The Two Kinds of Animals

The first big announcement: we’re getting turtles. Or perhaps the chickens deserve to be announced first, we got them a few weeks ago. Or the rabbits we got in the spring. We’re looking after a friend’s cat, too, who arrived in August with several pieces of her own luggage. One dog, two cats, two rabbits, and four chickens will soon be joined by three turtles, whom William has already named Mossy, Coral Reef, and Shelly.* The turtles, like the rabbits, are a birthday present; in this case, for William’s seventh birthday, which falls right before and is largely overshadowed by Christmas.

When I told a friend I was getting three turtles hot on the heels of four chickens, she remarked that I must be quite an animal lover. In fact, I don’t consider myself to be an animal lover. I enjoy having pets, but I’m not terribly sentimental about them. I rarely eat meat, but more from a combination of larger environmental commitments and a certain squeamishness about gristle than any affective concern for the individual animal on my plate. When people online complain that they’ve had a bad day and could we all please send cute animal pictures, I get it, of course I do, but also I can’t imagine a single bad day I’ve ever had that would have been even slightly improved by seeing a picture of someone else’s dog.

And yet, I like having pets. I suppose it gives me something to do. Every morning I feed the dog and the cat (canned food, dry food, breath-improving treats). Then I let the rabbits out of their hutch into their run, feed them, water them, clean their hutch. I let the chickens out into the yard for the day, feed them, water them, clean their coop. We have heavy bags of rabbit pellets, chicken pellets, bundles of hay and straw, separate bowls of chicken and rabbit food scraps, and special chew sticks for the rabbits. At night the chickens need to be let back inside their coop and their heat lamp turned on. The first Monday of every month (Monthly Mammal Maintenance Monday) I give the dog and cats their flea and tick treatments, trim the cats’ nails, and give the dog a bath and his heartworm preventative pill. This long list sounds like a complaint, but really I like it. I find simple, repetitive tasks both calming and satisfying, and if soon I add “clean turtle pond” to the list, I will do so gladly. It’s not that I don’t love our pets; this is the way I love them.

Zac is digging a pond for the new turtles in the backyard. I went online to do a little research on what turtles want in a pond and came across a blog that led with some good information about water depth and temperature before adding quite casually that of course, if you allow your pet turtle outside, you or someone you trust must go outside to check on it every hour. The writer advises that you don’t embark on this path if you work outside the home or, I suppose, sleep in multi-hour stretches. They explain that anything could happen to an unguarded turtle: what if a hawk swooped down from the sky and snatched it up?

What if. I guess I’d—get a new turtle? I suppose that sounds heartless, but red-eared sliders aren’t exactly an endangered species. I would never intentionally harm a pet turtle in any way, but look, everything dies, and if we’re being perfectly honest, my sympathies lie more with native hawks than a turtle we bought at Petco.

The same thing happened in May when I was researching rabbit hutches and a dozen sites informed me that letting a rabbit live outside was tantamount to beating it to death with a shovel. But rabbits live outside? I thought, perplexed. I know I’ve definitely seen them there, being outside. 

It’s true, predators abound. We have coyotes in our neighborhood, and raccoons and a skunk we often glimpse waddling through the piles of fallen leaves under our elm trees. Farther up into the foothills neighbors on NextDoor report the occasional bobcat or bear. Just last night Zac found a possum hiding in our chicken coop when he went to let them in at night (the possum was gently evicted and the chickens unharmed).  We live in the city, within a short walk of any number of places to buy paper towels, but you can sit beside our backyard fire pit at night and scoot your folding chair around until the green-gray silhouette of the ash trees just obscures the floodlights from the church parking lot next door and it feels like wilderness.

In addition to the one dog, two cats, three rabbits, four chickens, and three turtles-to-be, we have an owl. Or rather, we don’t have an owl, an owl sometimes visits the live oak tree in our yard. Unlike the dogs and cats and turtles, it neither knows nor needs me. I love the owl. I first heard it calling in late May, but it wasn’t until July that I saw it for the first time, winging across our yard from one old oak to another, letting fall a single soft feather like a handful of pixie dust.

Over the summer, I fretted that the nightly fireworks would scare it away, later that it would be driven away by the fires. It didn’t appear at all in September or October. Then a few nights ago I was awake at 5am with sinus congestion and while lying in bed quite miserable, I heard our owl hooting again from its perch in the live oak tree, something I have not earned and could not deserve.

The second big announcement: we’re having another baby. Babies are one kind of animal, and then the other. Today he lives in his interior wilderness, unlit, private, opaque to our understanding. In May he will cross over from his secret, sufficient world into our own and join the rounds of cleaning and feeding and walking and wiping that constitute the way you love a newborn. I look forward to it. For now, he is only a little here, like a cry in the night, a gift of grace arriving from somewhere far away.

*I almost forgot, we also have 10,000 largely self-sufficient bees.

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You Can Find Me

Working on final exams and projects for graduate school, and therefore not publishing very much these days. But I have a month-long break coming up, so hopefully I’ll at least have time to write a few more letters confessing to my reckless disregard for turtles.

Unless I’m Busy

Making panettone and apple cider caramels for our neighbors, writing a paper about Everyman, (still/always) renovating the kitchen, digging a pond

Also I'm Very Excited About

Vermont boiled cider, Olive and June emerald nail polish, this light-up Christmas deer my sister bought me as a housewarming present

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