American animals

We have, or have had, ducks that sit on dogs.

We’ve had chickens that play with ducks and cats.

We’ve had cats that ride on horses, sleep with dogs and lie still while ducks and chickens peck and scratch in the dirt around them.

We have goats that live with ducks, and another goat that thinks he’s a horse. If our two mares go anywhere, that goat throws a fit. And we’ve had dogs that hitched rides on the tails of running horses, their dog bodies airborne for 100 feet, and afterward remained canine-equine allies.

I take my mother for a walk down the road each day because she’s blind and old, but willing. A couple of very old dogs typically join us, along with one young dog and two cats — sleek little year-old brothers weighing only about 5 pounds apiece.

Molly and Joe. WILLIAMS FAMILY PHOTO

All of them drop their lower jaws and hang their tongues out the window of their mouths as far as they’ll go in the midday heat, panting. Except my mother, who may pant a little, but that’s as far as it goes.

Nothing in the animal world is much funnier — and more disconcerting — than seeing a cat with its mouth wide open and its little pink tongue afloat in empty space, panting.

The cats didn’t learn hang-tongue-and-pant from watching the dogs. They come by it naturally, although normally they’re too proud to get caught doing it in public.

Whatever their proud predilections and species differences, all these animals have been taught — firmly, by us — to get along. Especially the natural predators.

And they learn quickly. The degree of inter-species harmony at my house is pretty extraordinary, especially since the dogs could eat the goats, ducks, chickens and cats, the cats could eat some of the young chickens and ducks, and the humans could, of course, eat all of them, including the horses and goats, if we wanted to. We don’t.

But it’s not all rosy peace.

When one of my well-behaved old dogs was young, she killed a cat we’d brought into the family,

right in front of me. I was sitting in the house at my desk, which overlooks a yard full of animals, trying to write one of these columns. Suddenly the cat streaked out of the oaks and scrub on the far end of the yard with the dog in close pursuit, aiming to run under the house.

She didn’t make it. The dog grabbed her just before she reached safety, shook its head once violently and broke her neck. All while I watched helplessly through the window.

We had the cat only two days, taking her in after her owner, a friend of ours, had been murdered in his apartment.

He was a former marine, at 70 confined completely to a wheel chair with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), after suffering a debilitating stroke. He was losing his ability even to speak clearly. But he kept a big garden, he painted and he wrote extensively and well of his experience and thinking. He’d become a pacifist.

He also took in lost animals and human transients from time to time, giving them a bedroom and food, never asking for money.

One of those transient men, also a former marine with PTSD and other mental problems, killed him with a knife in his kitchen.

That we lost Chuck’s animal, whom we’d watched for years sitting on his lap and giving him peace, still bothers me a decade or so later. It bothers me because we made a significant strategic error: We didn’t do the firm teaching right from moment one, the day we got the cat.

Firm teaching means introducing an animal under our care to all the other animals — letting it and them think about the situation for a few days while we protect it and show it kindnesses in front of them — and then releasing it.

That approach has worked every other time for many years. All the animals on our place get to eat, sleep and live in relative peace as long as they leave the other, sometimes weaker animals, alone to do the same.

We try not to anthropomorphize. In the world of chickens and ducks, for example, rape, as we view it, is an everyday occurrence when roosters mount hens, or drakes mount female ducks.

It’s the same teaching we give our children, the teaching that shows competitors or predators a simple standard: Any other animal living on a property, including those different in appearance, in voice, in habit, inclination or ability is part of the household. Part of the landscape. Part of the country, if you will — the country and the way of life we insist on establishing. And no creature can be killed, abused or driven out by other creatures.

They’re all fine with that. And if they aren’t, they get gone.

Why not make that happen now, with a nation of 330 million American animals? ¦

— “American animals” first appeared in July 2020.

The post American animals first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .