The Soul of a Chipmunk

There is a bird bath by our back door, and in the evening the wildlife come to drink. It’s like a Serengeti waterhole, with finches, a squirrel or two, and the chipmunks in lieu of ostriches, wildebeest, and gazelles. There is even a lion-equivalent, albeit behind the glass: the cat Telemann, who creeps and skulks and lashes his tail and then hurls himself against the glass, sure that this time he’ll get lucky.

The squirrels long ago figured out the nature and role of glass doors, and they pass this knowledge down to their children, who ignore the gray beast and continue with their drinking. The chipmunks are more skittish, but they’re slowly learning to ignore Telemann’s attacks.

Chipmunks, even full-grown ones, exude baby charm, with their big heads, tiny noses, and widely spaced eyes. Elegant stripes of black, cream, and gray run the length of their bodies, as if they had been carved from some richly veined wood. From my COVID cloister, I spend a lot of time watching chipmunks, and as anyone knows who has looked closely, in order to draw it, at a leaf or a sleeping cat, the attentive gaze sooner or later ensnares the heart.

The Franciscan Richard Rohr says that “we must love something deeply to know its soul.” So if looking leads to loving, and loving leads to knowledge of another’s soul, I should, with luck, before autumn come to know something of the chipmunk‘s soul. But what can a chipmunk’s soul, its essence, possibly be like? How can I, a lumbering giantess by comparison, understand the quicksilver brevity of a chipmunk?

Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak we wouldn’t understand him. But he was talking about understanding as an intellectual process. I’m talking about knowledge and understanding as an action of the heart, prompted by love--the kind of knowledge that Saint Francis had of the birds and of the wolf of Gubbio. The kind of understanding that Robert Burns had of the mouse whose nest he accidentally broke up with his plow. The kind of knowledge of our brother primates that rewarded Jane Goodall’s patient gaze.

As the summer unspools, I attend to the chipmunks, and wait to see what arises. The trouble is, they’re so quick that they’re usually just a blur, so to supplement my practice I looked at a couple of chipmunk videos on YouTube.

One of them showed a mother chipmunk who had made her nest inside what looked like the hollow leg of a horizontal aluminum ladder. The end was covered by a piece of metal with a hole in the middle. Her thumb-sized baby was old enough to crawl out of that hole, but, in her opinion, not old enough to spend the night outside.

She opened her mouth wide, picked him up around the middle, and tried to stuff him sideways into the hole, but he was too big. She put him down and picked him up by the hip, but he still didn’t fit. He needed to go in nose-first, the way he had come out, but she couldn’t manage it.

It was getting dark, and she was frantic to get him back inside and put him to bed.  He would have none of it. With the foolish invulnerability of the young, whenever she loosened her grip he would move away, twitching his tail and staring out at the wide, green, new world. She tried showing him by example. She went into the hole and then stuck out her head saying, see how it’s done? But he would ignore her and she would jump out and pick him up again.

I watched the four minute video in an agony of maternal empathy. Here before my eyes the eternal drama of the generations was being played out: the young struggling to get out and get away, and the old pleading, Wait! It’s not safe! You’re not ready yet!

The chipmunks outside my window move too quickly for me to grasp their soul. But that mother chipmunk was speaking my language, and her words echoed in my heart.

Golfing Bees

I heard it on NPR, so it must be true: scientists trained bees to play a golf-like game in which the bee pushed a ball into a little hole in order to get a sugar-water reward. The trained bees then demonstrated before novice bees, who not only learned from them but quickly figured out ways to put the ball in the hole more efficiently than the trained bees.

Half a century ago Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees used twigs to get tasty termites out of their mounds. Instances of tool use further “down” the evolutionary scale, among monkeys, birds, and even octopuses, soon followed.

One by one, the flags that once marked us as unique are going up in flames as animal behaviorists show that, when given appropriate tools such as computers, certain primates can use language, albeit in a rudimentary way. And if you paint a dot on the face of a monkey, an elephant, a dolphin, a magpie, or even an ant, and then stand them in front of a mirror, they will touch the paint spot, thus demonstrating a kind of self-awareness.

And now bees, despite their tiny brains, have shown that they can readily learn, and improve on, behaviors that in the wild are totally outside their repertoire.What are we supposed to do with all this information? Fret and feel guilty, obviously.

I can’t spray soapy water on the ants on my kitchen counter without feeling like some vengeful deity massacring innocent beings. And what about my nemesis, those mouse-sized, appalling wolf spiders that come into my warm house in the fall, hoping in their little spider hearts that this year I’ll let them hang out in a corner of the mud room? Am I a monster for going after them with a broom?

How can I justify anything but the strictest veganism when I know that eating eggs (even ones from free-range hens) and dairy is predicated on the sacrifice of male chickens and calves? Yet even vegans must think twice before sitting down to dinner, now that it has been revealed that trees communicate with each other, warning of dangers such as invasive insects. Mother trees, bless their hearts, do their best to protect and nourish their little saplings. If trees are sentient, what about other plants? How does a lettuce feel as it is yanked out of its native soil?

I don’t know where this will end, and perhaps some human-made disaster will close this chapter in the development of our consciousness. But one outcome is that, albeit slowly, our treatment of animals is improving.

Many years ago, before the advent of PETA, I worked for a few months in a respected laboratory where, with the goal of curing cancer, thousands of mice, hamsters, and rats were subjected to great suffering. Today those conditions would be unthinkable, and a place like that would be closed down.

Every spring, in Vermont, when the moon is in a certain phase and the salamanders march to their breeding grounds, hundreds of people spend the night at designated spots on country roads, acting as crossing guards for the amphibians.

Not so long ago, in both rich and poor neighborhoods , dogs and cats used to run loose, breeding, fighting, and getting run over. Leash laws and spay/neuter programs have rendered the lifestyle of our pets far less “natural” than in the old days, but as a result they live longer, healthier lives. It used to be that you never heard of a cat living into her late teens, but I now personally know of several.

Not a moment too soon, we humans are beginning to abandon our cherished spot at the top of the evolutionary scale. As science demonstrates that sentience and cognition are more widely distributed than we ever imagined, the great chain of being is morphing into a circle, a dance that Brother Wolf and Brother Rabbit (and even Sister Spider) can join in, along with us.

Just Animals

I was watching Rachel Maddow the other night when I heard an odd splashing in the Japanese fish tub. The female of my pair of fantail goldfish was swimming on her side, twisting and writhing, clearly in pain. Instantly Rachel, Russia, and even Trump vanished from my mind. What was wrong with my fish? What if I couldn't cure her and she died? What if I had to euthanize her?

Was I overreacting? After all, it was just a goldfish, the sort of creature that people used to bring home from the fair, decant into a brandy snifter, and when it expired a few weeks later, dump unceremoniously into the toilet.

Those were also the days when newly-hatched chicks, dyed pink or blue for Easter, were given to children to play with until the birds perished from stress and their limp little bodies were thrown out with the garbage.

For that matter, when pets roamed freely in suburban streets, before spaying and neutering became the cultural norm, well-meaning people routinely drowned unwanted litters of puppies and kittens. After all, they were just animals.

Today, of course, Easter chicks are a thing of the past, and unwanted puppies and kittens are placed in foster homes, their reproductive organs are excised under anesthesia, and would-be adopters are carefully screened before they're allowed to take their new pet home.

Now there are leash laws, and no-kill shelters, and fines and jail sentences for animal abusers. Stories of people's dedication to their pets' welfare are everywhere. I have a friend who for years had to rush home from work to give her diabetic cat his insulin shot, and another whose day revolves around meeting the needs and wants of his ancient, arthritic, almost blind Lab.

This new-found sensitivity extends beyond our pets. Every winter Americans spend millions on seeds and suet for the birds, and I could name half a dozen people who, if they find a spider in the house, carefully trap it under a glass, slip a piece of paper under it, and take it outside (I am not among the latter. I clobber large spiders to death with a broom, and drown ticks in the toilet). Thanks in great part to the genius of Temple Grandin, cows and pigs can now aspire to death with at least a measure of dignity. And most grocery stores stock eggs from cage-free or even pastured hens.

There has been a sea-change, within the last half century, in our attitude towards animals. The wall between "them" and "us" has become progressively thinner, until it is an almost transparent veil. The hen on her nest, the cat at the window, are not mere machines, as Descartes infamously maintained. Thanks to Darwin, Konrad Lorenz, Jane Goodall and others we are beginning to see ourselves in them, and them in us.

Hence my preoccupation with my ailing goldfish, my friend's commitment to her cat, and the growing number of people who refuse to eat "anything with a face." There is nothing childish or silly about this, on the contrary. On days when it seems like human civilization is going down the tubes, I see in our compassion for the beasts a major reason for optimism, for it is in recognizing our kinship with the animals, and with all beings on the planet, that we finally become truly human.

Goldfish update: with the help of Google, I diagnosed swim-bladder disorder, withheld food for 24 hours, and she is now her old self again.