our counterparts

I just glanced at a pajama top this morning with a cute appliqued cartoon raccoon stitched onto it, and it struck me as especially odd, considering the wildlife drama at our house during the past week. We've had squirrels burrowing into our overhang, and they sounded like they were trying to scratch into our house, so I called our landlady and she sent Critter Control out to set traps. The first mother-pain was seeing two squirrels caught right away, with a smaller squirrel running circles around them. Oh, man. To think of the process of mothering, no matter the species, this is dramatic and sad. So. I tried to imagine that the humane process promised by the trappers (that they catch them live and release them farther away from residential areas) would unbelievably work like this: Mom (and Dad?) get caught the first night, are taken away to new land. The next night, son or daughter gets caught and the trappers set him-her free in the same spot. The family catches scent of one another and is joyfully reunited, running spirals up and down mossy tree trunks and squeaking thankfully. It was the only way I could feel okay about the night approaching, with the little guys pressing their eyes and teeth against metal. Oh, man. In the middle of the night, the sound of a heavy body thudding repeatedly woke me from sleep. In the dark, I saw a big raccoon body-checking the cages, heard frightened animal screams and scowls, and my blood ran cold. The long and short of it is that it wrested one cage free, sending it tumbling to the yard. And that, we thought, was that. Three hours later, the raccoon reappeared to get the second one. The same blood-chilling sounds of struggle and fear. This one made it through the night, doubtless with the memory of his companion's wild demise. But the other cage was gone, leaving only tufts of fur in the yard. And, well... a tail. So much for my dreams of familial reunion. Oh, man, indeed. And woman... the human-animal dilemma.

So this all feeds into my thoughts lately about animals in general... how close and far they are to us humans. We personify and relate to them in every way, but still love their otherness, and we have such an intricate relationship to them-- as damaged as all of our relationships seem to be on this earth, and as lovely. Pattiann Rogers says it so much more elegantly than I could in her poem "The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself" (this is an excerpt...click for the full version):

We use their heads and their bladders
for balls, their guts and their hides and their bones
to make music. We skin them and wear them for coats,
their scalps for hats. We rob them, their milk
and their honey, their feathers and their eggs.
We make money from them.

We make money from them.We construct icons of them.
We make images of them and put their images on our clothes
and on our necklaces and rings and on our walls
and in our religious places. We preserve their dead
bodies and parts of their dead bodies and display
them in our homes and buildings.