They say that it is much harder to forge deep friendships as you age and that the truest and longest lasting friendships are the ones you make in your youth. Usually one’s schooldays, at university, in the army, almost invariably some shared institutional experience forged in adversity. The observation may well be true in the sense that these friendships are deep and uncritical, but how many of us are actually still in touch with our friends from these dim and distant days, even though we may think of them from time to time?
Most of our adult “friendships” may in truth be described as comfy acquaintanceships, lasting as long as proximity and acceptable behaviour (on the part of the acquaintance of course) permit. As couples, the field is essentially halved since one or other of you are bound not to share your partners enthusiasm for a potential pal. If you have children in school the field is decimated, inevitably restricted to other couples in the same boat.
Finding and making a new friend in middle age and after is rare it seems. There’s altogether too much mobility in our world. We are always busy, there are too many considerations and perhaps we are just too discriminating (try judgmental?) about other people for us to have the shared experiences that lead to deep friendship. In fact, if we think about it, our early friends are almost certainly not the people we would ever have as friends as mature adults.
Animals Are Different
None of the above seems true of our relationships with animals, by which I really mean our fellow mammals, though people can and do have wonderful interactions with birds, even reptiles. In my own case I find I am becoming fonder and more caring in my feelings for animals at many levels, individually and generally. In my youth animals of many kinds were always around and I didn’t give it much thought. Now I miss their proximity. I dream of creating an environment where I can enjoy all that again. Meantime my partner and I content ourselves with two cats and latterly a dog.
Advanced mammals enjoy the same emotional range as ourselves, lacking only the “Self” consciousness with which we humans are cursed/blessed, and which is really the only thing that separates us as beings. While I am not a vegetarian I stopped eating meat 15 years ago. It is not that think we shouldn’t eat meat at all, it is just that I personally lost the taste for it. I simply could no longer stomach the industrial raising and killing of so many billions of creatures, usually in terrible conditions. If we do choose to eat our fellow mammals I think we should at least have a personal relationship with them. I think we should have to hunt, kill and butcher them ourselves if we want to eat them. More practically perhaps, we should pay a lot more money for our meat. An unsubsidised price that reflects the true economic and ecological cost to the planet. In two or three centuries time, a blink of the eye in terms of the ascent of consciousness I think future generations will look back in amazed revulsion at the way we treated animals. It’s in our interest to change. If we do not Nature will almost certainly do it for us, as she’s started to do. Mad cow disease may not kill many of us but it really spooks us, and the rich eat less red meat for health reasons. Hopefully all those millions of upwardly mobile Chinese won’t want to go through the rib-eye steak n’ claret scoffing stage.
Cat People
My partner and I are traditionally cat people. We only came to live in our house in Bali full time when our two cats died within months of each other, both of them just a few months short of their 20th birthdays. A Siamese female and a Burmese male, they had been together all their lives apart from the few months after birth. The Siamese was I swear, a fallen woman, who had blipped out karmically for one quick lifetime. The Burmese might not have been an intellectual giant but he was a Prince of a fellow, a natural aristocrat and the closest male relationship I’ve enjoyed so far this lifetime. At the end he was nothing but sweetness. Anyone who says cats don’t relate to people don’t know squat about cats. They do and intensely so, but they do it in a complex and subtle way, which is altogether feline and very independent. When they went we were devastated and six years on we miss them still.
Today we again have two cats. A sweet unassuming Balinese tortoiseshell female who wasn’t going to see out the night on a beach in Manggis one New Year’s Eve nine years ago and another Siamese female, who was abandoned by an expat family to our vet, who thought of us as a home. This one is a real “Scarlet O’Hara” of a puss. She’s got the legs and the manner alright, but not the colouring, some Bali tom got in their somewhere along the line, but she don’t know that....
Neither my partner nor I had had a direct experience of owning or being around dogs since we were children. Certainly we saw many fine dogs and owners, but in our observation there were also a few too many neurotic dogs, dogs who were smelly, who slobbered and foamed horribly, who peed and fawned all over the place. Dogs seemed high maintenance compared to cats, though it has to be said you soon knew all about it if your cat felt neglected.
The most impressive dogs I recall were really not “owned” at all. They were “collective” dogs, sort of Labrador crosses who really belonged to Brugh Joy’s ranch in Arizona. These were dogs at their best. They roamed a huge area but seemed to be everywhere. Many were the stories of their being in two places at once. If anyone was lost, was in difficulties climbing an arroyo or was confronted with a rattlesnake, one or other of these dogs would intuitively appear and see the danger through before disappearing.
The Dogs of Bali
In Bali, like much of Asia, whether you like dogs or not, you are confronted with them in a way you don’t usually see in the West. Dogs live semi-tolerated on the fringes of human habitation largely fending for themselves. Much the way it must have been everywhere not so long ago. Saddest of all is to see the mangy, maimed and diseased creatures leading the meanest of existences on the roads and lanes of our island paradise. And then there’s the road kill. Pretty soon most of us harden our hearts to the sight, except once in a while when we can’t pass by. The sillier among us repeat remarks about karma, dogs and thieves.
The last “compassion moment” that happened to me was on a vacant meadow between our house and the beach. Hearing a piteous mewling a few feet from the path I saw four pups with their eyes not yet open in a plastic bag. It was a sad sight alright, the ants were just zeroing in on the eyes. I steeled my heart and got about four yards down the path before turning back and took them home. I was not initially popular but fortunately there are some people who really take on the problem in a way I never could or would. They took the pups in, tended them and over time found homes for them all. People like this are magnificent.
Having a dog never entered our minds and quite why one stray dog should come into our lives on a permanent basis as opposed to a thousand others is one of those minor mysteries of which life is so full. My partner walks every morning along the beach. Every day for a month she saw the same revolting scabrous cur with a broken leg, all ribs and not a hair on his body, living out his last days until death would finally bring merciful relief. Something of the misery in that animals eyes touched her. She got in touch with our vet, and after several attempts we were able to find and secure the animal. We asked her to see if the animal could be healed or was too far gone and need to be destroyed. The dog had to be looked after for three weeks but apart from being bald and with a badly mended hind leg he was going to be OK, with a lot of care and attention.
Four months later we have a splendid year-old healthy hirsute snow-white Kintamani chow. My partner named him Neo, because he was unplugged from his fate and born again. He was neurotic at first and he certainly didn’t like us foreigners, particular men. He soon got friendly with our Balinese staff but growled at us whenever he saw us and bit us more than once. Took a couple of months for him to get over that and is now fiercely devoted to his new mistress. We wondered what a Kintamani was doing abandoned on the seashore and over time we got the story from the people on the beach. As a puppy he’d had a run-in with a motorbike and his owner, an expat man, had just thrown him out.
We reckon he must have beat him too, so fearful the animal was if you had anything that looked like a stick in your hand. That’s already two animals in our house abandoned and abused by foreign owners. Makes one wonder about who really cares about animals, doesn’t it?
Holy Writ?
And that’s the really the point I think. We are all blessed when we have animals in our lives. Best of all is when we can relate to them as independent entities who have sought us out, as friends and allies that is, rather then prey. We each bring something the other needs. That is our shared history over millions of years and is with us still. Next best, I guess, is where they are dependent as pets, but it is a lesser thing. Sadly the former relationship is fast disappearing. Most of us only meet animals as pets, vermin or livestock, in bits in cellophane in the aisles of our supermarkets or on the National Geographic channel. That looks increasingly the world in store for us and it will be a sadly diminished one. To believe as Holy Writ that God gave us Dominion over Earth and all creatures on the face of it, to dispose of as mere commodities is a folly that will come back to haunt us if we persist in such a brutal and silly interpretation.
