Even before Matilde's death on Sunday morning, I'd been planning to blog about animals and responsibility this week. Last month, a number of us in the blogosphere were moved by Chris Clarke's experience with a helpless baby squirrel he discovered on a hike. Chris celebrated the little creature's life with a fine poem, and explains eloquently why he chose to leave it to near-certain death rather than attempting a rescue.
Stentor Danielson, whose blog is one of the best in the 'sphere on matters environmental, made a powerful case that Clarke (and others in his situation) should intervene to help an injured wild animal, without worrying about "interfering with nature". Stentor writes:
Who among us would leave a human injured by a natural disaster to die, reasoning that we shouldn't interfere with nature? Why, then, treat a suffering non-human differently than a suffering human?
One might point out, rightly, that there's no such thing as a purely natural disaster. But there are disasters that are not purely social, and I would doubt that we can make our degree of responsibility for hurricane victims proportional to the share of the blame that human activities hold. And even so, it's strange to claim that there purely natural disasters claim no human victims, or that we should care only for the human victims of human-caused disasters.
Our moral obligation is not just to right the wrongs that we (individually or collectively) are responsible or blameable for. Our moral obligation is to relieve suffering, regardless of what the cause is.
Saturday night, just twelve hours before Matilde passed, my wife and I were taking a walk with my two younger sisters in Santa Barbara. Since my Dad received his terminal diagnosis in April, we've been spending most of our weekends up in the town of my birth. It was near dusk when the four of us came across a small fledgling starling hopping along the sidewalk. At first we thought it was a small bird with a broken wing, but on closer investigation realized it was a little one still too young to fly; he presumably fell (or was pushed) from a nest. We looked around carefully -- there was no sign of a nest (or anxious parent birds) anywhere nearby.
One of my sisters (who reads this blog and remembered my post about Chris and the squirrel) suggested gently we leave the bird alone and let "nature take its course." My sister is not a cruel person in the slightest; her environmentalism is simply closer to Chris Clarke's. But my wife and I, overcome as we usually are by sentiment and compassion, made a different choice. I raced back to the house for the car and a phone book, while my wife carefully guarded the evidently frightened and exhausted little creature.
We called a 24-hour vet and were quickly directed to our new favorite charity (besides Matilde's Mission, of course!) : The Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. We called 'em, dropped by, and within half an hour our little rescue was in a safe place with half a dozen other birds who had been found in similar situations. (Here is their suggestion page for wild bird emergencies.) We were assured we had done the right thing -- given that our little friend was unable to fly, he would surely have been a meal for some domestic animal very quickly.
If we had been on safari in the African bush in a relatively unspoiled environment, I might have understood not interfering. But in an urban area already transformed by humans (or even in most local regional parks), there's no point in pretending that there's anything "natural" about leaving a helpless creature to be eaten or die of dehydration! More importantly, I am convinced that God places us in situations where we are given the opportunity to choose whether or not we will help the most vulnerable among us. Whether it is with the homeless or with the helpless, each encounter offers us a stark choice: will we be agents of God's mercy or not?
Few serious Christians expect God, acting sovereignly, to solve all earthly problems in an instant. The healing of the world -- what my Jewish and Kabbalist friends call tikkun olam -- is also accomplished by God working through human beings. The Apostle tells us in 1 Corinthians that we are God's fellow workers, and though it is God who makes all things grow and work out in the end, we are needed to plant seeds and water them. It's useless, in other words, to cry out to God about the injustice of injured fledglings; as far as I am concerned, on Saturday night, God sent me and my wife to be His agents in the life of that tiny and vulnerable creature. What happens to that little bird after we delivered him to the Wildlife Care Network is not in our hands -- but whether to intervene or not was. We did what we did not merely because it felt good, but because the healing of the human and the natural order comes, at least in part, through a billion small actions such as ours.
I am not for a minute trying to impugn the decision that Chris Clarke made to leave behind a baby squirrel. I understand his reasons, and there is a huge body of modern environmentalist literature that would agree that he did the right thing. My environmentalist credentials, after all, are suspect: I may be a vegetarian anti-fur activist, but I've got more than one pair of leather shoes and I do like to travel around in fuel-guzzling airplanes. I have to be careful to distinguish an intense sentimental attachment to individual animals from a wiser and broader love for all of creation.
But just as with my feminism, my environmentalism is a process -- a slow deepening of my commitment to nature and a slow intensifying of my ability to empathize and connect with all of His creatures. One way I measure my growth is by my commitment to those few individual animals God places in front of me. What happened on Saturday night with the little starling was not all about me, but it was a chance -- to give up an hour of my evening in service to creation, or to walk on by and remain absorbed in my (admittedly very pressing) cares. My wife and I can't save the world by ourselves in an instant; but when we can play a small part in tikkun olam, I believe we must do so.
By the way, we don't have a Pasadena equivalent to the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network... yet!
Thanks for the good word, Hugo.
I'm still utterly puzzled over Stentor's analysis, however. The squirrel I found was not necessarily there as part of a "disaster." For all I knew, I had interrupted the meal of a raven or a coyote, and I like ravens and coyotes quite a bit. Unless you're willing to include "lunch" as a subcategory of "disaster," Stentor's analysis was way off.
As was his analysis of my motives. My act — or "inact" — was not at all a decision to step aside based on some high-minded principle of human non-involvement. I've rescued injured wild animals in the past and I almost certainly will again. Catted birds, I help without hesitation. Seals with six-pack rings entangled or deer caught in the barbed wire, certainly.
But there I had a choice between acting and not, and I did not know which course of action would cause the least hurt. I could have helped the squirrel, at the cost of depriving another animal of a meal to which it had every right and adding to the pressure on native squirrel species that the fox squirrels displace on Mount Diablo. Or I could have walked away, consigning the baby to probable death and yet avoiding causing additional harm to another wild animal, for whom that baby squirrel could well have meant the difference between life and death as well.
I chose the simpler course. I would not criticise anyone who took the other course. But my act was a rejection of the anthropocentric desire to help out of humane sentiment despite my ingorance of that gesture's true effects, and I have to admit it rankled to see Stentor apply such a silly and superficial analysis to what I wrote.
Posted by: Chris Clarke | June 16, 2006 at 06:21 PM
I just started reading Chris' blog regularly, so I'll have to catch up on this issue. I do agree with what he wrote above, though. Ravens and coyotes have to eat too. But if I can clearly tell that the calamity occurred as a result of a human act, I won't hesitate to step in. (And admittedly, sometimes I'll act when it's merely a strong likelihood.)
This post is timely for me, as I've been blogging recently about some baby skunks that my sister's ex has rescued. Their mother was killed on the road outside his workplace. I suppose it's that time of year.
Posted by: Trailhead | June 16, 2006 at 07:06 PM
Chris: My apologies for attributing the argument I was attacking to you. I freely admit that I don't "get" poetry, so my post relied on Hugo's interpretation of your poem. I gather from Hugo's reactions that I have correctly read his interpretation of the poem.
And Hugo, what have I told you about worrying about the status of your credentials? ;^) In any event, the intervention/nonintervention question is a matter of debate within environmentalism, not a reason to judge some people as insufficiently environmentalist.
Posted by: Stentor | June 16, 2006 at 07:52 PM
Also, Blogger did some wonky things to my archives, so the proper link to my post is: http://www.brunchma.com/~acsumama/blog/archive/2006_05_21_oldblog.html#114852476676861923
Posted by: Stentor | June 16, 2006 at 07:59 PM
In any event, the intervention/nonintervention question is a matter of debate within environmentalism, not a reason to judge some people as insufficiently environmentalist.
Absolutely.
Posted by: Chris Clarke | June 16, 2006 at 10:28 PM
Thanks for the updated link, Stentor -- and for the clarification of your argument and Chris's. I'm not at all sure that any of us are at cross-purposes here.
Posted by: Hugo | June 16, 2006 at 11:43 PM
In other words, Chris Clarke understands the difference between compassion and pity, which is all to his credit. I'd have left the squirrel, too.
Posted by: Douglas, Friend of Osho | June 17, 2006 at 12:57 PM
Your timing is eerie :)
Just this morning, I heard loud peeping just outside my bedroom door and realized it was coming from the trapdoor to the attic. Now, I've got enough nests in the roof that I figure they're an essential part of the insulation, but this hasn't happened before. I slowly pulled the trapdoor down and the little guy fell out on me all of a sudden.
I think it was a starling, we get lots of starlings. Some pin feathers, eyes just starting to open, and surprisingly frisky. Took me a few minutes to find the most likely nest -- under the eaves, near a bit of daylight and making more peeping noises -- and put him back as best I could through the space he probably fell out by.
Meanwhile, the cats were complaining that they couldn't get up the ladder to help. :)
Thanks for giving me a chance to tell the story. I don't have a lot of people that I could tell it to.
Posted by: carlaviii | June 19, 2006 at 09:42 PM