Minnie is in her third week of recovery from an animal attack that cost her her right rear leg. She has struggled with pain, medications, disorientation and a lack of balance and movement. Her ordeal has opened a vivid window for me into the power of healing in animals. Today, Minnie began to emerge from her hiding place in the barn, seek out the sun, and somehow she found it healing and safe to be with the chickens.
She has healed in a number of different ways – in the barn, by gathering herself and being still, by exploring the world cautiously, by being with Maria, by being with the hens, by finding her warm and safe spots in the sun.
Minnie came to me as a feral kitten and lived in the big barn at Bedlam Farm for the first months of her life – I left food for her, but she was shy and cautious and I never saw her. I sometimes looked through the barn window and saw that Minnie was at ease with the chickens, when my rooster Winston was sick Minnie sat with him for days and nights until he died. Minnie grew up around chickens, she has always been at ease with them, is often seen with them. It is not surprising she would turn to them for comfort and company for her own healing.
Today was Minnie’s coming out day. She spent most of the day outside of the house and outside of the barn where she had been hiding all day. Every time we came outside, she was in the sun, usually with hens around her, sometimes with Maria. I chronicled this day in a series of photos which I am putting up on Facebook. Tonight, we brought her inside, she is still unsteady on her legs and tires easily.
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Note: Many of you good people are asking me for updates and information from the first Bedlam Farm. I am willing to share some of my life, but I can’t make that decision for other people and while I might take a photo there from time to time, my intention is to respect the privacy of our very nice tenants, who are not seeking publicity or looking to share their lives. I will not be writing about life there.
I have had a lot of wonderful dogs, but I have never had a dog like Red, he doesn’t ever lick or even bark, he speaks through his eyes, which are bright and expressive. Today, he went with me to Pompanuck Farms to talk with Scott Carrino and Scott always kneels down and looks at Red and Red speaks to him – and to me – with his eyes, which show a different range of emotions. I know that dogs have some emotions, but I also do not believe they have ours and I do believe Red is seeking to communicate things with his eyes – I see in them affection, healing, other things I can feel but cannot describe.
We do not have a language to communicate with animals, yet I see Red has a language, and he uses his eyes to send messages.
For some months now, I’ve been mildly haunted by a phenomena that mystifies me, has no ready explanation, and defies much of life’s experience. Generally, I associate hostility with men. Men invented violence, commit most of it, fill up our prison system, wreak economic and environmental havoc, fight wars, have rigid and unyielding models of negotiating. Online, men created the flaming and trolling and tradition of hostile e-mailing that destroyed countless open sites and crippled open speech. Blogs were created in part as a response to permit moderation of comments.
As I’ve often written, I fervently hope women gain political control of the world in order to save it from the deprivations of men.
Yet in my own experience writing about animals and the animal world (along with other things), I have seen a completely different pattern and it is so marked I feel the need to write about it.
I get hundreds of thousands of messages via e-mail and social media each year, usually more than 1,000 a day. I have almost never received an angry e-mail from a man. Every angry e-mail I get is from a woman, and almost every one of those seems to own a small dog, a dacschund or toy poodle or other lap breed if you can go by their photo profiles. Angry e-mails are a rare thing on my sites, I have long discouraged hostile comments and am happy to ban or block anyone who posts comments that are hostile, I consider that opportunity a gift. I have only banned 17 people in the time my blog has fed onto Facebook – and about 50,000 people a day come onto my Facebook page.
But every one of these people is a woman, nine had photos of dacshunds for their profile image, six had toy poodles and two were other small breeds. The angry messengers are always always accusing me of some act of cruelty or abuse, either from reading my books or looking at the blog. They are familiar in tone. Most anger in the animal world seems to me to emanate from a kind of victim culture – people who have been mistreated themselves and are quick to fury if they think anyone is mistreating an animal, and those definitions of mistreatment are very broad and arbitrary. Social media is host to countless sites of incestuous communities who fuel this tendency to see animals primarily in terms of their abuse and mistreatment and who – like the outraged political posters of the left and the right – give people license to use the love of animals or opinions they disagree with as a club against humans.
Psychologically, it makes sense – fractured people can feel better about themselves by caring for animals and channeling their disappointment and fury at people, there are simply no end of stories about animal suffering (you will never see a website online about how well many animals are treated.) There is an us-versus-them jihadist quality to some of these messages and I have always believed that many of these messages come from people who have been mistreated by men – and that is a lot of people.
Behaviorists have long studied the correlation of mood and identity that exists between people and their pets, so do attachment theorists and when I posted this question about anger and small dogs on my Facebook pages many people – mostly women – said they had encountered this behavior themselves, they considered it a fascinating question and often linked it to some owners of some small breeds. Generalizing is always dangerous, I am fond of small breeds – I love dacshunds – and know many people, male and female who own them and are quite nice and grounded and who do not write angry messages. I also know many women who own large dogs and many men with small ones.
The only idea I have so far is that some small breed owners may be more inclined to see their dogs as intimate extensions of themselves, to personify them as victims in ways that justify anger and rage at the outside world. I still get angry messages about my decision to euthanize Orson, the dog in “A Good Dog,” and I have noticed over time that a disproportionate majority of these messages come from small breed owners and almost all from women – they almost always use the dog as their profile photos, in itself a statement of identity and attachment: I am my dog, literally. I wonder if smaller dogs don’t engender strong protective and nurturing instincts, if they don’t project a need for protection. These angry posters are not interested in facts or dialogue, just in expressing anger and when challenged, they invariably run away, as if they are afraid to confront human targets or wish to get banned or blocked.
I wouldn’t rush to any broad conclusions, generally my sites – which have a distinct majority of women posting – are very safe zones, filled with thoughtful and interesting comments. My readers and I have worked hard to make them that way, the sites are self-policed and live up to the promise of Internet communities, save for confused newcomers or these aberrant and occasional invasions of angry posters. I wouldn’t want to blame dacshunds any more than I would blame pit bulls for the bad behavior of their owners.
But I realized recently that this was one of those strange patterns, one of those fascinating Internet cultural and behavioral ticks that permeate the animal world. I’d love to figure it out, it is sort of what I do.
Red’s World is a simple, beautiful, intense and inaccessible place. Red and I are right, but he is a border collie and I understand border collies, having lived with them for 15 years. They love whatever and whoever brings them to work, to sheep and since I brign Red to sheep every day, he and I are right. I have no need for illusions, when I am away and Maria brings Red to sheep, he loves her just as much, and he would love you too, if it came to that and you had some work for him.
Red is either working or waiting to work. His work takes different forms – sheep, therapy work, riding along in the car on my many rounds and chores, sitting by my feet when I write. I am always touched in the morning, when I open the door and let him out. It would not occur to me to worry about him running to the busy street on the other side of the farmhouse, he goes straight to the pasture gate and waits for me to come out and open it so he can work. Red has great passion for work, I imagine him to be running and re-running work reels in his head, like some coach after a game.
Red lives inside of his own head, inside of his own world, it is a flame that never flickers.
Last night, three boxes of Second Chance Dog: A Love Story arrived by UPS. Our driver, who knows me well know, said they looked like books, and I said they were author copies of my next book (under contract, I am sent a small amount) and he said “wow, that is exciting, congratulations,” and he shook my hand. He seemed quite impressed.
It was a telling moment. I stood there looking at my books and looking back on my life as a writer and seeing clearly once again just how much that life has changed, how much magic there is in getting your books, and how much of a struggle it is to keep that magic in my heart and soul in our world now.
I have wanted to be a writer since I was eight, it is really all I have ever wanted to be, and how lucky I am to have done it, to have made a living at it for so long. Still, keeping the magic is a challenge sometimes. Up until fairly recently, a new book was considered a big deal in the world, especially when publishing was more personal and less corporate. When a book came out, my editor usually invited me into New York City for lunch at some fancy French restaurant, I was always the frumpiest person in the room. Often, he or she would give my flowers or send them to my house and congratulate me on the book and wish me well. If it was close to publication time, my editor would bring me a sheaf of reviews, a thick folder prepared by the publicity department. I remember the excitement of traveling into the city, meeting my editor, waiting to be personally handed a copy of my book. It was as excited as I have ever been in my life, I remember it so well.
Publishing has changed, it is very corporate now, it is a business generally. There are no flowers, there is no lunch, there are no congratulations – just another book out in the world trying to be head amidst all of the media hype and clutter. There are very few reviews either, most newspapers and magazines have stopped doing book reviews, the NPR stations mostly interview movie and TV stars and commercial television is rarely interested in anything that is not an argument, a murder or an explosion. For the first time in my writing career, I made the difficult discussion to forego a national book tour this year, my book tour consists of some local appearances and some radio interviews.
Mostly I will be here and on social media, giving away free dog food, free books (the new book tour) and hopefully talking about the book and the issues it raises.
My readers are online now, right here and reading this, and I am happy and lucky to be able to meet them here, and to have them at all. The reviews I have received have been quite glowing, I am lucky to have them as well. Lots of people don’t buy hardcover books any more, some wait for the paperback, others read on e-book readers. Second Chance Dog: A Love Story will be published on November 12, and the pre-orders for it are very strong at Battenkill Books and online (you can pre-order the book at Battenkill and Maria and I will both sign and personalize it. People who pre-order at Battenkill are also elibigle to win one of 100 free bags of Fromm Family pet food. If you wish, you can call the store at 518 677-2515.). Maybe this will be one of those books that finds it’s market in the crowded new world.
As I was writing this, Random House let me know that the book has just gone into it’s second printing, three weeks before publication. That’s cool.
Still, those boxes of books felt a bit forlorn and they drew me into a bit of mournful reverie for the days when there was magic in publishing a book. When my books arrived yesterday I was conscious of the fact that if the UPS driver had not congratulated me, no one would have even noticed.
Maria did, she was excited to see the books, she demanded that she take me out to dinner and we did celebrate and toasted my new book in the new world of publishing. I am very proud of this book, it is the story of the journey Maria, Frieda and I took together during the difficult days of divorce, recession and the collapse of everything I knew about publishing. I saw once again last night that Maria is my magic, it was a wonderful dinner because we were together.
I do not trust nostalgia, and I do not spend a lot of time wallowing in it, it just drains money from the bank. People who get older are forever missing the past, I am loving the present and the future, there is a lot of magic for me here. I love this blog as much as I ever loved any book, I love the words, images and poems I can publish here.
I don’t want to ever lose the magic of the book and I will devote a good portion of the day to considering what a special thing it is to write one and have one published – there are a million copies of my books in print – and I will make certain that the magic of it never goes away for me. That is a light that ought to never go out.
