Given that this is the season of hope and joy, and especially miracles, a good friend’s dog is in the process of having puppies as I write this. I was at her place yesterday and experienced that feeling of awe like no other as I laid my hands on that dog’s abdomen and felt the lives within. We both readily agreed that there was do word to describe it but “miracle”. And when my friend, a vet tech, called while ago to tell me the first pup had been born, she used the same word. As I pondered this later, I couldn’t think of any more appropriate one, either. But both of us had been highly trained in our veterinary and animal care work to sneer at those who would attach the word to this event in companion animals, particularly when parents said they got a pet so their kids could see this event. She and I had been among the chief sneerers. I was a wreck when my dog had pups and she has been likewise because, in all of our years of combined education and vet med practice, neither one of us had ever seen a normal birth. All the births we saw were nightmares, not miracles.
And yet, having experienced this miracle twice, and because of my interest in the bond, I can’t help wondering how much denying children that experience has helped create the separation from nature that plagues our society and manifests in such seemingly remote areas as our environmental policy, even as it demoted dogs and cats to blank slates upon which their owners (I refuse to use the word “guardian” in the his context) project human emotions that can result in health and behavioral problems for those animals.
It also seems to me (and this will show you just how weird I am), that the only other experience to which the word “miracle” can so readily applied is orgasm. Perhaps another reason for the increased sexuality in our young pre-teens and teens culture is because they’ve no first-hand experience with the consequences of it. Although birth is a miracle, an inextricable part of the message that only an idiot watching an animal give birth could deny is that, even at its very best, it’s not without its pain, hard work, and long-term responsibility. While that message is inherent in orgasm, the very in-the-moment nature of orgasm makes it easy to deny this.
No doubt these thoughts will horrify some, but we can’t say we love animals unless we’re willing to objectively explore all aspects of them and our relationships with them, not just those that suit our purposes.