Integrated Pet Management

I have pets.

I keep beautiful little pets.  I have three Gerbils -- the Charmed Girls.  I also have two Hamsters, both females.  One is a mellow older girl who came to me through adoption.  The other is a young, big, pensive, troublesome lovely creature from a communal pen at a pet store, pulled up from among the odd mayhem of 50 or so napping, squirming, waddling hamsters.

My pets are a wonder and a source of pressure on me. The pressure is that of constant re-adjustment of my plans and investments (of time, primarily,  and of creative efforts and of routine husbandry).  I have had any of them only since early December (2014).

These small beings are regarded by some humans as the most trivial kind of commodities -- hardly more significant than bundles of toilet paper or cartons of motor oil (but a bit more work to ship around from producer to retailer).  A strange way of not-seeing, to me.  A very real moral and spiritual blindness.  One that marks a vast impoverishment and tends to perpetuate further penury.

These fellow-ones are learning from me.  I can see that if I look with the heart's unclouded perception.  Oona MacTuna (the younger hamster) is watching, testing, hesitant and distant but lured by curiosity and need for that touching of life upon life that we call interaction.  Shasta BoogieBear is fully engaged.  She's a character, and demonstrates the true potential for responding to human affection.  She's immensely gratifying.  The g-girls are more ...natural-animal, as I think of it.  They are gregarious and a bit more self-sufficient; used to living as a group, sleeping in a pile; yet they too are learners and teachers.

Nothing about this is as dualistic, as minimalized, as reductionist as the principles of "what is a human person, what is an animal, what's the difference, what makes animals do as they do" that I was taught.  Not only are these not merely animate, organic toy-objects, but the relationship is not one of simple provider/owner to consumer/owned, either.  Not only are these not simply unconscious puppets ruled only by this (actually poorly understood) thing called instinct.  These are people.

My pets are naturally motivated to try to teach me.  I think all happy creatures are happy to demonstrate, to offer teaching.  Maybe they perceive me in this way:  as a strange, sort of colonial or composite being, a bunch of different creatures all living inside one skin.  Clearly I am very confused; they merely have to observe with their senses and animal connected-awareness to perceive that.  What I need according to their innate sense of rightness, is to be more integrated, less in conflict with myself.

And yet.  This composite nature, and the internal conflicts that are unavoidably implied, is the gift of humans as well as the illness of humans.  We maintain a constantly shifting, usually out of balance relationship to life, that nonetheless leaves us unparalleled capacities, potentials.  We often maladapt, but adaptation is still our outstanding accomplishment.  We lack the grace in living that many animal creatures demonstrate;  our modes of being in the world are befuddled, half-crazed or worse, wearied by dissipation of life force, drained by focus on mirages...

And yet.  From within our composite beings we draw forth what karma and conditions mandate, and strike upon surprising, unpredictable new solutions to the challenges that are posed to us.

And pondering my teaching and learning,  I must mention individuation.  The best moral reason for humans and non-human persons to closely coexist, to be in domestic arrangements or daily interactions, may be this: we provide for animals an opportunity to partake of more of life's possibilities (in compensation for the holistic existence of life in nature that we deprive them of), and this leads to the phenomenon (one best seen obliquely, in the peripheral vision) of individuation, on which the one-of-type-ness of the creature in its human-free life is pulled into a sentience that is more individual, idiosyncratic, and maybe more self-aware.  Less interchangeable with the others of its kind; more of a singular thing.

There is no limit to what an animal, a pet, can be taught be us.  We limit everything in both directions.  We can learn nothing from them, or a great deal (primarily about ourselves, in the end, although the practical understanding of the species that we can acquire through attentive observation is a very valuable and great kind of knowledge).  We cannot know the limits to what they can learn from us.  We cannot directly ask them what they've learned, obviously.  And yet by extending our sense of potential, by expansively practicing patience and consistently setting a direction, we can allow pets to enter into new behavioral interactions with their physical environment, with us, and with each other.

And yet.  What cannot be done is to push an animal in a direction that is truly contrary to their nature.  This is a distorted and misguided thing to attempt.  They can do many things that we teach them directly and deliberately, but only if these things are somehow an outgrowth of their nature.  The value of some things --the tricks, the games-- that are taught to animals is hard to assess;  but the negative value of abuse, of distortion, of setting of directions towards the degraded, is unmistakable.

So my pets and I meet again and again, and often, it seems (especially with the more solitary hamsters, who as adults do not characteristically set up living arrangements with others of their kind) ...it seems that each encounter is a little unexpected, a kind of momentary surprise, followed by that flash of recognition from them that is one of our great and primary rewards for keeping them around ...oh, she knows me.  She knows me.  I am a welcome thing in her world.