A human being is a part of the whole called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
—Albert Einstein
As I write this final chapter, it’s summertime in New England. School is out and our mornings start earlier, compared with the regular school year routine—swim team at seven thirty, camp at nine o’clock, and breakfast gobbled down sometime in between. On the drive from the pool to camp, I peek through the windows of other cars—a menagerie of humans rushing in different directions to get wherever we’re headed to next. I catch a glimpse of the other faces, as we move along in different lanes or cross paths at intersections, to remind myself real people surround us. It almost seems to come naturally, that we narrow our focus to our own lives.
A thunderstorm had been predicted and it’s hit just at the end of swim practice. In a rush of water, the streets are flooded.
“It looked like you guys practiced racing dives before you finished,” I say to my daughter.
“Uh-huh,” she replies between bites of her bagel, “but then the coach, at the very end, let us jump off the diving board. The other lanes didn’t have time—”
A dot in the road catches my attention. Somewhere a familiar form registers in my mind: a pair of black dots, a thin strip at the end, an off-brown rounded shape curled in between. Huddled dead center in the middle of the road, a field mouse has lost his way, caught in the torrent of rain and thunder. Lost on all sides to broad sheets of flowing water, he’s surrendered to the sudden storm. I think of braking—not a chance, not safe—and decide in that second to swerve instead. I steel myself as I look back in the mirror. The mouse hasn’t moved an inch. I cringe to imagine how long he’ll survive.
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“There’s a mouse in the road. I’m pretty sure he’s still alive.”
“Wait, I’ll show you in just a sec. We’re going to pull around again. I feel like we need to try to help him, sweetie.”
I scan the road to either side. By chance, to our good luck (or his), there’s a break in the traffic just at that moment, and the next car coming is a good stretch away. Quickly turning, we circle around and come to a stop in front of him. I squint through the window. He hasn’t budged. For a moment, I wonder if he’s alive. But then I notice a blink of his eyes. Or is that just my imagination?
I turn on our flashers as cars approach behind us. “It looks like they’re stopping. Okay, here goes.”
I brace myself, open the door, and in only seconds, I’m as soaked as the mouse. I quickly slip over to the passenger side and wave for the drivers of the cars to pass us by. A line has formed behind the first, and as he pulls forward the others follow. One, then another, and another, and on.
Now that they’re moving, they’re barely even slowing. While I stand and wait for the line to end, I keep checking on the mouse to see if he has moved. Out in the downpour and a few feet away, it’s easy to see that he’s still alive. Yet, remarkably, he’s staying put, in spite of the noise of the cars whizzing past and the waves of water they leave in their wake.
Two minutes. Three minutes. Do that many people really drive this way? And though I already know the answer, somehow I still feel surprised. Usually, I’m just one of many, in a steady stream of all kinds of humans, passing through on their daily routine.
I recognize a logo on a door. Our gardener, Jeff, pulls up in his truck and rolls down his window to offer us help. His brother and another worker sit beside him in the cab. In spite of myself, I feel my checks blush and point to the tiny, wet lump in the road.
“You know me—that crazy vet. It’s a mouse. I had to try to help him. Hey, thanks, though, for stopping to check.”
Jeff looks at me with a knowing smile then continues on in the pouring rain with a line of cars, once again, behind him. As I wait for the traffic to ease for a moment—just a few seconds when the road is clear—two more huddled shapes catch my eye. I blink, unbelieving, but they’re still there. A pair of skunks, also caught in the storm, are curled into black-and-white mounds in the gutter. With drains overflowing, a river surrounds them. And though their coats are as drenched as my clothes, I can make out their faces surprisingly well and see that they’re utterly overwhelmed.
A car races past from the other direction, hits a swollen puddle of rain, and douses me thickly from head to toe. As soaked as I was, I feel even wetter. With a sigh and a chuckle of disbelief, I peer in the window to see if my daughter is smiling back, but the rain is coming down much too hard.
A break in the traffic—the road is empty. Quickly, I crouch down next to the mouse—far too bewildered to respond to the shadow that now is bending over him—and easily pick him up by the tail. Instincts on, he wriggles and squirms, legs stretched out in all directions, reaching with his paws to grasp onto anything. I block the picture in my mind of how I imagine we must look—both of us waterlogged, captor and prey—and, with him dangling in my hands, quickly jog across the road and onto a soggy stretch of lawn. For just a few heartbeats (more of his than mine), we pause in that moment to consider each other—a world apart in perspective and experience, yet now our lives are assuredly linked. And then, with a blink, he scurries off between the bushes.
As I trudge back through the swamp of rain-soaked grass, I look to the gutter to check on the skunks. Both have shifted a bit from the road to be far enough from the passing cars that I trust their instincts are keeping them safe, despite the river that still surrounds them.
I stop to open the passenger door, expecting to see my daughter’s smile at seeing her father so thoroughly soaked, and to point out the skunks, since I’m not sure she saw them. With flushed cheeks and reddened eyes, she quickly rubs a tear with her sleeve. My sensitive daughter—so much like her father.
“Oh, sweetie, no worries. Everything’s fine.”
She smiles and softly says, “I know.”
“He scurried away into the bushes. But, hey, did you get to see the skunks?”
She hadn’t. So, I point them out, and together we watch them for a minute. Still a safe distance from the road, they’ve shifted to huddle more closely together. Cars whir past and the rain drives harder.
“We better get going,” I tell my daughter. “I’ll check them again on my way back to town.” I dash back around to the driver’s side, wait for our turn, then pull into the traffic, once more just another in a steady passing stream of cars.
The animals with whom we share our lives—the vizsla we adopted when the kids were little; a border collie raised since birth to help a herdsman tend his flock; the hyacinth macaw our best friend bought while still in college and who has kept her company through all these years—we hold in our hearts with loving affection. The wild animals we see at zoos—a lion surveying his domain from a nearby hill as we pass him on safari; a bask of crocodiles fixedly staring with jagged-tooth smiles while sunning on the riverbank; a recent litter of bat-eared fox kits who, in their playful behaviors and antics, remind us of our dogs at home—all draw us in with a mystic allure. Even a field mouse lost on the road or a pair of wet skunks huddled in a gutter, caught in the downpour of a summer thunderstorm, can spark our sense of connectedness, if we allow ourselves to notice them.
Across a remarkably wide range of species, from blue-crowned conures to lowland gorillas, northern sea otters, and spectacled bears, animals tap into human emotions in ways that other people cannot—even those who are closest to us. They enchant us, seduce us, and help us to laugh. They inspire our visions, give us pause, and fill us with a sense of wonder and awe. They reach into our very hearts to touch us in ways we don’t understand, stirring us to heights of joy as well as heartrending depths of sorrow.
In the opening pages of this book, we considered a fundamental question: Why are we so drawn to animals? Common history, memories from childhood, compassion, empathy, longing for connection, our willingness to be vulnerable, a feeling of acceptance without judgment or rejection—all play a role in what attracts us to them. Beyond all of these, the traits that we share—sensitivity, integrity, presence, forgiveness, and each of the others we’ve considered in these chapters, are not only part of our bond with them but also add to their allure.
Yet, from all I’ve seen and heard through the years as I’ve worked hand in hand with clients and patients, I am certain what draws us together goes deeper. I believe our sense of kinship with animals comes from our souls connecting with theirs. And though this may be contentious to some, I’m far from alone in believing so. From Hippocrates and Pythagoras to Martin Luther and Pope John Paul II, since the earliest roots of Western culture (and almost certainly well before then), countless luminaries, philosophers, clergymen, and common folk have held this to be an essential truth.
This conviction that animals have souls like ours can be traced to the roots of the word animalis, which, literally, in Latin means “having a soul.” To ancient scholars, the anima, or soul, was the spirit of life found in creatures and humans that makes up our essential nature. And how our predecessors viewed the soul is not unlike how we do now.
The most recent version of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the soul as the “spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal.” The soul is the seat where our spirit resides. Yet, though it’s within us, it survives our death, for it’s not in our bodies or physical features. The soul is the essence of who we are and holds those traits that make us unique: our character, emotions, identity, and spirit.
In the stories of the animals in this book, I’ve sought to portray what I perceived of their souls: the nature of their characters, the emotions through which they endured, how they expressed themselves, their uniqueness in identity, and a sense of the spirit that filled their lives. Though it may seem beyond the scope of traditional behavioral medicine, I believe I should consider these traits of animals’ souls as I care for them.
Now and then I think back to that day when Jen told me Baxter had passed. As we sat on the phone sharing memories of him, we cried not so much for the void that he left as for the ways he had touched our hearts through all those years he was alive. What we both missed of Baxter was his calm and loving nature; his untiring passion for retrieving paper balls; how completely accepting he was of his fate—the pains that he suffered from FHS, Jen’s school and work schedules, his different homes—how lovingly he cared for Jen (on a quiet evening or in the midst of a fit, his greatest comfort was being with her); and their favorite way to spend time together: out on the deck, while Jen sat and read and Baxter slyly stalked squirrels and birds (though not quite concealed) from his grassy lair. For what touched us both was Baxter’s spirit. Without a doubt, our souls connected with his.
With Sakari, as I sat in that cave at the zoo, pondering her fate visit after visit, what stirred my heart so deeply was the ghost that lay perched in her tree. Long before the first time I saw her, Sakari’s spirit left the leopard in that pen. What remained there was only a shell—a body with no will to live, no reason to do so, empty and spent. The ache I felt that haunts me still is for the leopard I never knew. Where did her spirit go? What was she like before it was gone? Why couldn’t I find a way—any way—to bring her back?
Over the years from time to time, I’ve seen other animals like Sakari, shadows of beings who, in the course of their lives, have somehow surrendered their spirits. As I struggle to care for them, something, I sense, is palpably different from what I find with other animals. With them, it feels as if I’m working alone, trying desperately to open a door beyond which lies a cold, vacant house. As much as I try to reach out to them, all that remains is a haunting absence. There is no soul left for mine to meet.
Each of the animals we’ve considered in these pages—Pandora and Persephone with their nighttime games; Maurice’s reclusive avoidance of Jacques, when his brother started attacking him; Dougal with his penchant for reflections; Murphy and his steadfast presence during all his episodes; Sabrina in her acceptance of Mia—impressed me far beyond the details of their cases. In truth, what I remember most was simply by offering care to them, I felt touched in some way by their spirits.
The belief that animals’ souls touch ours is a widely held principle that crosses many cultures. Here in North America, near the turn of the twentieth century, Chief Letakots-Lesa of the Native American Pawnee tribe spoke of this relationship between animals’ souls and ours:
In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animals, for Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell men that he showed himself through the beasts, and that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon should man learn.… When man sought to know how he should live, he went into solitude and cried until in vision some animal brought wisdom to him. It was Tirawa, in truth, who sent his message through the animal. He never spoke to man himself, but gave his command to beast or bird, and this one came to some chosen man and taught him holy things.
I believe each of us is the holy man on our own journey, crying somewhere deep inside, yearning to feel more connected to others—animals and people—and the greater world in which we live. And surrounding every one of us are animals ready to serve as teachers by opening doors to new perspectives and ways of being beyond how we live. All we really need to do is pause a moment to notice them—in our homes and backyards, at the park and the zoo, or even along the side of the road—and take the time to truly watch and listen, setting aside the pace of our day, our thoughts about the past and future, and our countless wishes, worries, and fears that distract us so much from that precious moment.
If we are willing to focus on animals, putting aside ourselves for a bit, Tirawa can teach us holy things, for animals offer us ways of being that we cannot find simply by ourselves. And in that moment, if we allow our souls to touch those of animals, together we can change how we live from day to day, and discover a deeper sense of connection to others and the world around us.