SYMBIOSIS

From the beginning of any records, including the evidence of human remains and kitchen middens, animals have shared our lives. Dogs joined us when we hunted and cats or ferrets came along when we began to store grain in bins, attracting rodents. We learned to domesticate other species and how to morph them to our designs, each region creating the kind of sheep or cow it needed.

Beyond that, now that we have the means to “read” DNA, it becomes clear that the metabolic electrochemical processes inside the skins of all creatures are closely related. In fact, zillions of tiny creatures move back and forth among us, through our guts, in our eyebrows, under our fingernails. We exist in a matrix of shared circumstances. Humans can ease the consequences of weather, food, and disease and we all work to make our livings among the givens where we find ourselves. We work best in symbiosis, that is, “an interaction between two dissimilar organisms living in close physical association, esp. one in which each benefits the other.” Hopefully, this yields synergy” which is “increased effectiveness, achievement, etc. produced by combined action and cooperation.” And for those who admit the religious aspect, synergism, “the doctrine that human will cooperates with divine grace in the work of regeneration.” (All three definitions from The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.)

Whether it is the Budgie bird issued to oldsters in Britain so they will keep the temperature warm enough for birds and thus protect their own lives instead of economizing on fuel too stringently, or whether it is the nearly extinct practice of fishing the surf in Spain by deploying a huge net into the water, then pulling it to shore with powerful draft horses, we interact with our animals in many ways. Arguably, working cross-species pairs are even more enmeshed than pets and their humans.

My ideal for dog ownership is the interacting symbiosis of working animals: assistants to the blind or deaf, hunting dogs, guard dogs (even those who are symbiotic with sheep rather than humans), and companions who soften the solitude of the single person living alone. But even when person and animal share a purpose, understand each other wordlessly through the power of habit, and fit their surroundings well, problems must constantly be worked through. Laws concerning animals in the US too often classify them as “products,” too often letting their well-being go by the wayside unless it cuts into profits. Or animals are “pets” defined by who protects them economically and emotionally. Unless they are status markers, the law sees them as essentially valueless. But when a loose steer in traffic (or as in Great Falls a few years ago, three loose bison running down the main artery) it’s an emergency and no one cares whether they are pets or livestock in that moment. Some animals create an emergency simply by dying inauspiciously. Dogs have repeatedly been defined in the law as “deadly weapons” when they are used to menace or control others.

The business of animal control (or the function that we currently call by that name) is NOT to number, sterilize, and supervise every animal in America, but rather to work through problems as they arise. It is a great mistake to alienate and polarize whole populations of animal keepers and lovers, but it is often a mistake thrust upon animal control by over-reaching humane societies. The misunderstandings are fed by the narrowness of experience of many people, who only know about animals from television, their dinner plates, and maybe their childhood pets. The use of animal aggression for gaming and gambling, an ancient practice, is (and I’d say SHOULD be) hypocritically demonized in this country. (I have a hard time seeing the difference between Vick fighting dogs against each other and Vick himself courting concussion and joint damage in a football game.) But my prejudice is that we’d do more good to try to uncover the causes of such behavior than by simply passing laws. Education, the creating and pointing out of better ways, has got to be a big part of animal control.

Two major scientific realizations are so important to my thinking that I would also consider them religious. (Technically, “process theology,” which sees the flow and flux of creation rather than concentrating on one ideal state.) First is that existence is continuous and connected through all time and space. The boundaries we see between humans and animals, between animals and plants, between life and non-life, are only structured interfaces between the sets of electro-magnetic and molecular processes contained in one creature and another. This means, most simply, that every time some small things changes (a sparrow falls) everything else on the planet is also changed to some tiny degree. Nothing can stay the same. Every human act has consequences, usually cumulative. These accumulate until they interfere with something else -- then there’s a reaction.

We know now that what we do in one corner of the planet affects all the rest. Pigs and waterfowl sharing barnyard space in SE Asia give rise to bird flu that migratory waterfowl spread everywhere. AIDS and ebola, sequestered for millenia in the jungles of Africa, now travels the world in passenger jets. Driving SUVs in Atlanta causes global warming that drowns and starves polar bears in arctic seas. Cost-cutting in a factory in China kills our pets with tainted food or damages our children with lead-based paint on toys. It’s not all bad: dust blown off the Sahara in Africa can suppress the ocean forces that create hurricanes in the US. This is all very high-falutin’ and so far from most people’s ordinary thinking that they can hardly get their heads around it.

Neighborhoods and jurisdictions, urban or rural, each have their own ecologies. The same factor that in one place is helpful can make trouble elsewhere. Appropriateness to the situation is one of the keys, so the work of the good animal officer is as much to gather awareness of what goes on as it is to intervene, because how else can a person know what intervention will work? Force might work in one context, a law in another, a spay-neuter program here, a school-wide animal ownership class there. Or maybe it’s time to invent something new.

The Internet offers an incomparable chance to hunt and gather ideas. Use a search engine to find them, then use the links down the sides of their blogs. Don’t be afraid to explore non-AC sites. One of my favorites is www.terriermandotcom.blogspot.com, written by a guy who runs working terriers. “Querencia” at stephenbodio.blogspot.com combines an interest in gazehounds (dogs that hunt by sight and swift pursuit in open country) with hawks. “Fretmarks” at fretmarks.blogspot.com is a woman poet and professor at Oxford who has a hawk named “Mabel” and produces some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read. http://ambulancedriverfiles.blogspot.com/ is unbeatable for wry comments on emergency responders. There are not enough animal control blogs --are there any? The bureaucrats who pay for animal control are VERY nervous about revelations. But I’m now at the stage and situation where I can say what I want.

Animal control need not be grim, angry, and punitive. One of the continuing ties among almost all emergency responders is hilarity at the predicaments people and their animals can get into. Some of the deepest and sustaining emotions many of us feel is bonded love with a pet. And surely animals provide transcendent moments, whether it’s the flight of an eagle or the birth of a horse. Then we are put in touch with the pulsing core of life.