Animals R Us. Part One by Luanne Armstrong

When I was a child, I lived far more intensely with animals than with people. I spent a lot of time by myself in the woods and at the lakeshore. There were always a lot of animals at the farm, and, my brothers and sister and I made pets of all of them, every calf and pig and dog and barn kitten. We also brought home fish, turtles and sad baby birds that always died. The only things that weren’t pets were the chickens. There were simply too many of them. But one of my favourite jobs was to care for the hundreds of baby chicks that we ordered every year. They came cheeping and thirsty, in shallow boxes cardboard boxes. One by one, I picked them up, showed them the water and grain in their new home, the floor spread with clean sawdust, They huddled together under a metal hood, where a glowing red sun lamp mimicked the warmth of their lost mothers. I fussed over them, if they huddled together too much, they’d smother; if they were chilled, they’d get sick. But usually, they thrived and then one day, always exciting, I opened the door to the big world, a pen full of green grass and sun and watched as one by one, cautious and fearful, they ventured outside.
Eventually, the hens went off to the big chicken house and the roosters went into the freezer and I lost interest in them. There were so many other animals. Late one rainy spring night, my father came home. He called us downstairs, brought his hat out from under his jacket, full of wild baby mallard ducks. Their mother had been killed on the road. The ducks followed us to the beach all summer and then flew away that fall but for years, they, or their descendents, nested in our pasture. The fish, turtles and frogs went into the small pond we had made beside the house. They always escaped. We didn’t mourn them. There was more.

I also began a life-long habit of reading about animals. Stories about horses were my first choice but any animal book would do. In most of these books, the animals were braver, kinder, smarter and in general, more likeable than the human characters. And the people clearly, most of the time, didn’t understand animals. They beat them (Black Beauty) took them away from the people they loved and were faithful to, (Lassie Come Home) loved and lost them, (The Yearling.) I hid upstairs in my room on rainy days, curled up under the covers and wept over Lassie, starved and sick, sitting outside the school, waiting for her boy. I learned pretty much every lesson about being human from reading about animals.
Now, much later, I’m reading about animals again, but now I am looking for a particular kind of book, a book by someone who knows something about the animals they are writing about. Perhaps he or she is a scientist; perhaps not. I don’t care. What I want is for the writer to know and care about animals as what they are, no children or proto humans, but splendidly and only, themselves, in so far, as humans, that we are able to know that. Perhaps I am still looking for that ethical edge, that sense of care and morality towards animals that traditional morality still insists should only be extended to humans.
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Ethical considerations didn’t really enter into my childhood relationships with animals, although I did have an ongoing constant argument with Wally Johnson, our neighour. He was a trapper; my mother always said that the dogs could smell him coming. He smelled like death, she said, and indeed, the dogs did howl when his truck turned the far corner, came down the highway to our driveway and turned in. Wally was a wonderfully kind gentle man who believed that the only animals that really deserved to live were deer, trout, and songbirds. Everything else he saw as his job to kill, as many as possible, as often as possible. We were fascinated by the carcasses of dead animals in the back of his tiny green Austin pickup. He was always bringing things to show us; he knew more about animals than anyone else we knew, and when he sat at the kitchen table, with a glass of dandelion wine, we sat and listened to stories of cougar, lynx, coyotes, beaver, marten and min. In these stories, all the animals died. I was both drawn in and repelled. I didn’t mind helping my dad kill the farm animals, but wild animals seemed to me to belong to a different realm, one with which I sympathized, even felt akin to.
Wally took my arguments about animals and nature seriously. Somewhere I had heard or read about the phrase, “the balance of nature.” I wasn’t sure what it meant but even at seven or eight it seemed to me obvious that killing all the predators in the woods wasn’t a good thing and I told him this. In fact, we argued about it for years, neither of us ever convincing the other. But Wally also knew the woods and mountains in a way that very few people do anymore. When he was in his eighties, he hiked over the Purcell Mountains with a package of salt and fishing line. He took a young nephew along.
Wally told me this while standing on his head on the board swing tied to the giant walnut tree in the north garden. He had just had couple of glasses of my mother’s dandelion wine. He always did love both my mother and her wine.
Wally was always interested in my or my brother’s stories of what we had seen in our travels around the farm or in the woods. If we said we had seen a bird or a fish, he always immediately demanded to know where we had seen it, what it had looked like, what it was doing. He liked children because he was something of a sad child himself. He had been born in North Dakota in 1900; he often told us stories about how harsh his childhood had been, how little they had to eat and how he had left home at 12 and never gone back. His wife Nettie was the shyest woman around; she wore long skirts and head scarfs and made lard laden greasy doughnuts which we always politely ate on our visits even though they made us feel sick. One day we arrived at their house and somehow, their truck had gotten stuck in the mud. Wally was sitting in the front seat, gunning the motor and screaming, “Push, Nettie, push,” while Nettie struggled along grimly behind the truck, covered in black mud from the spinning tires.

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The animals I loved best and thus knew best were horses. I first learned to ride on our neighbour’s half-wild horses that they captured, tied in a corral until they were ‘broken’ and then turned them over to us kids to ride. Eventually, after much stubborn begging and pleading, I got a horse of my own. We couldn’t really afford a horse. Such an animal had no use on our farm. Everything we had we used to survive; a horse was purely a luxury. So my father bought her and then resented her for every mouthful of grass she ate. Eventually, he complained so bitterly that I let her go. But I never forgot what I learned from her. When I got her, I knew almost nothing about horses or riding and there was no one to teach me. The horse had never had any training either, so we learned together through a constant series of trial and error encounters, where she learned to figure out what I wanted and I somehow learned to communicate it to her.
My sister is now an accomplished rider and trainer. She says that a trained horse with a trained rider enter into a kind of consciousness where the rider really communicates by thinking, do this or go there and the horse feels the slightest shift in the rider’s body and responds. I never got even close to being that good a rider, but it is pure pleasure for me to watch my sister working with a horse, to watch the horse respond, to see the connection between horse and trainer.
One night, listening to the radio, as I often do when I am lying in bed waiting for sleep, I was listening to a program on whales and the commentator began talking about a term I had never heard before. Later, I looked it up. The word ‘umwelt’ is a German word that means environment, but it also has a specific meaning in the world of consciousness studies. It was coined back in 1930 by a German biologist named Jacob Von Uexkull. Von Uexkull was fed up with the era's dominant behaviorist view of animals, which considered only how animals acted – their behavior. He was more interested in what animals experienced, in the texture and quality of their felt sensory worlds. In an attempt to address this question, he published a monograph called A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men.
To get a glimpse into how animals experience their environment, Von Uexkull writes, "We must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows."
As we step into each of these bubbles, Von Uexkull goes on, "a new world comes into being." Each "new world" Von Uexkull called an Umwelt, a richly-detailed self-world which corresponds to the unique senses and environments of each animal. By imagining these Umwelt bubbles, he believed he could also imagine his way into the reality of the animal in question.
But to truly be able to do this, a human would have to stop assuming he or she knew the actual realty of the animal, stop thinking of it in human terms, stop comparing the animal behaviour and rating it by how close it is to human, stop in fact, making assumptions and just be in the animal’s space. My sister does this by thinking and acting, as much as is possible for a predator human, in a way that will make sense to a horse. And she watches the horse for its reaction to her. It’s a relationship in which they are both fully engaged.
At the farm now, I am far more conscious of the weird ethical contradictions that are involved in our relationship with animals, with which we are still surrounded. My city son-in-law always marvels at how, as he puts it, “In the Kootenays, the animals are just as important as the people.” And indeed, at the farm, we tell endless dog, and chicken and coyote and cow and pig stories. There is people gossip and animal gossip. Both are equally fascinating and equally necessary. The people gossip keeps us informed about our friends and who is doing what; the animal gossip plays a slightly different role. A lot of it is necessary information about how the animals are doing and what needs too be done or not done. In addition, the behaviour of animals is endlessly fascinating and intricate and we are always trying to understand and come to terms with it.
This year, we bought 20 baby pigs to raise. They came to the farm in the back of my brother’s pickup and were unloaded into their new clean pen. These pigs had never been outside, had been born in concrete pens and raised on concrete. They were terrified to go out so eventually my brother pushed them out the door of their shed, one at a time. And then one of them began sniffing the dirt. And then shoveling through it with his nose. And then tasting dirt and grass roots. Pigs really do caper and kick their legs in the air and this one did. He was manifestly in love with dirt. He kept snuffling through it and then looking at us. If a pig could smile, he did.
These pigs were still in a pen but they had a creek, shade, a mud wallow, grass. Every morning, all twenty baby pigs snorkeled their way through the mud pool. They liked to stand in the mud every morning after I let them out and have an amazingly long pee. The pigs quickly became a tourist attraction, people stopped on the road, brought their children to look, took pictures, wrinkled their noses at the smell and the proliferation of flies and black hornets and asked questions like “Do they bite?”

At the farm, we still love and care for animals. And then we eat them. And we are always just slightly uneasy about it but it feels all right. Recently, we killed five young roosters, gorgeous happy strutting roosters, with colourful feathers. But a flock of chickens only thrives well with one rooster; in nature, they would be driven off and probably eaten by predators. Here, we are the predators, big alpha predators with teeth. We don’t hunt and every year, I think I am going fishing but I don’t. I haven’t solved the bait problem. I am not, any longer, willing to squish worms or grasshoppers onto hooks. If I can find a passive, non cruel bait that works, I might, again, go fishing.
And I am also comfortable with the bargain we make with our animals; that they are loved and fed and cared for and then, they go from a living being to food as quickly and humanely as possible.