Читать книгу The Dog Who Healed A Family - Jo Coudert - Страница 3

All the stories in this book are about animals, and all are true. What the stories have in common is the love and caring that can exist between animals and people. Nancy Topp struggled for weeks to get a seventeen-year-old dog home across fifteen hundred miles. Gene Fleming fashioned shoes for a goose born without feet and supported the goose in a harness until he learned to walk. Months after their javelina disappeared, Patsy and Buddy Thorne were still roaming ranch lands in Texas, Bubba’s favorite chocolate in their pockets, searching for their wild pig.

The Thornes recently sent a clipping from their local newspaper describing how a group of men out hunting with bows and arrows came upon a javelina. The animal stood still, gazing at the men, while they shot at it three times. When all three arrows failed to strike home, one of the men ventured close enough to pet the animal and found it was tame and welcomed the attention.

What is amazing about the report is not that the animal was Bubba—it was not—but that the hunters shot three times at a creature that was not big enough or wild enough to be a threat to them and that did not provide sport by running. And because the meat of a javelina is too strong-tasting to be palatable, they were not interested in it for food.

The hunters shot at the javelina because it was there, which is the same reason a neighbor who lives downriver from me catches all the trout within hours of the time the state fish and wildlife service stocks the stream. An amiable man who loves his grandchildren, the neighbor has built the children a tree platform where they can sit silently and shoot at the deer who come to the river to drink at twilight. He also sets muskrat traps in the river and runs over woodchucks and possums on the road.

The family doesn’t eat the deer; the frozen body of a doe has been lying all winter in the field in back of my woods. Nor does anyone eat the trout the man catches; he tosses them into a little pond on his property where they stay until they become too numerous and die from lack of oxygen. When I once asked this ordinary, pleasant fellow why he’d gone out of his way to run over a raccoon crossing the road, he looked at me in surprise. “It’s an animal!” he said as though that quite explained it.

To many people it is sufficient explanation. After all, did not Jehovah tell Noah and his sons that all the beasts of the earth and fish of the sea were delivered into the hands of man? Surely this is a license to destroy them even if we have no better reason at the time than the fact that they exist and we wish to.

Or is it? Belatedly we are beginning to realize that the duality of people and animals, us and them, is false, just as we have discovered that there is no split between us and the world. The world is us and we are the world. We cannot simply exploit and destroy, either the world or the animals in it, if we are not at the same time to do ourselves irreparable harm.

Consider what a Native American, Chief Seattle, said in 1854: “What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected. This we know: The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know: All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

The world belongs to the animals just as much as to us. Let us be unselfish enough to share it with them openly and generously. Which is to say, when you come upon a lost dog or an orphaned fawn or a goose born without feet, give it nothing to fear from you, grant it safety, offer to help if you can, be kind. In return, as the stories here show, you will sometimes find a welcome companionship, and surprisingly often love.

Jo Coudert

Califon, New Jersey