A Small Furry Prayer (16 page)

I don't know how far we all ran that day, but much of that canyon for sure. What finally drew us to a halt was a six-foot drop where the riverbed should have been. I bailed off to the side, and five silly dogs landed on top of me. By then, we were all laughing. It was an experience unlike any I'd previously had with animals, which meant it was like just about every experience I had with animals. Which also explains illustrator Brad Holland's famous definition of surrealism: “An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.”

31

By the time that second summer was in full swing, our network had grown large enough that I actually got to see what it took to run a real rescue. And
see
is the operative word. While I was down in the goat shack writing, Joy was in charge of the vast understatement I called “daily living.”

We had about twenty dogs by now; many were older, many without teeth. Each of these older dogs needed to be fed individually, some hand-fed with a spoon. All told, about a half hour's work. The dogs' diets varied depending on health status and nutritional requirements, and there was some home cooking involved, so food prep took her another half hour. The dogs get their big meal in the morning, and two smaller snacks in the afternoon, and that's one more hour's work. The distribution of medicine requires two twenty-minute installments, the washing of dog towels and pee pads and other rescue paraphernalia about the same. Dog walks last around seventy-five minutes. And then there's the work of rescue, which doesn't look like much from the outside, but it's most of the secret. What it looks like is a woman sitting in a chair petting a dog. Joy tries for twenty minutes a day for each of ours. I've tried it as well. It took three hours and my hand went numb. What I called “daily living,” Joy called a solid eight hours.

What I called public relations was another part of the job I finally got to see. PR was split into administration, admissions, and anomalies. Administration is the standard pile of non-profit paperwork plus a three-stage adoption process. The first stage is a telephone interview with a potential adopter. A lot of our dogs have been too traumatized to handle much roughhousing, so placing dogs in homes with small children is something we try to avoid. For this reason, during those phone calls, “Do you have kids?” is where Joy often starts. She goes on from there. “Do you work from home? How much time will the dog spend alone all day? Will the dog be walked? Sleep inside? Is the yard fenced?” As most of our dogs have chronic health problems, “Can you handle the medical responsibilities?” is important. Mostly, though, it's a vibe thing. If Joy likes their vibe, then it's on to stage two.

This is when the potential adopter meets the potential adoptee for the first time. This is also about vibe, but we're less interested in how much the person likes the dog than in how much the dog likes the person. After initial introductions, does the dog hang around, want to be petted, want to play? If the dog climbs into the potential adopter's lap and goes to sleep, this is among the better signs, because it means the dog feels safe. One story comes to mind: the potential adopter a woman named Janice, in her seventies, a little odd, huge breasts—more on that in a moment.

The elderly are a difficult conundrum for dog rescuers. On one hand, older folks tend to make fantastic dog owners, especially for special-needs dogs that require more time, patience, and tenderness than others. But a lot of rescues are nervous about placing a dog with a senior because the senior could die at any time. The long-term concern is having to start over and find the dog a new home, a process that is both time-consuming for the human and traumatic for the animal, but the short-term concern—the person dies and the dog is trapped with no food and no water until someone discovers the body—is the real problem. To get around this problem, Joy had started “Seniors for Seniors,” a canine lending library of sorts. Instead of adopting out the dog, we leased, with the critical condition being that the leaser agrees to call in every other day to verify their status among the living.

Before we lease an older person a dog, safety concerns demand that we verify dementia hasn't set in, so we tend to conduct lengthy in-person interviews. In the middle of our interview with Janice, the phone rang and Joy went to answer it. A second later a barking riot broke out at the far end of our fields. I went to check on that. Janice stayed behind with Flower, her potential match, a teacup Chihuahua with special needs. Ever since celebrities started appearing in magazines with these tiny dogs, demand has gone up. Since breeders can charge six thousand dollars for one, supply went up as well. The hidden cost is the severe inbreeding needed to make a dog that small. The results are litters of sickly, often brain-damaged animals sent to shelters for every healthy one sold to a Paris Hilton fan. Dealing with these dogs takes a certain touch. Janice didn't have dementia; we were trying to decide if she had that touch.

The reason I mention her bust size is that Joy's phone call lasted a little while, as did the ruckus. Ten minutes passed by the time I returned from the field. I got back to find Janice beaming. When I asked what was up, she flashed me: lifting her blouse clear over her head. It wasn't her boobs she wanted me to see. It was Flower, dead asleep, tucked perfectly between them. What do we look for in a potential adopter? Janice had the right touch.

Stage three is a home check. Just as it sounds, one of us drives out to the adopter's house, makes sure the dog still likes the match, makes sure the person still likes the match, and makes sure the house is safe enough for the both of them. Some of this is preventive medicine. Joy likes to point out all the things that are likely to get broken by introducing a dog into the environment. She says it helps with the “bereavement process”—meaning it tempers how pissed off that adopter is going to be when a favorite rug becomes a jigsaw puzzle.

Admissions are the second component in public relations, and they're supposed to be straightforward: we get a call about a dog in need and help if we can, but there are too many dogs and not enough rescuers and never enough space. I have learned to fear those phone calls. I know of no other job save those in war zones where death is such a constant, and fewer still where just trying to help means making so many decisions of the who-should-live-and-who-should-die variety. Every rescuer agrees: admissions are the worst part of the gig.

The last part, anomalies, is mostly reputation. To date I have fielded calls from three countries and every state save Alaska, and I don't much answer the phone. Typically the person on the other end knows almost nothing more than Joy's name and the rumor that she has a way with small dogs with big problems. The first thing Joy always tells them is that her way is to let the dogs be dogs and love them for it—but no one thinks it's that easy and the conversations take much longer. What I call anomalies, Joy calls another two hours of her day.

Perros
is the Spanish word for “dogs.” Not long after returning from the Gila, a woman I'd never met stopped me at the grocery store to ask if I was married to the
angel de los perros.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Is the angel smart, skinny, and smoking hot?”

Turns out we were talking about the same person.

“
Necesitamos más como ella
,”
is what this woman said to me. It means “We need more like her.”

I couldn't agree more.

32

Back when my friend Joe first introduced me to his friend Joy, as I was immediately smitten, he followed that introduction with a warning.

“Great woman, amazing writer—but crazy.”

“Crazy how?”

“Dog rescue,” he had said. “It's not a cause, it's a cult.”

This may not exactly be the case, but it's not entirely wrong. The British philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark once asked: “What are animals really like? How far can we trust our own unthinking recognition of their fear, fidelity or cleverness? How far should we accept the impulse to decree a strict division between us and them? Here then is the issue. How shall we decide?” Dog rescuers appear cultish because they have already decided and their decision is not a popular one. They reject, at least on some level, the division between “us” and “them.” Quite simply, they don't see humans as special.

To understand all this it helps to start at the beginning. In 1637, the French philosopher René Descartes published his
Discourse on Method on Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences
and laid out his four fundamental rules for doing philosophy: Accept as true only what is indubitable; divide every question into manageable parts; begin with the simplest issues and ascend to the more complex; review frequently enough to retain the whole argument at once. Out of this emerged a number of different ideas, including his legendary
Cogito
—“I think therefore I am”—and a bunch of downstream correlates upon which most of modern science was built. The anchor in Descartes's
cogito
was language. He knew he thought because he could describe his thoughts in language. What he didn't know was if animals thought. Descartes had already decided to doubt anything he could not prove, but lacking a common language, he had no way to prove animals could think. He concluded they couldn't. Animals, in his opinion, were machines with intricate parts. They were not a “special case” like humans; they had no thoughts and no feelings, and were guilty of that ultimate Funkadelic crime: having no soul.

During his lectures—as insane as it sounds—Descartes liked to nail this point home by nailing dogs to the wall. He told the audience that the screams they heard were not real, rather the product of complicated automa producing mechanistic noises, not unlike the squeak of a screw turning in a tight hole. When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that René Descartes was a jackass.

There is a long line of thinkers who have fallen into this anti-Cartesian camp. Voltaire devoted much of his career to shouting down his ideas. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,” and the rest of the Transcendentalists tended to agree. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham upped that ante when he realized, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?' nor, ‘Can they talk?' but rather, ‘Can they suffer?' ” But it was Princeton philosopher Peter Singer's extension of Bentham's principle that's become the most infamous counterargument.

Singer is a pragmatist, a devotee of Bentham's school of utilitarian moral philosophy, concerned here with the foundations of equality. When Bentham wrote, “Each to count for one and none for more than one,” he was expressing his fundamental basis for equality among people. In his 1975
Animal Liberation
, Singer extended this argument to what he calls “nonhuman animals,” and the resulting ruckus has never quite ceased.

In trying to separate Singer from that ruckus, I've found that history is helpful. In August 1969, the preeminent journal
Science
published a paper by Allen and Beatrice Gardner about a female chimpanzee named Washoe whom they'd taught to talk. Before Washoe, chimps couldn't string together a sentence. Their world record for words learned totaled at three. The Gardners' breakthrough was to recognize the limits of primate anatomy. Rather than attempting to teach Washoe to speak, they taught her to sign. Washoe got a little farther than
mama
,
papa
, and
cup
, developing a 250-word vocabulary and an ability to react to novel linguistic combinations.

The Gardners' method spread through the scientific community. Around the time Singer began writing his book, Stanford primatologist Francine Patterson had moved beyond chimps and taught a gorilla to sign. At Columbia, Herbert Terrace collected twenty thousand instances of a chimp named Nim Chimpsky—a direct challenge to Noam Chomsky, then Descartes's most ardent supporter—stringing together grammatically correct sentences. Not long after, Johnny Carson introduced Washoe to the nation. Carson was so impressed that upon his death he left a million dollars to the Carson Center for Chimps, established in his home state of Nebraska.

Despite the appeal of signing chimps as a counterargument to Descartes, Singer didn't hang his theory on them, but for the general public the connection was critical. Also critical was the equal rights movement of the early 1970s. Racism and sexism were hot topics, and when Singer began looking into the question of animal rights, it's there he started. He wanted to know what the ethical basis for equality was: “When we say that all human beings, whatever their race, creed, or sex, are equal, what is it that we are asserting?”

Those who wish to defend hierarchical, inegalitarian societies have often pointed out that by whatever test we choose it simply is not true that all humans are created equal. Like it or not we must face the fact that humans come in different shapes and sizes; they come with different moral capacities, different intellectual abilities, different amounts of benevolent feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, difference in the ability to communicate effectively, and different capacities to experience pleasure and pain. In short, if the demand for equality were based on the actual equality of all human beings, we would have to stop demanding equality.

Joining a long line of thinkers, Singer came to realize that equality is not a fact, instead considering it a “moral idea.” As such, his basis for equality comes down to Bentham's key question: “Do they suffer?” If a being is sentient, and thus capable of suffering, it must receive the same “moral consideration” as any other regardless of race, sex, intelligence, creed, moral capacity, or—and this is the key point—species. “Racists,” writes Singer, “violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly,
speciesists
allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.”

So what does equal consideration look like? When HBO's Bill Maher said, “To people who say, ‘My father is alive because of animal experimentation,' I say, ‘Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father can live.' Sorry, but I am not behind that kind of trade-off,” he was merely extending Singer's principles to real-world situations. Of course, sometimes that extension takes the form of firebombing three buildings and four chairlifts as the Earth Liberation Front did in Vail, Colorado, in 1998 on behalf of the lynx—but who said revolution was ever easy?

And this is another thing about dog rescuers: even though a great many abhor violence, the vast majority do believe they are fighting a revolution. Another is that many have misinterpreted Singer. The philosopher never departed from Bentham's basic ethical equation: “Do the greatest good for the greatest number.” Singer's argument is that we cannot exclude animals from that number based on their species—though he does say that when he talks about those species deserving equal rights he really means all primates, most mammals, and even leaves the door cracked open for animal experimentation as long as the benefits outweigh the consequences and
all
non-animal alternatives have been ruled out. Animal experimentation, he feels, is never okay for testing makeup or cleaning products, but just may be acceptable for lifesaving research. In 2006, Singer told Oxford neuroscientist Tipu Aziz that his work with Parkinson's disease and primates was “justifiable” because a hundred monkeys had been sacrificed to save forty thousand people.

Nor is Singer the ardent supporter of vegetarianism some presume. While he does believe that not eating animals is the best practical solution to a thorny problem, he bases that not on individual suffering, rather on planetary suffering. He agrees with author Eric Schlosser's
Fast Food Nation
argument—meat might not be murder, but it's certainly murdering the planet—writing: “Concern for world hunger, for the land, and for energy conservation provides an ethical basis for a vegetarian diet, or at least one in which meat consumption is minimized.”

But who needs logic when there's gut instinct? And that seems to be the real problem. Much of modern society depends on the subservience of animals, and this is as it should be, we are sure, because animals have never created anything like modern society. Philosophers call this a reflexive argument; the rest of us think of it as common sense.

And this was the exact wall I ran into. Before moving to Chimayo, I had never seriously considered Peter Singer. I had told myself I didn't need to consider his work, because my sense of common sense also told me humans were special. Even if Descartes's “humans are the only species to use language” example of our distinctiveness no longer held water, I knew it was only one out of many attributes that scientists used to make this case. But those attributes are either things such as emotion, personality, and the capacity for abstract thought—capabilities that have also been discovered in most animals—or compassion, cooperation, morality, and altruism, capabilities I'd already seen in my dogs. Laughter, as mentioned, was another item on that list. Seeing it in my dogs was something of the last straw. Afterward, the whole line of reasoning just fell apart.

I spent a bit more time thinking through Singer's argument. While I find “Do they suffer?” an incredibly important question, I also knew that creating a society where animals had rights equal to humans' was—at least for a while—going to create a whole lot of human suffering on its way to alleviating a whole lot of animal suffering. Ultimately, I decided a better approach might be to reframe the debate and just check the scorecard. For the past four thousand years, ever since the Bible gave us “dominion over the beasts,” humankind has been acting like the superior species. If moral concerns are the topic on the table, it seems the only question worth asking is how this arrangement has worked out so far.

In 2002, according to a survey of four hundred top researchers conducted by the American Museum of Natural History, the planet is currently facing a “mass extinction” the likes of which has never been seen. Species are disappearing faster than ever before in history. In 2008, this time according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, seventeen hundred experts from 130 countries all agreed: one out of every two species on earth is in decline, and one in four is at risk for extinction.

Worse, as Richard Manning explains in “The Oil We Eat,” we know exactly why this happened:

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet's “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth's primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

These assessments are more math than morality. Plain old animal stewardship has been our charge, and by almost every metric available we've failed spectacularly at that charge. And while I was still not entirely sure what to make of Peter Singer, as Joan Didion once said: “However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.” And, if for no other reasons than the scale of our error and the lumps in our mattress, isn't it time to reevaluate first principles? If we can't push past the morality of yesteryear to reshape the common sense of tomorrow, then we really should consider punishing football players for their crime of touching pigskin on the Sabbath.