TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#87 Why We Love Them

#87 Why We Love Them

I got pretty maudlin again about Binkley last week. Don't know why; maybe it was the stress of everything and not having a four-legged person to commiserate with. Looking at some of the pictures I've taken of him, I got choked up again. Nicole made me promise not to look at those pictures without her around. It's necessary to visit this topic to kind of get something out in the open. Why did Binkley's death affect me so much, when animal death is so much a constant feature of our daily life? Why this one animal, why this one death?

As hideous as it sounds, I'm certainly aware that many animals die on a daily, hourly basis to support the designs of the human machine. It should fill me with a sickening sense of a god gone mad to visit havoc on innocent creatures in such cold-blooded efficiency. If that is your opinion, I stand before you a defenseless man. And yet, seeing this animal left for me in a rain-soaked plastic bag with his sightless eyes and his muddy paws, this affected me deeply. Still more, the question: why *this* animal? Why *this* life? Why, indeed, do we care so much?

As the days passed into weeks and I didn't feel like crying all the time, the sense of loss for Binkley didn't leave me. It still clings to me like the smell of smoke if you spend any length of time with a nicotine addict. I still get maudlin for his loss, both Nicole and myself. Why does it hurt so?

The answer itself was something that I've been pondering for much time, something that came to me as I watched Internet Tough Guys duke it out over a vBulletin board when one person posted an article about animal cruelty (or the latest "Crazy Woman Has Hundreds of Cats in Her House" story). The answer really is simple and I wanted to take the time to document it here.

Animals live on this planet the same as we. Some of them serve a domestic purpose and although it is unfortunate that they die so that humans can live the way that they do, I don't want to discuss that aspect here. Animals are live things, the same as we. To ignore their right to live and breathe is to ignore ours for we, as flawed as we are, are blessed with the gift of empathy. We can feel others' pain and that includes a living creature whose intellect is beneath ours.

Humans, as Charlie Chaplin said in "The Great Dictator", want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. However much people decide to ignore it, this also includes animals. I don't know the answer and I don't pretend to. I don't know the time in which an animal established such a deep connection with me as kin of this great ride known as Life. I can only think of two animals who first joined our household when I was very young. I realized then, as I know it now, that they are the children of a benevolent God who loves us and wants us to be happy.

And so, we love them as kin. As the creatures who love us when no one else will. Who remind us of the simplest and most noble aspects of our experience. Who love without reservation and who live without apology. When their life is lived up, they relinquish it with the simplest and most profound sense of dignity. We as humans can only hope, sometimes, to equal that level of humane, meritorious and princely behavior.

To ignore the simple and profound way that animals live on a daily basis is to ignore the deeper truths of the universe. Most people do, I was told a story not long after Binkley's loss of a man who purposefully ran over a cat on his way to work in the morning. It meant nothing to him, so much so that he revealed as much to a fellow co-worker. He ran over a cat, he wasn't sorry and he thought he'd mention it as a conversation-piece. The co-worker was not amused. "You ran over someone's best friend," she said and knowing her most of my life, she was holding back a very special bit of rage. He was taken aback, suddenly realizing that someone would not see his actions as benign as he considered him. She ordered him out of her presence and I admit I am such that finds that laudable. To harm the defenseless, to take pleasure in harming things that have no recourse. When we can do that, end a life for no better reason than that this life took a form you find repugnant, then truly woe is you.

Humanity has all sorts of ways to point out how far down the path they have gone. As I sit here writing this, this week featured a story about a baby being found in the trash behind a nearby Jack in the Box. Another story was about a seven-year-old who lived a short and terrible life being abused by her parents and who was finally murdered despite the efforts of the state child protective services to protect her. Losing a cat pales in comparison to those charming tales and yet, to be callous about it is to take a step down that same dark path. So, it hurts to lose a cat; but that pain won't stop me from getting another. Life is short and sometimes now is all you have. So, even though it might be painful when one friendship ends, the answer is not to rid yourself of friends.

Life asks of us to accept some great challenges. One of them is knowing when to let go and this will be the last time I talk about Binkley. We would have had good times together and who knows how many "Adventures of Binkley" there might have been? As long as he kept doing weird things, he defied me to explain his weirdness. Taking pictures to document it and then later coming up with a twisted plotline and posting it on the web seemed only logical.

I've spoken about "The Weird" as though the weird things in my life had their own presence and personality. I know that it doesn't but it helps to look at it that way so that I can stop getting bent out of shape by it. I think Binkley understood that because his life embodied the Weird. One of the major truths of life (at least, my life) is that when things get weird you have two choices. You can run from it, be embarrassed and look for a hole to hide in. Or you can stand there and pretend that it's exactly what you wanted to happen. For Binkley, there was no conflict because the weirdness was such a part of him that it never probably occurred to him that people (cats, I mean) lived any different. I doubt that he got anything deep out of this. He was a cat, his perspective extended to whether he had food or things to play with for the next 20 minutes. He walked where he willed and he slept where he fell. We should all be so fortunate. His calm acceptance of the situation, no matter what it was, is something that I'm still trying to get better at after 28 years (to his 20 or so in cat years). That he was usually able to pull something positive out of it (have fun, chase a bird or kill a mouse) is something else that I can only aspire to do.

I can still feel how his fur felt to pet him. His fur was more coarse than Kara's. His face had much more leonine features. He walked and looked like a pygmy tiger. He liked it when you scratched his temples. He never learned to bite gently and a couple of times he scratched me worse than any cat ever did. If I had the option and someone had the way, I'd still take him back in a heartbeat. The greatest way I can thank him for my time with him is to go find another of his brethren and give that person a good home.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Love is no different - to have it is to know one of the greatest joys of life and to lose it is to know one of the greatest pains. As much as it hurts to lose this life, or any other, I'm grateful for the time I had with it.

- Tim Woolery, 01/15/2006