Sabre-tooth tigers were left behind; Bengal tigers and lions and Egyptian desert cats obviously were not. But there was no question of precedence between them and Noah’s children. Animals were saved ahead of the ratbags who, in the Noah story, self-identified by making fun of Noah for building his ark.

In a lifeboat scenario, I seriously don’t see much of a problem with Noah’s perspective on things. My Nephews? Absolutely. Your nephews? Well, if they really want to come, and don’t mind sharing a bunk with the skunks...

Because, no matter how much you love a human child, and I have some reservations about human adults who don’t love a human child, all that child is only ever going to be is a human. He’s not going to pollinate any bean vines; for that purpose he’s worth less than a bee. He may figure out ways to catch a mouse, but he’s not as motivated to catch mice, as trustworthy to leave beside a mousehole, as a cat is. He’s never going to weigh a ton, and he’s unlikely to be able to carry even two hundred pounds any distance, so for some things he’s not as good as a horse. You can forget about ever getting milk, wool, or eggs out of him. Why, he’s not even able to fill a gnat’s place in the ecological food chain.

Humans are humans. Only humans can fill humans’ places in the world. Other animals are animals, of their kinds. Only they can fill their kind of animals’ places in the world. Most people believe that each species, and each individual within a species, was created in a distinctive way, for a distinctive purpose. Those who aren’t sure about “creation” have still been forced, by empirical scientific study, to concede the value of “biodiversity.” Cultural and individual diversity have value too, but when an ecosystem loses biodiversity, you actually see living things die.

Yes, there’s a traditional stereotype of the pathetic old fool who, being childless (probably because person was an unfit parent), tries to  use an animal to stand in for the child person can’t have. The usefulness of this stereotype is to illustrate how stupid it is to ignore diversity. The person who wants a dog to replace a child, or a child to replace a dog for that matter, is doomed to perpetual frustration. Like the parents who wanted a child of a different gender or temperament, they can neither make anyone unfortunate enough to be around them be what it’s not, nor allow it to be what it is.I’ve known far more humans who tried to demand that humans be the kind of humans they wanted than humans who seemed even likely to confuse a house pet with a child. This pathology is so rare, in real life, that the animal haters’ claims that people adopt animals as surrogate children sound to me a bit like claims that people apply for jobs primarily in order to become embezzlers, or usually get married in order to beat their wives (or husbands).

I dislike the way the same people who are behind the current #WarOnPets are using “adoption” rhetoric these days. Their idea is not that their own dog is a child surrogate (some of them don’t even live with a cat or dog), but that, if unreflective people form a habit of saying “adopt an animal” (even when a considerable sum of money is paid) rather than “buy an animal,” then unreflective people will be more vulnerable to “How caaan you sell animals?” rhetoric, and these “animal rescue” groups, many of which are now controlled by people who want domestic animals to go extinct, will then have control of all human/cat and human/dog relationships. In some areas they’re making a bid for control of human/horse and human/fowl relationships as well. 

Some animals are capable of understanding a distinction between being sold, without their consent, and being adopted, with their consent. My junior Tortie cat, Samantha, is one of them; she wasn't cooperative with being sold but was willing to be adopted. It's because this kind of thing is sometimes observed that I've become so disgusted by the Humane Pet Genocide Society's use of "adopt" when what they mean is rather blatantly "sell."

At the very least I’d like to see a demand that #HSUS get its terminology into line with English usage. When you go to an animal shelter, even though you may be rescuing a dog from death or torture (and being in those shelters has to be torture for most animals), you do not adopt a pet. You buy the animal. If you want to be annoyingly self-righteous about it you might say you’re redeeming the animal--English has a traditional word for the concept of giving someone money to rescue someone else from being killed by or enslaved to that person, and "redeem" is the word. But you are giving money to someone else who has claimed control of the animal. 

When you adopt an animal, you go to a friend’s house or to the kind of place I’ve previously described as a sanctuary-as-distinct-from-a-shelter, you spend time with the animal, you bond, and the main criterion for your being authorized to take it home is that the animal clings to you and climbs into your car. Most people authorized to adopt cats I’ve been keeping, for example, have in fact supplied food or paid for medical care for the Cat Sanctuary cats—but not all of them have. Payment is not a criterion. Most people have more money than I do, and if they don’t offer to contribute some money toward the cats’ well-being I may begin to suspect that they’re either miserly people or not fond of cats; but there are other possibilities—they might, for example, have been living with other animals, and have lost them—so they might be allowed to adopt a cat without paying me money, if the cat agreed to adopt them. Whenever a fee is stipulated up front, the correct word to use is buy.

And on what terms do animals adopt humans? Some dogs and horses obviously think of their favorite humans as leaders they naturally want to follow. Cats aren’t followers. It’s probably unfair to assume that all cats’ own words, if they thought in words, for their humans would literally mean “dear can opener.” At least some cats also think of their humans as “ear groomer” or “wielder of the flea comb,” too...

Rita Mae Brown's fictional animal narrators refer to their human both as "Mom" and as "Our Dear Can Opener." Brown is a long-term animal rescuer in real life.

Cats, dogs, and horses obviously do bond with their humans, show pleasure when their humans come home, feel insecure if their humans go away for very long, and often prefer to rest within sight or sound of their humans; and they can be protective of their humans, sometimes to the point of showing the kind of “mad desperate courage” that allows grandmothers to lift Buicks. 

Black Magic, the Founding Queen of the Cat Sanctuary, died trying to defend me from a sociopath who probably weighed more than twice as much as I did. Probably, if she thought in words, her word for me included some concepts analogous to “friend” or “pet” or maybe even “aunt.” She might even have thought of me in terms that included “leader” or “protector.” Probably, going by her body language, she was aware that that kind of human/cat bond existed and saw me as a suitable candidate when she was five months old. But I was not her “mother” as my social cats have clearly come to understand that word. She never nursed at my breasts, nor did I ever clean her back end.

Animals do unmistakably adopt humans—for mutual benefit. Some animals, like cows, willingly accept more of a parent-like role in relation to humans; they are, after all, bigger or stronger. (Julie of the Wolves was fiction but Jean George claimed to know a real Eskimo naturalist who had persuaded a big alpha wolf that the naturalist was harmless, amusing, and willing to try to help, enough to be adopted as a sort of foster pup.) Some researchers seriously believe that cats took the initiative in domesticating humans, and I used to live with an alley kitten who did that, all on his own, in spite of his parents’ concerns, when he was three months old.

This classic "fact-based fiction" has been translated into several languages, but is easiest to find in English.

Part of the problem in the pet haters’ thought process is their attempt to define entire species as wild or domestic. In fact, if you live with mostly domestic species, you soon learn that some individual cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, even sheep and chickens, don’t like humans and won’t be domesticated; the best you can do is prevent them from doing harm to anyone else, and live with them on a sort of uneasy truce. If you spend time around mostly wild species, you soon learn that some individual wild animals do like humans, and will happily hang around you and your home, as long as you respect whatever rules of proximity they’re comfortable with. 

Large predatory birds, the kind that can be dangerous, almost always bond with humans who’ve rescued young orphaned or injured birds, but they do form bonds that include mutual protection and food sharing. Elephants are famous for enduring very rough handling before they lose patience, partly, of course, because their skins are literally thick as elephant hide, but also because—so far as it’s possible to imagine that humans understand these things—many elephants think humans are cute and useful pets.

Bonding with individuals of other species is not one of the behaviors that are peculiar to humans, or even domestic animals who’ve lived around humans. Horses adopt all kinds of smaller animals as pets. Red-tailed hawks have been known to keep chickens as pets—the hawks were probably thinking “If we get hungry we can eat him,” but healthy red-tailed hawks actually prefer any other kind of flesh to fowl, so they end up keeping these chickens in the nest and the young hawks just let the chickens pick at their leftover food. Eagles have been known to keep red-tails as pets, probably in the same way. Inter-species bonding usually begins with some benefit from exploiting the other species’ difference, but then if the animals involved have sophisticated enough brains (which some humans apparently lack), it develops into real friendship...the kind of voluntary individual friendship that makes the control freaks absolutely itch all over with non-comprehension.

This week Dan Lewis shared a super-cute story about a dog who bonded with a goose. Who's the master and who's the pet? Hard to say, isn't it?

http://nowiknow.com/baks-the-blind-dog-and-his-gaggle-of-eyes/

But no, it’s not that a beekeeper likes bees better than children (even if he yells at children in defense of his bees). It’s not that cat, dogs, or horse people like cats, dogs, or horses better than humans (although, again, cat haters are not a variety of humans for which I have much use). It’s not that lovers of “wild nature” like lions or gorillas better than people, either, although both Joy Adamson and Dian Fossey do seem to have been women ahead of their time, and found few real friends and a lot of enemies for that reason. It’s that we recognize that the other animals make things better for the humans—for all humans.

Cats protect humans from rodents and the diseases they carry. That’s the basic relationship between our species. Some humans also enjoy grooming cats and giving them names, and some cats also enjoy being groomed and trying to figure out whether there’s any pattern of reference in the noises humans make, such as names. (Most cats either don’t hear or don’t listen to human speech enough to recognize words or names. Most humans, likewise, either don’t hear or don’t listen to cats’ “meows” enough to recognize that most cats have a particular kind of “meow” they associate with their humans—that cats give us names.) Grooming and cuddling promote the formation of emotional bonds through other affectionate behavior, food-sharing, playing, travelling together. Some cat/human bonds can be as intense and as mutually protective as any of the individuals’ other relationships are. Yet the cat/human relationship is profoundly different from either a relationship between cats or a relationship between humans.

So where does that leave the dog lovers and their Muslim employee? Duh. If you want to live with both a pet and a Muslim employee, you keep the “unclean” animal in a separate room, or outside, while the Muslim employee is working. Dogs, even small dogs, provide protection; they’re like burglar alarms that work when the electricity is cut off. They provide protection for people to whom they are ritually impure, too.