All images in this post are sourced from Dr. Amanda Stronza. You can find out more about her work to cherish the dead here and here.
There are enough terrible things going on in the world, but I’ve inexplicably become fixated on all the terrible things going on in the world that have to do with animals. I don’t think animals have souls—though sometimes I wish they did—but there’s a special kind of pain when there are creatures who are punished for simply trying to exist.
One of my least favourite hymns is “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” The Trinity hymnal edition is a deplorable musical catastrophe, with ill-advised octave jumps that leave already-non-musical congregants baffled. But musical quibbles aside, it makes me wonder: if God was watching the flowers and sparrows in the Bible, is he watching still? Does God watch the city pigeons and the bumblebees and the groundhogs? And does God weep as I do when he sees a creature unnecessarily lost, destroyed by human hands? Does God wish he had spent more time in his book on stewarding the earth and its precious creatures? Does he grieve the callousness of humans, the way they shoot helpless animals and delight in habitat destruction?
“And God
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go someplace
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.
If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.”
— “Kinder Than Man” by Althea Davis
Of course, given the choice between saving the life of a human and that of a ferret, I know I’m supposed to save the human, and at the end of the day I’d follow my moral duty in that respect. Humans are, after all, meant to be the pinnacle of God’s creation, and nowhere in the good book are we told that ocelots reflect the image of God…but, don’t they, in a way? The gaunt and starving polar bears who try eating styrofoam to stay alive, I want to believe that they’re a reflection of God’s divine image and his care for creation. And they understand what’s happening to them, even if they can’t do anything about it—hence the unethical captivity of certain animals like orcas and polar bears.
Half of Britain’s badger population are being killed on the off chance they carry bovine tuberculosis. Badger mothers are killing other badger infants because there aren’t enough resources for multiple families to survive. There is inhumane slaughter of mink on fur farms, used for fake eyelashes and oversized coats. Orcas are evolving to try to find different food sources as they lose what they once relied on. Orphaned baby sea otters—for every one rescued, how many aren’t? Thousands of Emperor Penguin chicks—four colonies’ worth—are drowning because their home melted before they could grow their sea-going feathers. Extinction are happening constantly, with estimates varying wildly but a ballpark figure of twenty-four to one hundred and fifty species lost per day.
It makes my heart ache every time I see dead baby skunks and raccoons on the side of the road. The ethical culling of wildlife is necessary, yes—I understand and support the necessity of deer hunting, fishing, and so forth—but not the wanton cavalier destruction that so many people are prone to. Cattle and other livestock were effectively made for human utilisation, albeit in ethical and responsible ways, but wild animals aren’t. Torturing and killing a wild wolf just for fun is vile, but people still do it because they can. Animals can’t fight back, not really when they could easily be mowed down by our death machines. And I know that it’s so much worse when death and destruction are weaponized against fellow humans. But I still mourn every day. I hope God does, too.
“On my way to the fertility clinic,
I pass five dead animals.
First a raccoon with all four paws to the sky
like he’s going to catch whatever bullshit load falls on him next.
Then, a grown coyote, his furred golden body soft against the white
cement lip of the traffic barrier. Trickster no longer,
an eye closed to what’s coming.
Close to the water tower that says, “Florence, Y’all,” which means I’m near Cincinnati,
but still in the bluegrass state, and close to my exit, I see
three dead deer, all staggered but together, and I realize as I speed past in my
death machine that they are a family. I say something
to myself that’s in between a prayer and curse—how dare we live
on this Earth.
I want to tell my doctor about how we all hold a duality
in our minds: futures entirely different. Footloose or forged.
I want to tell him how lately, it’s enough to be reminded that my body
is not just my body, but that I’m made of old stars and so’s he, and that last Tuesday,
I sat alone in the car by the post office and just was for a whole hour, no one
knowing how to find me, until I got out, the sound of the car door shutting like a gun,
and mailed letters, all of them saying, Thank you.”
— “The Vulture & the Body” by Ada Limón
