Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  Concentrating on the meat-free aspect of cheese seems as silly as referring to all animal species but one as “nonhuman animals.” Humans always seem to get separated out.

  Why do we do this? Humans are the only ones who will read these sentences. We’re also the only ones who wear hats. But the list of attributes once thought to be unique to our species—from using tools to waging war—is not only rapidly shrinking but starting to sound less and less impressive when we compare them with other animals’ powers. Spiders grow new limbs. Octopuses change color and shape. Insects and amphibians metamorphose from one distinct form to another. Human accomplishments pale!

  One reason we created this collection of essays was to put humans back into the animal world and bring animals into the human world—where we all belong.

  Think of it: For all but the last few moments, evolutionarily speaking, of our existence as a species, humans have been hunter-gatherers. We depended directly upon our observations of the natural world—the real world—for everything: food, shelter, clothing, medicine, even art, worship, and inspiration. The natural world is where our kind perfected “the wholeness of all we think of as culture,” wrote Paul Shepard, the scholar of human ecology. And humans, as we now know, are not the only animals with culture by a long shot, as you’ll see when you read the stories that follow.

  How different are we from other creatures? Humans are so closely related to apes you can share a blood transfusion from a chimp. We share 90 percent of our genetic material with all placental mammals (and 40 percent with a banana!). Even the word person does not derive from the single meaning “human.” Person comes from the word for mask, as in the Christian mystery of “God in Persons Three” (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). A person means merely one of the many Masks that God wears in this world—animal or human. This truth has long been recognized in many cultures, particularly indigenous societies. Many of these tribes tell creation stories that portray animals as the First People.

  In mythologies throughout the world, the theme reemerges: Animals nurture and inspire us. From Russia, Turkey, Liberia, India, Chile, and Greece, we find stories of animals who adopt human babies and raise them in their world. We read of monkey boys, gazelle girls, even an ostrich boy. From the Roman Romulus and Remus, the human twins raised by wolves, to the Sundarbans’ Bonobibi, the orphaned-girl-become-goddess rescued by wild deer, our kind honors a kinship between humans and animals—and the special powers accorded to humans raised by our wild kin.

  Our fellow animals also sometimes frighten and repel us. But even this can be instructive and often tells us more about ourselves than the objects of our fear. The following essays explore some of the ways we interact with fellow species, often in surprising ways. But all of them affirm the fact, told to us by both evolution and our sacred creation stories, that we belong together with our fellow animals, and without them, we cannot be whole.

  —Sy

  Animals as Teachers and Healers

  — Sy —

  My father was my hero. He was an army general who had survived the Bataan Death March. As a child I got in trouble in Sunday school for saying I loved him as much as Jesus. When my dad was dying of cancer, my husband knew of only one thing that might help ease my sorrow: a sickly, runty piglet.

  All my love couldn’t cure my father’s illness. But I could love this little pig back to life. All he really needed was a little TLC, some wormer, and some slops. Well, a lot of slops. But our little pig—who grew to be a very big pig—gave as good as he got. Christopher Hogwood (we named him after the famous conductor, as we both were lovers of early music) became not only a beloved member of my family but my teacher and healer as well.

  Animals have been recognized as mentors for millennia. “The animals are great shamans and great teachers,” the mythologist Joseph Campbell insisted. Any animal, he said, “may be a messenger . . . or one’s personal guardian come to bestow its warning or protection.” Among the North American Oglala, a person on a vision quest seeks an animal teacher. It might be a bear, since bears know the healing powers of plants. (Scientists have now proved that bears indeed do use plants as medicines, including willow bark as aspirin.) Or it might be an eagle, since eagles can see all that happens (and in fact, an eagle can see an animal as small as a rabbit more than two miles away).

  These days, modern readers are catching up with what native people always knew. So many recent books have been written about animals as healers that it’s almost a literary genre. While the motif is familiar, these stories retain the power to surprise—because the ways an animal can rescue, instruct, comfort, and empower us are virtually endless.

  In Lissa Warren’s The Good Luck Cat, a cat leads the author out of the abyss of grief. The book’s heroine, a mischievous seven-pound blue Siamese named Ting, was really Warren’s dad’s pet, purchased as a retirement companion. When her beloved dad dies suddenly of a heart attack, for Warren and her mom the cat he adored becomes a feline embodiment of the man. But then Ting herself develops serious heart trouble. And the book’s subtitle, How a Cat Saved a Family, and a Family Saved a Cat, tells only part of the story, because there’s yet another twist: After Warren had begun writing this book, her left leg went numb, and then her left arm, then her face—and chapters she had never expected to write detail how Ting’s healing powers get called into play again.

  In a very different memoir, H Is for Hawk, when Helen Macdonald’s dad dies, she turns not to a soft, purring cat but to “the bastard offspring of a gleaming torch and an assault rifle.” That’s her description of a goshawk, the most voracious and unpredictable bird known to falconry. The young female she procures, Mabel, is everything a grieving human is not: Boiling with life, the red-eyed raptor “was a fire that burned my hurts away.” But eventually the fiery goshawk leads the author to what she considers a kind of madness, where she retreats from the human world and enters another, older and wilder, a world where she realizes she does not belong.

  Elisabeth Tova Bailey, too, leaves the human world, but it’s a strange, debilitating illness that transports her there. Beset in her active, busy thirties with a rare pathogen, she can no longer stand upright. Bedridden and sapped of energy, “each moment felt like an endless hour,” she writes. She receives as a gift a pot of wild violets with a woodland snail living in it.

  In her earlier, healthy life, she wouldn’t have given a snail any thought. But in her lovely book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, she details how her illness gave her the patience to observe and appreciate the snail’s mysteries and charms. She makes some genuine scientific discoveries as well as a number of personal ones—including that “my snail was just as aware of the details of its world as I was of mine.”

  Then something happens to break the spell. Bailey gets better and discovers she no longer has the patience to observe her snail. She returns to the large, boisterous, human world. But she does so enriched by her glimpse of a slower, softer world that exists beside our own.

  For the Oglala the spirit of the animal teacher actually enters the body of a person on the vision quest, so that the animal forever after becomes part of his strength. The Oglala got it right: Animals become part of us, restore us, and remake us—and they give us the power to restore and remake others when we share their stories.

  Your Brain on Pets

  — Sy —

  I once faced a sickening defeat. The only thing keeping me from swimming with octopuses in the wild was a scuba certificate. The only thing keeping me from seeing octopuses in the wild was a scuba certificate. After a day and a half of an intensive scuba class, diving too deep, too fast produced pressure in my ears, causing dizziness and nausea. I was forced to quit. Next I realized I was too vertiginous to drive home.

  Despairing, I lay down on the blanket that protects our car’s upholstery from our border collie’s dirty paws. As I inhaled Sally’s scent, calm washed over me. Within a half hour, the d
izziness eased enough for me to drive.

  We animal lovers have long known that no matter what life may bring—sickness, sadness, or radiant health—pets make us feel better. Numerous studies have documented astonishingly wide-ranging effects. Cat owners enjoy a 30 percent reduction in heart attack risk. Watching swimming fish lowers blood pressure. Stroking a dog boosts the immune system. Now researchers can explain the source of our companion animals’ healing powers: Our pets profoundly change the biochemistry of our brains.

  “This is science that supports a truth the heart has always known,” Meg Daley Olmert writes in her book, Made for Each Other, a synthesis of more than twenty years of work on the biology of the human-animal bond. She singles out one neuropeptide: oxytocin, a brain chemical long known to promote maternal care in mammals.

  Oxytocin levels rise in a mother’s brain as she goes into labor and produce the contractions that deliver the baby. Once her infant is born, just the sight, smell, or thought of the baby is enough to trigger milk letdown (a fact that has caused many a new mother to ruin a blouse). Humans have known for millennia that this affects animal mothers, too: Ancient Egyptian tomb art shows a kneeling man milking a cow with her calf tethered to her front leg.

  But oxytocin’s powers are not, as once thought, limited to mothering or triggered only by labor. Nor is it confined to females, to mammals, or even to vertebrates. Even octopuses—who not only lack breasts but die when their eggs hatch—have a form of oxytocin, called cephalotocin.

  Oxytocin causes a cascade of physiological changes. It can slow heart rate and breathing, quiet blood pressure, and inhibit the production of stress hormones, creating a profound sense of calm, comfort, and focus. And these conditions are critical to forming close social relationships—whether with an infant, a mate, or unrelated individuals—including, importantly, individuals belonging to different species.

  In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Japanese researchers sprayed either oxytocin or saline solution into the nostrils of dogs, who then reunited with their owners. The owners were told not to interact with their dogs, but the pets who inhaled oxytocin found their people impossible to ignore. Statistical analysis showed the oxytocin inhalers were far more likely to stare, sniff, lick, and paw at their people than those who had saline solution.

  Oxytocin is not the only neurotransmitter companion animals call forth from our brains. South African researchers showed that when men and women stroked and spoke with their dogs, the people’s blood levels of oxytocin doubled. But the interaction also boosted levels of beta-endorphins—natural painkillers associated with the “runner’s high”—and dopamine, known widely as the “reward” hormone. These neurochemicals, too, are essential to our sense of well-being. A later and larger study by University of Missouri scientists also documented that petting dogs caused a spike in the people’s serotonin, the neurotransmitter that most antidepressants attempt to elevate.

  So it’s no wonder that pet-assisted therapies help troubled children, people with autism, and those suffering from drug addiction and posttraumatic stress disorder. Pets help normalize brain chemistry.

  “By showing how interacting with pets actually works,” says the Missouri study’s lead author, Rebecca Johnson, “we can help animal-assisted therapy become a medically accepted intervention”—one that could be prescribed like medicine and reimbursed by insurance.

  All animals appear to have cells directly under the skin that activate oxytocin in the brain. So gentle touch—from grooming your horse’s coat to making love with your spouse—is a powerful trigger. But so is simply thinking about someone you love, whether it’s a person or a pet. And in fact, a small study at Massachusetts General Hospital published in October 2014 found that MRI scans of women’s brains lit up in the same areas when shown pictures of their pets as when shown pictures of their children.

  But here’s the best part: It’s mutual. We effect the same physiological changes in our pets as they do in us. As I lay on that blanket in our car, soothed by Sally’s scent, I remembered how my best human friend, Liz Thomas, once quelled desperation and fear in another border collie named Tess, Sally’s beloved predecessor. I was away tending to my dying mother when Tess, a rescue with separation anxiety, suffered a strokelike illness. For the first time in her life, she was confined overnight at the vet’s. Liz knew just how to help. She came to our house, retrieved my barn coat, and took it to Tess’s hospital cage. Tess inhaled my scent, and instantly her ears folded and the terror fell from her face. She let out a sigh and relaxed.

  Is ESP Possible?

  — Liz —

  Is there such a thing as ESP, or extrasensory perception? Most scientists doubt it, and rightly so. Experiments were tried, but none could demonstrate it. One experiment, for instance, involved two people in isolation booths, one turning up cards from a pack while the other tried to identify them using ESP. The results were disappointing.

  Even so, I’ve had four ESP experiences, all generated by powerful emotions that the sight of a playing card would not arouse. Three times a dog was involved and perhaps was the vector. So humor me, please, while I tell my stories.

  One dark night I was accidentally locked in a museum where I’d been working. I didn’t like the museum: I was young at the time and living with my parents, and was afraid of some mummified corpses that I knew were stored in its basement. Suddenly the lights went out. Terrified, I groped my way in pitch darkness to the door, but it was locked. I heard footsteps. The mummies were walking! In panic I tried other doors until I found one that opened, and I ran out into the night. We lived nearby, and my mother was in front of the house, badly frightened. She had suddenly felt that something terrible was happening to me and had come outside to look. I wasn’t endangered—the footsteps were the janitor’s as he closed the building. But never before had I experienced such fear, and somehow my mother caught it.

  Panic over another event was transmitted either by our dog Ruby when our dog Sheilah was killed or by Sheilah herself as she suffered. It happened in our driveway, evidently when two men in a truck unknowingly ran over Sheilah with their trailer-rake, which dragged her. No one saw this but Ruby.

  As for me, I was fifteen miles away, driving to a fabric store, thinking about a quilt I was making, when suddenly I felt a sense of terror, of emergency, of terrible trouble at home. I tried to calm myself and think about the fabric, but urgency overwhelmed me. I made a U-turn, sped back to our house, and saw Sheilah’s body on the lawn. She’d been found dead on the road. I later investigated the drag track with another dog, Pearl, who explored the track with her nostrils, her hair bristling with each terrible discovery. That’s how we knew what happened.

  In another experience, my husband and I were living in an apartment with two dogs. At the time, the younger dog, Violet, wasn’t completely housebroken, and because we were planning to go out, I considered leaving her on the balcony. I imagined myself taking her to the balcony and shutting her out there, but I didn’t physically move because I wasn’t actually going to do this—it would have been extremely unkind. It was simply a thought that had crossed my mind.

  My husband was in the same room, taking a nap. He half-opened his eyes. “Don’t leave her out there,” he said.

  He thought he’d heard us on the balcony, heard the door shut, and heard me come back inside alone. Did he get this from me or from Violet? It might have been from Violet. Some scientists believe that animals think in visual images. I normally think in words, but this time I had pictured what I thought of doing. I felt no emotion at the time, but Violet would have, if she caught it.

  Must an emotion be powerful to transmit ESP? One lovely summer day I waited by our car with our dog, Sundog, while my husband went into a store. Sundog and I were sitting on the hood of the car enjoying the sunshine when suddenly, for no apparent reason, a crushing, desperate sadness overcame me. Sundog was beside
me, suddenly alert, sitting up straight, looking at the store, his body tense, his ears raised, his eyes wide—as if he thought that something had happened in the store.

  After a while my husband came out, his head low, walking slowly. He’d learned that the storekeeper had driven the ambulance that came for our teenage daughter who, many years earlier, had been hurt in a terrible accident. My husband hadn’t known who drove the ambulance, and the memory of the event overwhelmed him. It seemed that Sundog picked that up.

  Our daughter survived the accident although she was disabled, and by then was an adult. We lived in New Hampshire, she lived in Texas; Sundog hardly knew her; and the accident had happened before he was born. All he could feel, if indeed he felt something, was my husband’s grief. Like a lightning bolt it transmitted to me, but only the terrible grief. While feeling it I made no association with our daughter or the accident.

  Coincidence might explain these events, and ESP may never be proved. All that can really be said, at least for now, is that if we have it, other animals do, too.

  Thunder

  — Liz —

  Summer storms are upon us, and with them, thunder. Most of us who live with dogs have noticed that they don’t like thunder. One of mine was a capable sled dog who before she came to me had lived at the end of a chain in a village in northern Canada where she learned all about terror, mostly from her former owner who beat his chained-up dogs when he was drunk. Yet for all the terrible things she had seen, she was fearless—except when it came to thunder. She’d hide in the bathroom, squeezing herself behind the toilet, trembling so hard her teeth chattered.