The Return of the Animals

“Gradually extend the boundaries of the glowing kingdom of your love to include your family, your neighbors, your community, your country, all countries– all living sentient creatures.”

Paramahansa Yogananda

We rejoice at the spring bird-song of the mating season during the day now that we have the spring peeper choruses at night… some of the most beautiful sounds on the planet.  We search every rock in every pond, looking for turtles sunning.  The first opossum of the season appear and what a thing of joy it is.   No longer is he cringing in some nest of wood and leaf debris for shelter from the cold.  He is running past our door to find a mate.  All round and rotund.

Animals work their unique and miraculous magic on depressed souls and bring joy.  Animals are natural anti-depressants… how a child’s face lights up with joy to touch an animal or observe one up close.  Adults, too, are wooed by their innocence.  Animals bring enchantment, enrich our lives.  That is why therapy dogs and other animals do such good work in hospitals, prisons, hospices for the dying, wherever there is misery.

The return of the animals brings music to the air, replacing the ominous gale winds of winter and the blanketed silence of snows.  Insects hum and buzz.  Birds sing and chirp.   Windows are opened wide to allow sweet- smelling, soporific breezes to blow through our houses. Little green shoots become beautiful flowers in our gardens, along side roads, in the fields.  Trees come to life again, gods of greenery.  Fat, red-breasted robins perk up the lawn in their search for worms.  And we no longer have to worry about animals starving.  The deer we see mid-March in groups, scavenging for food are thin and weak.  And the squirrels have run out of their stores as well, raiding the bird feeder which they normally leave to the birds.  A late Spring means animals will starve and die with no edible items.

And yet, with all the pleasure the return of the animals brings us, do we welcome them with open arms? No, we fumigate our land and spread pesticides all over their territory.  Many species of birds are heading towards extinction due to our use of pesticides and, generally speaking, our “development” of the land.  We destroy vernal pools, thinking them mere puddles rather than the breeding place of frogs and salamanders. We take the babies of spring– the lambs, the calves– away from their mothers and slaughter them.  Sometimes with abject cruelty, in full view of the mothers.  The mothers wail in anguish.  We break bonds stronger than the supposedly solid bond of human matrimony that nowadays fails as often as it succeeds.

In The Letter Writer, famed author, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote: “In his thoughts, Herman spoke a eulogy for the mouse who had shared a portion of her life with him and who because of him, had left this earth. “What do they know–all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world–about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

This is how we repay those who bring us such joy, such love, such purity– those who uplift, save lives, care for us.  It has been said that a dog is the only creature who loves his caretaker more than he loves himself.  Dogs have it over us in this. 

Spring is here and, with it, the return of the animals.  Without them, as Rachel Carlson warned, it would be a “silent spring”.