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The Long Lovely Story

People like to say that they are "cat people", or "dog people",
but I am neither:  I am both a cat person and a dog person.

I love animals, and I think I know why:  I am fascinated
with our evolution; with how all of us critters are related.

It irritates me every time I hear, or read, about the relationship
between "humans and animals".  Lord, love a duck!
What are we if we are not one of the animals?  A rock?

Long ago, long before we know what we know now,
I read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was both a paleontologist
and a French Catholic priest, whose scientific curiosity saved him,
and whose religion damned him.  He had a view of evolution
that helped me to understand that when we observe something
in ourselves that we like to think of as uniquely human,
whether that uniqueness is intelligence, or shape, or feelings,
that there are precursors in our family tree, and that our family
was the emergence of life itself.  Our dogs and cats do not
think or feel or remember as we do, but something in us
thinks and feels and remembers as they do.  We are both
what they are, and what we have become.

Carl Sagan wrote about that in the Dragons of Eden,
in which he explained that in the evolution of the human brain,
we still have a dragon brain stem that makes us lash out, almost
helplessly, and a chimpanzee brain, and a cerebral cortex
that overlays both of them, that tempers what we used to be.

I see, every time, in our cats and dogs, something of what I am.
I suspect I love them because I like myself; what I have become.
The urge to show kindness to them is very much like the desire
to protect our children, who are becoming what we are,
but who are not there, yet.  Our cats and dogs will never get there,
but our children usually do.  No matter!  Loving them both
is to love life.  It is to love ourselves, and how we got here.

I am almost offended by the notion that we humans are
a special creation, by some magic designer, intended to rule over
all the precursors of our own existence.  We aren't royalty.
We are what worked out.  We are family.  We are survivors, too.

I have wept at having to survive the pets I have loved,
and sometimes having had to help them die, as I shall.
I have loved them as I have loved life, and the story of life.

Two of my grandchildren have just gotten a puppy; their first puppy.
I am happy for them.  That puppy will help them understand themselves.
The puppy will love them, and if they are lucky, help them love themselves
as they see in that dog the whole long, lovely story of evolution.
.

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