Human-Animal Bond Important To People
With eerie irony, Inland Northwest animal rescue groups and animal shelter workers found themselves once again welcoming in a new year by liberating an entire kennel of dogs.
Early last month, 37 Siberian huskies starving, dehydrated and covered with lice were taken from a Stevens County woman. Two were put down immediately. One had organ failure. The other had maggots and gangrene in a festering wound where its metal collar was embedded in its neck.
During January last year, hundreds of dogs were taken from a Pend Oreille County puppy mill. They were starving, dehydrated and living among the rotting corpses of their kennel mates.
In both cases, pictures of the suffering dogs appeared in the newspaper and on TV. In both cases, the public responded with offers to adopt the dogs and donations to help cover rescue costs.
Sadly, in both cases those who reached out to help the dogs were criticized for doing so.
Us vs. them
At a north Spokane drugstore, a pharmacist raised an eyebrow when I told her the prescriptions I needed filled for enalapril, diltiazem and furosemide were for my dog Lacey.
Besides questioning the validity of the veterinary cardiologist’s signature on the prescription slip - clearly labeled with formal Washington State University Veterinary Hospital letterhead - the pharmacist wondered aloud about the ethics of spending $100 for the drugs.
The veterinarian’s instructions, she noted, were for one month’s worth of the heart medicine. Was I told, she asked, that I would be spending $1,200 a year? On a dog?
Two emotions washed over me. Pity for such an educated person so out of touch with the medical and evolutionary importance of the human-animal bond to people. And an aching sadness for Lacey.
Lacey went into congestive heart failure this past November, early during the morning after her sixth birthday.
One of the valves in Lacey’s heart never formed properly. Even though her heart is listened to by a veterinarian twice annually, the defect went undetected. In part, that’s because mitral valve insufficiency strikes without warning. In part, it’s because Lacey is an athlete, a sled dog; her healthy body could compensate.
As I waited for Lacey’s prescription to be filled, I thought of how the pharmacist reminded me of the judge who oversaw the Pend Oreille County puppy mill case as it wound its way through the court system.
While sentencing the puppy mill owners on animal cruelty charges, the judge said the public outcry over the case was shameful. Why such compassion for mere animals, he said, when all around are children who need help?
May the circle be unbroken
“Dogs dream,” my husband recently observed, “so they must have souls.”
I’ve never believed in animal rights, at least as they are defined by People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA) and other such activist groups. These organizations always strike me as being less about animals and their biology and more about human nature and its pathology.
I believe in science - it proves the existence of animal emotions.
I believe in souls, and how right it is to honor the souls of all species - the plants and animals we kill for food, and the plants and animals that kill us.
I believe life is a circle. I agree with the prophets - from religions as diverse as Christianity, Buddhism and Native American spirituality - that all life is connected.
Our species is at its best when we reach out to each other and to the other creatures with which we share the Earth.
We are at our worst when we think life is an all or nothing, “us vs. them” contest.
If Jesus, Buddha and the Great Spirit were to respond to the pointless debate sparked by those like the judge and the pharmacist, what would they say?
I imagine they might say something like this:
“We need another, and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.
“Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image a distortion.
“We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.
“For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complicated than ours they move finished and complete, gifted by extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
“They are not underlings.
“They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the Earth.” - Henry Beston, 1928, The Outermost House.
, DataTimes MEMO: About Dogs appears monthly in IN Life. Mary Sagal is a member of the Dog Writers Association of America.