A couple of days ago, I was sitting at my desk, with the door ajar so the cats could come and go.
That’s my everyday setup here. Cats don’t like locked doors and they have trained me well. It’s a true open-door policy here and has led to all sorts of visitors, lizards being the most common. I’ve even had a couple of gorgeous snakes come in for a perusal.
But most recently, it has been the lovely Ricky … a gorgeous juvenile Raccoon.
Tuesday, I was sitting here and while working on my PC, felt that I was being watched. So, I looked over at the doorway and there she was looking in at me.
When I stood up, she moved away and as I stepped out the door, she was over by one of the two food stations that I set up each evening. She was standing behind one of the empty bowls from the previous night and was running her hands through it to show me it was empty.
So I made up a quick mixture of wet and dried cat food for her and she wolfed it down.
I was saying to Morgan how fabulous it was that she had figured out how to communicate that she was hungry to me. There is a huge sense of wonder when a wild animal communicates with us on a level that we understand. Dr Doolittle must have been a very happy man.
Morgan guessed that now that she had seen that I understood, she would probably be back.
Fast forward to an hour or so ago. I am sitting here at my PC, door ajar and suddenly sensed I am being watched. There was Ricky looking in at me. I didn’t need to follow her to the empty bowl, because I knew I had taken them in already anyway. So as I stood up, she retreated and I filled up a bowl with a mix of wet and dry cat food and followed her over to the spot.
She stood about five or six feet away in a cluster of Palmetto bushes and when I stepped back, she came over and started eating it. I was thrilled. I grabbed one of the old cameras from upstairs and took a few pics of her. They are at the end of the blog.
It can’t have been more than fifteen minutes later and I was just finishing resizing the pics for this blog and sure enough, I see her walking over this way again. I rattled off a few clumsy pics in the excitement as she approached the door and asked for more. As I stood up, she backed out of the door again and so I mixed her up a second bowl, which she duly polished off to the last morsel. Those three pics are at the end of the blog also.
Enjoy.
Anyway, since then, I can’t help thinking about how such an intelligent species as ours have been able to figure out how to land a space vehicle on Mars, create untold technical marvels, and can automatically translate any language to another instantly on Google.
Yet, we have never figured out how to communicate with animals or how to understand their communication to us. Don’t you find that curious?
I am not a conspiracy person, but in this instance, I know full well that the reason we haven’t is not because we don’t know how. It’s because we don’t WANT to know how.
How on earth could you live with yourself if you were able to hear the fear of animals being led to the slaughter? How could you look into the eyes of little creatures being killed for their skins and furs, or creatures that were being “culled” because we have deemed there are too many of them. CULLED … see, we can’t even call it the murder it really is.
When we displace millions of creatures so we can build big theme parks, golf courses, or distribution centers we don’t want to know how they feel.
When we hunt and fish for fun, is it really fun if the creature we are about to kill can talk to us?
Of course not. Humans are wonderful at killing. There is no creature on the planet better at it than us. But we like to do so anonymously.
That’s why we drop atomic bombs from planes and hand bars of soap to those we send for showers.
Willful ignorance is a form of cowardice that we have gleefully extended into our handling of creatures other than human. We assign no real persona to these guys, so that we minimize the empathy we would otherwise have to get over in our dealings with them.
And then there is the great oxymoronism (new word alert!!) of how we single out creatures like dogs, where we treat them like babies and can’t understand those savages in Asia that eat dogs. All the while, trowing Fido a bone from our plate while we chew on the flesh of some poor creature that wishes he were born a dog. Just not a dog in Asia.
… just a thought.
