Dead pets

We ascribe human traits to animals in an attempt to understand them. The loyal dog, the aloof cat, the mischievous squirrel, the sneaky rat. We even think of insects as being industrious and social, living in colonies where their roles are well defined. We also think of their emotions as being like ours, especially, for some reason, guilt. 
We often overdo this for entertainment. There are decades of moving images of animals doing things in ways that make us laugh, cry, and lift us up somehow.
I was guilty of it with the cat I had put down a day ago. He had what I saw as a personal coolness, a style. And intelligence. I could, in the three months and eleven days I had him, see him think things through. The best way to drink from the toilet, how to use the footstool I put next to the bed to jump up on it. Which windows had the best views, where best to sleep at different times of the day.
This may make our time with the animals we take into our homes more valuable to us, but it also makes their deaths harder to bear. They have a kind of innocence to them that makes dying a cruel thing, a removal of life they don't deserve and don't see coming.
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

A bright side of being a moron like me

If you're like me and you have just a few hundred brain cells firing, life can be difficult. You can't figure out your health insurance policy, you have to pay others to do your taxes, you fall asleep when reading anything that smart people read. Cutting your fingernails is a task that takes preparation.
The good thing about being dumb is that it doesn't take much to please or amuse you. Squirrels running up trees, people walking outside your window, lit candles, warm bread.
I saw this picture of bats on a newspaper's website, saved it, then rotated it so it looks like the bats are standing around rather than hanging around. If you're one of the many who dislikes and fears bats, it's not the picture for you, but if you like the idea of a furry animal that can fly as much as I do and you're as dumb as I am, this picture might make you smile.

Dog walk

Pets are wonderful. At their best they lift your spirits with unconditional love. At their worst they remind you of the primitive, selfish parts of you that you, being human, struggle your entire life to conquer or at least suppress. (Or they're throwing up on the carpet. Never a hard surface that'd be easy to mop up. Always a rug or a carpet. Always.)
I had pets as a boy. Nothing exotic, the usual animals you'd find in a suburban house in the 1960s and 70s. Dogs, cats, gerbils, fish, turtles. As a teen, I wanted to be the cool guy with a boa constrictor, but when I found out you had to feed them live animals I demurred.
I never had a pet as an adult. 
Partly this is because I moved around more than most and, even when I was in one place for awhile, I was never sure where I'd be a few months from any given time. (I had hopes, dreams.) Partly it's because I lived in cities and I couldn't imagine having a dog or a cat that stayed in all day—or longer, for most cats—the small apartments I could afford to rent. When I was a kid you'd let your dog out in the morning and he'd (we always had males) run around all day, sometimes longer, if he smelled a female in heat. The dog would come back tired but happy at the end of his time in the wild. Everyone did that back then. Leashes were things you had to hunt for if you had to take your dog to a vet. (Sometimes quiet afternoons would be shattered by the awful sound of fur-covered bone getting slammed by the die-stamped steel of a car, followed by a shriek and a series of yelps that could have been anyone's dog; no one could tell because it was a sound they made only then. Sometimes it was your dog.)
Another reason I've had no pets since childhood is that my feelings for their suffering from ailments, injury, or age hurt me more deeply the older I became. The opposite should be true and maybe it is for people who form strong connections to their partners and children, but those are things I never did.
Two animals have died while I've cared for them and the grief I feel even decades later hurts more than anything else. The memory of deaths of people I've loved gives me a dull, empty ache. With animals, the memory induces a sharp pang that makes me draw a breath rapidly.

Me walking the dog.

Right now I'm taking care of a sister-in-law's Corgi and I'll be doing so for the next four days. I've done this several times before and the dog and I know each others' routines well. She hasn't been with me for over seven months because of the operations I've had that have failed to keep a terminal illness at bay, but she remembers all the little rules and customs I follow. She knows which door I'll use to exit the house, where I'll put her water and food, whether we're going to visit the back yard, walk around the neighborhood or, joy of joys, go for a car ride. When I get up from the desk or couch she knows whether I'm going into the kitchen to do something food related or to another room for another reason.
Animals aren't psychic, but they know things. Dogs' sense of smell is so beyond anything we can comprehend that it might as well be psychic. 
After a few drinks, I hold the dog close and say, "Do you know how sick I am? Do know when I'm going to die?"
She wriggles, says nothing.

Too close

Two deer in the Loser's back yard.

Last night, during a short highway drive, the Complete and Total Loser came just feet from hitting a deer as it ran across the road from the Loser's left to right. The Loser had a hard time believing he didn't hit it, it was so close, and drove for several minutes afterward with a stupid, slack-jawed look on his unattractive face. 
Today, the Loser saw a dead cat on another road, the victim of a car. It made him think about how and why it tugged at his heartstrings—it was probably someone's pet—yet it had no more or less personality than a deer. The Loser can see personality differences in the deer that enter his back yard. Some are bolder than others, some of the young ones are more playful than their peers.

Vigilance

#1: What happened?
#2: The human came out in the yard.
#1: Oh. Is he carrying anything?
#2: Yes. The black thing that clicks when he puts it on his face.
#3: Is that dangerous to us?
#2: I'm not sure. Nothing's happened yet, but I've heard about what happens when other humans put things on their face. Especially the long sticks.
#1: We'd better stand up and look in all directions anyway.
#2: Just in case.
#4: Well, I'm not going to worry about it.
#3: You! You don't worry about anything! 
#1: You seem kind of tired today. Are you all right?
#4: Actually, I'm kind of achy and tired. I feel like I have Lyme disease!
#2: Funny.
#1: Good one.
#3: Yeah. Almost as funny as it was yesterday.

Second capture

Raccoons are different, though it's not like the Complete and Total Loser has much experience with wild animals. The one he caught earlier this morning and released in a park far away hours later didn't react the way the Loser would if he were a captured animal. 
For all the raccoon knew, it was going to be killed in some horrible way. If it caught a frog, for example, it may bite off a hind leg first. Then an arm. Meanwhile the frog's alive to see this. The Loser doesn't approve of eating meat and eats little of it himself, but at least when most humans kill animals for food they try to make its death quick of not entirely painless.
If the Loser were in this trap, he'd snarl and spit at his captor. This raccoon, however, like its friend captured late last week, just looked sad. 
The Loser let it go in the same spot as the first in the hopes that the two will find each other and live out their raccoon lives in a peaceful wilderness.

A raccoon in a Havahart trap.

Nature

A Philadelphia suburb, fall, 1975. The Complete and Total Loser and his classmates are on a college campus across the street from his high school. There's a small pond there, home to some fish, other unknown water dwellers and a jumble of ducks of varying sizes and colors. On one side of the pond is mowed grass. On another an acre or so of ungroomed woods.
The Loser and two other ninth graders, all boys (the school is single sex), are working on a biology class project assigned by a progressive teacher who has severe diabetes and has the distinction of being one of the longest surviving people to receive dialysis. He will die by the end of the academic year and is seldom well enough to teach his class now. This gives the Loser and others permission to go off campus, where they smoke pot and cigarettes and swear at full volume. Boys with bumpy skin wearing sport coats and neckties, sitting on rotting logs smoking Marlboros.

These many years later, though, it's the assigned work the Loser remembers. Each group picked a square meter of ground and examined it in detail. They dug a foot deep, took plant samples, and swept a net repeatedly back and forth over the site, grazing the grass and other fauna, to collect whatever insects lived on it.
The Loser doesn't remember the exact number, but it was in the double digits. Dozens of species, living together even as they competed on land that was not remarkably fertile.
Human beings are the only species on earth that could voluntarily, peacefully, bring about their own end. Imagine what a beautiful planet this would be in just a few centuries if we did. The seas, teeming with life. The land rich under clear skies.

The Honeycomb

Today the Complete and Total Loser found a honeycomb while walking from the train station to his parents' house. It took him back to his boyhood days, when finding animal technology like this was a wondrous hint of another world hidden yet surrounding him.

Whatever happened to animals? All they are now to people is pets, pests or food. It would be nice, the Loser thinks, if they presented real dangers to large numbers of humans. It'd keep us humble.