Yesterday I was in the Petsmart. I have some goldfish on my deck in a big pot with a pitcher pouring water into it, but I wanted to add more aeration and get a heater so the fish don't freeze over the winter.
I've always been very fond of animals. Pets were a part of my household growing up. We always had a dog. There was at one point also a cat named Sugar but a neighbor poisoned her, and no more cats were forthcoming. I had a couple of hamsters as a kid, and there were two budgies named Peter and Tweetie.
So I always visit the small cages and aquariums that they keep the various and sundry small critters in, and then I visit the other side where they keep the cats, wishing I could take the really sweet ones home, and knowing I can't. You'll see why later.
Anyways, at the Petsmart, they had a couple of chinchillas in a big glass aquarium. There was a plastic bowl with one piece cut out and they were both huddled underneath it.
I stood there looking at them and imagined what it must be like for these animals whose entire genetic history coalesced into small, soft and fluffy creatures whose primal instinct was to hide from the prying eyes of predators. Now these shy Andes creatures find themselves in a glass aquarium, with a blue plastic bowl that is 1/3 cut away for their only cover, replete with a 180 degree view of extremely large humans grinning and tapping on the glass 12 hours a day.
I swear those poor chinchillas looked like their entire world had crashed and burned around them.
Now, maybe somebody hand raised them, and they were used to humans. I certainly hope so. They are nocturnal, so the bright lights must have been hard on them, and they were trying hard to shut out the stimulus and get some rest when I came by their house.
I found my heart reaching out to them. And then to all the captive animals, from the dozy gray rat who had nonchalantly flopped to sleep at the front of his aquarium world, to the little finches in a cage, hopping from one perch to another, to the bearded dragons doing their best to blend in.
I have never owned a wild creature. But have had numerous encounters with wild things.
We had a cat who died recently after a long and happy life. There was a truce with Kato, and Lola, the biggest dog, grew up with the cat, and loved her like a sister. Our third dog, Honey, is a rescue dog, who never does a thing wrong. She would have loved to attack the cat, but she knew we did not approve, so she would not consider it. We figure she was called to an earlier master and beaten when she got there, because she would come to no man but my husband for the first five years we had her, and only come cowering, acting like it was her last moment on Earth. She is doing so much better now, after years on only kindness and love.
Our cat was an indoor/outdoor cat, who spent her nights outside. Before we moved she had a possum friend, and she shared her food with him. He started visiting her late at night when he was just a baby. Her food was up on a shelf to keep it away from our dogs, but of course that was no problem for Mr. Poss. She had a chair with a kitty heating pad on it for cool nights, and she would just let him eat his fill of her chow, watching him quietly with her big green eyes.
The night I first discovered him, I had gone out to the car late at night, and on the way back past the dinner shelf I noticed the little guy. It was too late for him to hide or fake death. We locked eye-beams. He took stock of his options. One step. Two steps. Not quickly, but measured steps. Now his head was behind the only cover available. There were 3 or 4 spray cans to one side of the shelf, just past the food dish. There he froze. I just stood there for a minute. "I can still see you, you know.", I said to him. A few beats later and he got the idea. Turning tail, he jumped down from the shelf, hustling off in a slow trot, which I imagine is moving particularly fast for a possum.
I didn't begrudge the food Mr. Poss ate. Mostly because Pitcher the pitch black cat seemed to enjoy his company and did not mind sharing.
Mr. Poss didn't stay small though, he got really big on that quality cat food, and finally I decided, after our paths again crossed very late at night, that had to scare him away. Pitcher was was no longer getting much of the food we put out for her.
I hated to do it. Mr. Poss was the cutest possum I had ever seen. He was very healthy from his regular diet, his face was all white and almost spherical. He was living the life of Reilly.
I knew that close encounters on the back porch with a wild possum, no matter how many times we've seen each other, are really not, in the main, healthy for either of us. So that night I put on a really roomy coat and I got a hold of a broomstick, the kind you use to screw the paint roller on to the end of. And I confronted Mr. Poss on the back porch. I must have been quite a sight to him. I yelled. I pulled my coat out so it looked like wings and flapped them in his general direction. I growled. I squatted down and then sprang up closer to him. I poked him with the broomstick. Not to hurt him. Just to scare him away from Pitchers food and our back porch. Poor guy. He cowered in the corner of the porch, amongst some dried fall leaves. And he looked at me like I was crazy.
It worked though. At least I think it did. The food went further at any rate. Perhaps he just adjusted his visiting schedule or ate less when he came. I'll never know for certain.
Mr. Poss the cute is not the only possum I've met. I've also come face to face with a very frightened possum, with a garden bench as his only cover, surrounded by my three dogs who had gotten very excited by their find. We came outside to see what the fuss was all about, and this possum had apparently decided the time was not right to die a la William Shatner. We were concerned that the dogs would get bitten after he hissed at the lot of us and showed a mouthful of needle sharp teeth I will never forget. I understand completely. If I were a small creature being danced around by three predatory and extremely excited dogs plus a middle aged shrieking woman and her caterwauling husband, us yelling at the dogs and them barking madly, I would show my teeth and hiss too.
Kato, all 22 pounds of him, somehow got close enough to the possum to grab him by the neck, and gave him a shaking that defied the physics of the situation. It was a large possum.
Some how, I honestly don't remember how, we got Kato off of the possum.
The possum just died. He died dramatically. On his back. Mouth open. Tongue draping out the side. The dogs were pulled to safety in the house, and after all the commotion, we honestly did not know if the poor thing really died of fright, or was just playing possum.
We got the shovel from the shed. My husband was going to dispose of the poor creature, if it was dead or badly damaged. It was hard to tell if it was hurt. It clearly looked very dead. Though the dogs were in the house, they hadn't stopped howling for blood. Their kill! Their kill! I went inside to try to calm the dogs.
Alone with the dead possum, husband had a decision to make. Before scooping it up in the shovel, or hitting it on the head to put it out of its misery, if hurt, he decided that he needed to know if it was playing possum. He took the shovel, turned it upside down, and gently put the top of the wooden handle in the possum's right front palm. That possum couldn't resist gripping the end of the shovel. Just a little bit. "You bugger" husband said to the dramatist. OK then. He came back inside. We were all much calmer after about a half an hour. Some time during that time the actor had left the stage. Presumably a great deal wiser about the scent of dogs and what that means to such a wandering thespian.
Wild bunnies live all around us, and I have come to decide that they are not, as a rule, very bright. Couple of years ago I had to intervene in my dog's yard hunt to save a little baby bunny. They had found his litter mates too.
Kato is not the Alpha of our little pack, though he would dearly love to be. Lola wouldn't let him, and proved it nearly daily as required by putting his head in her mouth. (She is gone now, but that is another tale). Still, Kato is a born ratter, and his instinct is to shake and kill small creatures like baby bunnies.
I could only save one of them. Kato probably led the charge, and though I cannot say it was all him, it most likely was, as he is quite the instigator. I came late to the scene of the carnage. Suffice to say that the dogs had their way with the other babies. They were either broken and dead or badly punctured and in the act of expiring, and there was only the one to save, the last one. Taken from the jaws of Kato, master of the killing shake.
Their mother had stupidly dropped her kittens under a large tree in the front yard, on an acre property that, to a bunny nose, must have reeked of the three dogs who patrolled it every day. This defect in the intelligence of rabbits must have direct bearing on the number of offspring that they produce.
His eyes were not open yet. I made him a cozy box with a borrowed kitty heating pad, kept in a room that could be made dark, and he drank formula from an eyedropper until he was a bit older, and ready for a nice salad, which he enjoyed very much. I named him Starbuck, for the little blaze on his forehead.
I thought about keeping him. But I would pick him up and he would strain so hard to get away that I was sure he would injure himself. It was obvious that he was not like a domesticated bunny. Extremely wild, he would never make a good pet. I took him to a rescue shelter that rehabilitates and releases wild animals that people find, or raise, or have tried to domesticate.
There are so many reasons why I have come to believe that taking wild animals for pets is wrong.
They have genetic coding that makes them unsuitable, for one thing. They deserve to be free like the millions of generations of their ancestors for another.
But perhaps the biggest reason is that, as human beings, we should be able to empathize with their plight, and the life that they will lead in a small cage.
Consider the animal collector who let loose all of those creatures, most of them rare, endangered animals. I cannot imagine the mindset that went into collecting 18 Bengal tigers. A kind of covetousness that hovers on the edge of insanity, and most certainly does not have animal welfare at its core.
We humans covet animals. Something furry and small, furry and big, or wet, or slithery, or huge and rare, like an elephant or a tiger.
They have to acquiesce to us. We hold all the cards. We have the magical see through cages. The electric prods, the wire mesh. We have the branding irons and the fences, the barns and the leashes.
What we choose to do with that power over all creatures great and small is a measure of our humanity.
What creatures we choose to "own" and why we choose to do that is also a measure of our humanity.
Lets choose to be more human.