Loving animals loving animals!

                                                                                                                                                                 The Dodo image

Ahhh, Valentine’s day: love, chocolate, flowers, champagne, romantic dinners, lacey cards and ardent love letters!  For people, it’s a festive, demonstrative day.

Bonobos

What about love in the animal kingdom?  Without humans’ love reminders and features -- red hearts everywhere, pricey gifts and novelties -- animals nevertheless do their varied loving things all the time.

We may wonder about what "love" is to animals, although the answer's obvious in countless different ways.  And, the unending images of animals "kissing" one another at least suggests how meaningful "kisses" are to them. 

Think of bonobos, DNA "cousins" to us and chimpanzees, also our cousin.  "Make love, not war," is a motto often attributed to bonobos, who are sometimes said to love sex and fruit -- for them, a combo that represents the good life. 

Animals’ maternal love is found all over the world.  How many times have you seen or read about mother elephants rescuing their babies from predators, drowning or other hazards?  Merely glance at photos of traveling elephants to see how the babies are typically surrounded by adults in transit.

Then there are the stories about mother cats and dogs who go to great lengths to protect their young, sometimes seeking human help to save them from mishaps.  Animal mothers mourning their babies who died sometimes accept another mother’s young to nurse and protect, or even the young from another species.

Interspecies friendships – like all friendships, also a form of love – bring different kinds of animals together for mutual support and even play times.

 The Weight

     by Linda Gregg

Two horses were put together in the same paddock.
Night and day. In the night and in the day
wet from heat and the chill of the wind
on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging
and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.
The dignity of being. They slept that way,
knowing each other always.
Withers quivering for a moment,
fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,
width of back. The volume of them, and each other's weight.
Fences were nothing compared to that.
People were nothing. They slept standing,
their throats curved against the other's rump.
They breathed against each other,
whinnied and stomped.
There are things they did that I do not know.
The privacy of them had a river in it.
Had our universe in it. And the way
its border looks back at us with its light.
This was finally their freedom.
The freedom an oak tree knows.
That is built at night by stars.

(From Chosen by the Lion, c. Graywolf Press, 1994, “The Weight” appeared in the Jan. 31, 2012 edition of The Writer’s Almanac.)

 

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