As a writer, my study of animals began with a book called “Pets And Human Development,” written by a psychologist from New York named Boris Levinson. The book lit me up.

Levinson, James Serpell of the University of Pennsylvania (“Domestic Dogs”) and the British Psychoanalyst Dorothy Burlingham (“Twins”) have been the most influential scholars of the human-companion animal relationship for me.  From his photographs, Levinson seemed an odd man, with his goatee, bow tie and poodle. But his little book, published in 1963 to little or no attention, was prescient, the only one that I know of that foresaw the extraordinary changes in humans’ relationship with many animals.

Levinson foresaw a culture where people  were increasingly moving  into urban and suburban environments, cut off from the natural world and the real world of animals. Animals are integral to human development and well-being he said, and moving away from them would have profound social and cultural consequences.  Animals no longer played an integral or organic part of most people’s lives, relegated instead mostly to the role of pets whose lives were radically altered to fit into people’s lifestyles, rather than their own. Levinson predicted that people removed from nature and from animals would be broken in some ways, damaged, and as they struggled with the disconnecting effects of technology, politics, the new economy and the challenges of the urban world, they would seek to heal, turning to their pets for love and support. If you read Levinson, Serpell and Burlingham, you see the foreshadowings of the companion animal explosion, the  emotionalizing of animals, the near worship of animals by some,  the rise of the pet culture as a multi-billion industry, and the stirrings of what would become the rescue movement.

Animals got tangled up in human issues of need, rescue, connection and affection, and species like dogs and cats are, in fact,  redefining their relationships with another species, humans. I grew up in Providence, and lived most of my life in urban areas – Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Dallas, Baltimore, New York City, Northern New Jersey and I have lived on both ends of Levinson’s predictions. In my other life, I became disconnected from the natural and animal world, and for that and other reasons, I became broken. I live in the natural world now, surrounded by animals, and I know I cannot go back. These creatures have helped me to heal, shaped my work, connected me to love, human beings, my own mortality, challenged the limits of what I believed I could do, laid the foundation for a spiritual life. I have been drawn into different kinds of animals, working with animals that are pets, into livestock and animal husbandry, animal rescue, been challenged to grow and mature, learned patience and self-awareness. Some people get nervous when asked to talk about the reasons for their attachments to animals or their desire to rescue them and give them perfect lives. For me, the subject is endlessly fascinating. It is neither good nor bad, in my mind, surely sometimes both.

I am grateful to Levinson for challenging me to be self-aware of my involvement with animals, reminding me to look into my own psyche and motives. Every day they teach me something about myself.

It is in this way, I think, that animals can teach us what we need to learn, and help us heal from the traumas of the modern world.