Day: July 24, 2013

You can emotionalize animals all you want, project your thoughts and feelings onto them, anthropomorphisise to your hearts content, wait to meet them on the Rainbow Bridge, but if you live with animals for a long enough, pay attention to them, listen to them, you will learn, as I have learned, that our relationships with them are often built on food. Food is the gateway, the foundation of trust and communication. Animals do not have motives, language or narrative, food is essential to their survival and the people who bring it to them are central to their lives.

Animals like dogs and cats have learned to understand some of our emotions, play on them, mirror them, manipulate us into caring for them, it is how they adapt and survive with our cruel and destructive species. Animals like raccoons do not know how to do this, they do not get gourmet treats, expensive health care or comfortable spots in the bed.

Donkeys have been around people as long as dogs, and they understand the meaning of people who bring them food. It is a way of talking to them, building trust, opening the door to a genuine relationship. Donkeys respect the people who bring them food, pay attention to them, often seem to love them. Every morning of their l lives, our donkeys get carrots and brushing from me and Maria, it is our way of talking, of saying we care about them, they can trust us.

Red wants nothing to do with chickens, he doesn’t want to eat them, chase them, sit near them or acknowledge their existence, and he keeps looking at me balefully when I called him into the food police brigade to quell some disturbances we are having between aggressive chickens, a hungry Lab (is there any other kind?)  and the cats and their food bowls. I explained to Red that he is a farm dog, he doesn’t get to choose his work assignments. Life is not just about chasing cheep in pretty meadows, preening for adoring crowds, I said. This is a farm with animals, and he has work to do that isn’t always pretty.

This morning’s strategy: I put Red right in front of the cat bowls and told him to stay put and keep the chickens “off” – he knows that command from herding. The chickens came up, halted, went under the chairs to confer. Red stood his ground. Unfortunately, when the chickens came up behind him and headed for the cat food, he just stood his ground, didn’t have any idea what to do, and unlike the sheep, the chickens were not the least bit impressed with him.

I charged at the chickens waving my arms, tripped on the stone steps and went sprawling into the garden (I made sure the camera fell on me.). The cats got most of their food, but I’d have to give this one to the chickens. Plan B, distract the chickens with mealworms and feed the cats in the barn. Red is disgusted with me.

The Dahlia garden did not exist a few months ago, it lives today because I saw a Dahlia and fell in love, because Maria did the very hard work of digging, planting and weeding, because I watered the garden every single day, because the summer was hot, wed and sticky. Yesterday, we planned an expansion of the garden, we will double it’s size next year, it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever done. In the afternoon I took a chair out into the garden and read some books of poetry, sat with Red and Lenore, closed my eyes for a few minutes and felt peace and hope washing over me. I am learning so many things in life, one of them is what a Dahlia garden can do for me.