I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Over the weekend, I visited a different place and saw different scenery.
I saw some beautiful landscapes, but I also noticed the butterflies. Everywhere you go in Missouri right now, there are butterflies.
The butterflies that I noticed were just like the butterflies at home: pearl crescents, common buckeyes, and even a passing red-spotted purple flying high. But there was one important difference: they were not my butterflies. I knew it, and they knew it, too. And so they did not stop to say hello, but just went flitting by.
"Aya, you can't own a butterfly," someone might want to say to me at this point. "You can't own any animal at all, because they have souls of their own." And I would beg to differ. You can tell who is yours and who isn't, by the way they behave. This is true of dogs, cats, and chimpanzees. And it includes human beings, too! Can you go up to strangers and give them a hug? Unless you are mentally challenged, you know there are boundaries. The boundaries may not be marked with a fence or a property line, but they are just as real!
Back home again, I went out into the backyard and mowed it yesterday, while Bow and the dogs did their own things. Everybody was glad I was back, and I was glad to be back. And since it was my own backyard, I could even stop in my work any time I wanted to, and take pictures of butterflies.
I saw what I thought was a question mark butterfly on the trunk of a tree, and while I was trying to get closer, a great spangled fritillary landed on my leg and then flitted off and landed again on my shoulder.
This never happens to me any place but at home, on my own land. But it has been happening more and more frequently lately, as if, after fourteen years of living here, the butterflies finally know and trust me.
With Bow and Brownie looking on, the butterfly remained on my shoulder for a good long moment.
Brownie watching as the butterfly moves freely on my shoulder
Then it flew away. Nowhere else than on my own land has anything like this ever happened to me.
People talk about how property lines and state boundaries and borders are all artificial constructs and how when the world is viewed from outer space, all that disappears. But we don't live in outer space. We live right here on earth, and when you get closer, really close, you can see that the property lines make a big difference in the behavior of every living being they affect, even if they are not marked from above.
The wildflowers on either side of the fence may look exactly the same, but when the neighbors mow their pasture, my flowers don't get cut down. And on some level of visceral feeling, I think they know it, and it alters their behavior. My butterflies trust me, and the butterflies that are not mine do not.
Trust is not something you can give somebody else as a present. Trust has to be earned. I have that with Bow. Bow has that with me. And that's what ownership is all about. And if you don't believe me, then take it from Nabal the Carmelite, in my novelVacuum County.
The truth is that there is still a lot that I don't know about bees, even though there seems to be no shortage of them on my property. Some of the bees are honey bees, while many belong to other varieties. But even in the case of the honey bees, I don't know where they live or whether they are free or "owned". And I certainly don't know how they reproduce or manage to survive our harsh winters.
The idea of owning bees may seem kind of silly. They are insects. They fly around freely. There are no collars on them or identification tags. How could you possibly complain that a bee is trespassing on your property and ask for restitution from the owner? By the same token, how would you go about filing a claim if you thought a bee belonging to you was stolen? Do the bees know who owns them? Oxen and asses do know who owns them, according to Biblical scripture (Isaiah 1:3). But bees?
However, not only are there beekeepers and bee owners, there are also bee breeders and bee sellers. If for instance, 30% of a beekeeper's colony dies of the dreaded "colony collapse disorder", that does not mean that next season that beekeeper will have 30% fewer bees to begin with. Not at all. He can simply order new bees -- in a kit -- from his friendly local bee breeder, and next year he will have exactly the number of bees that he wants to have. No more, no fewer.
I actually did know about the bee kits, because a friend of mine orders them most years. Although recently she skipped a year, and that must have greatly reduced the bee population in her neighborhood.
If you read the most popular news items about bees, they never mention this. They don't talk about bee breeders, and how all of us are counting on them to supply beekeepers with extra bees, to make up for the bees they lose to the vagaries of nature.
They do talk about how we need bees as pollinators, so that even if we don't like honey and could not care less if there were no honey left to eat, we should care if we like peaches and nectarines and apples and pears. No bees, no fruit, they tell us. The earth will be a desolate place, and the only thing left to eat will be hamburgers and bean burritos.
Here's what they don't tell us: if we keep importing honey from abroad, our local beekeepers will stop ordering pre-packaged bees from the bee breeders, and then the local fruit growers will have to find some other way to pollinate. This will not result in no fruit. It may, however, result in much more expensive fruit. Because all the bees will be overseas, working for the local beekeepers who are making a living from selling honey to us.
Everything in life is interconnected, including ecology and economy. An animal has no chance of survival in this overpopulated world unless humans cultivate it, breed it and keep its kind going. That's why if you want bees, you go to bee breeders. No breeders, no bees.
The same thing is true for chimpanzees. If you want there to be chimpanzees on earth in the future, then you have to be nice to chimp owners and chimp breeders. Chimp breeders make a living from chimp owners. Do away with ownership of chimpanzees, and there will be no breeders. No breeders means no chimps. There is no other way for them to have any chance at all to survive as a species. So if you are a real conservationist, you have to fight for the right to own chimpanzees.
The cat has been seen to be consorting with the neighbor's dogs. She was away for a while, after killing a giant cream-colored rat and leaving the corpse under my tulip tree. After that, she disappeared for a while, only to reappear when I was giving guests a tour of the orchard. She emerged from the neighbor's field, and with her came the neighbors' dog, Cowboy, and the two seem to be on very good terms. I think when she is not over on our front porch, the cat is hanging out with the neighbor's dogs. This gives me hope that maybe she is actually owned by the neighbors, and they are the ones who are feeding her and seeing to her medical needs.
Ownership of animals can be a very fluid concept out here in the country, in that a cat may feel that it owns more than one family. Coming from the city, we expect a kind of pet "monogamy", where every pet is owned by exactly one household, and every household is the sole owner of every pet. But we had a similar situation once with our dog Teyman. Before I had my eight foot fence built for the backyard, Teyman was free to come and go. We thought she was our dog, and we had her vaccinated and put a collar on her and fed her and played with her, but she often went over to the neighbors' house and begged for food, got admitted inside, and sat on the couch with them watching TV and being petted and fondled. They even had a name for her: they called her Tiny!
At the time, because I had some pretty rigid notions about pet ownership, this upset me a little. Whose dog was she, really? Mine or theirs? But I had both Israeli and Taiwanese people here who chided me for my seeming jealousy. One of them said: "Can't you just be happy that the neighbors are so kind to your dog? They are feeding her treats and showing her affection. Don't you want her to be happy?"
I asked: "Well, if your husband were going over to the neighbor lady's house, and she was feeding him and meeting all his other needs, would you be happy that the neighbor lady was helping to keep your husband satisfied?"
To this I got a really weird response. "Dogs aren't husbands. That is completely different!" But it really isn't. The question is, in both cases, can you own another living being? And if you can, then does your ownership come before the desires of the being you own?
My friend from Taiwan told me that where she comes from, you do not own your cats and dogs. You share them with the entire community. You love them, but you let them come and go as they please.
Now, Teyman continued to visit the neighbors. and to hunt in the fields for rabbits, and to bring home parts of cows that she had gotten from goodness knows where, until the day our eight foot fence in the backyard was complete. And after that, her roaming days were over.
And you know what? I did feel a little guilty about that. But she never came home all scratched up from a fight anymore, and she had more security. So there are two sides to every coin.
That's what I meant when I talked about the cat having its freedom. Someone I know was upset because I implied that owned cats had less freedom. But it's true. More security means less freedom, whether you are a dog or a cat or a human.
Animal rights activists, like human rights activists, have strong opinions about all of this, and they tend to censure individuals for the restriction of the freedom of an animal and for providing less than a perfect environment. Here is what they have been saying recently about some of my colleagues:
If you own an animal, and you take full responsibility for every moment of its day, then your resources and their limitations will dictate the situation under which the animal lives. If you don't own an animal, and it is free to roam, then nobody can be responsible for what ultimately happens to it. The same is true of all animals, even humans. We should spend less time criticizing each other for not having the perfect, infinite environment for those we are responsible for and not giving them the perfect diet, whatever that may be. The irony is that the same criticism and worse could be leveled at sanctuaries and zoos, but for some reason, they are not.
When my guests were over, I shared some Israeli olives with them, that my mother had brought from her trip. And later I shared the olives with my daughter, and then with Bow.
Olives are a high fat food. Bow does not get them often, but he is familiar with them, because he has been having olives all his life, whenever we had them. Each chimpanzee owner has his own nutritional theories of what is good for a chimp to eat. I have noticed that some of the same weight issues that humans have are shared by their chimpanzee companions. If the humans are trim, their chimps seem to be, too. We tend to eat a wide variety of less processed food, and it works for us.
I once had volunteers who were eager for a more professional diet for Bow. "Monkey chow" sounded good to them. "What is in monkey chow?" I asked. They had no idea.
I have two dogs at present confined to my back yard. They have less freedom than the neighbor dogs who come onto my land sometimes. But they seem to find ways to keep themselves entertained. For Brownie, playing with rocks is very entertaining.
For Leo, it is his friendship with Brownie that adds the most meaning to his life.
Even though Brownie is often fixated more on his rock than on his companion, Leo manages to engage him and bring out the playful. social side of the chocolate lab.
There is more than one way to conceptualize every possible relationship between living beings. Those of us who have been exposed to more than one culture understand that sometimes dogs and cats are owned and are happy being owned; and sometimes they are not owned, and are happy being free. There is more than one way to relate to a dog or a cat or a chimp. The problem with people who want to dictate to others is that their view is so normative, that often they can't see the possibilities.
It's not bad to own a dog or a cat or a chimp exclusively. But it is also not bad that under a different set of circumstances that dog or cat or chimp might actually be free and not owned at all. What is wrong is to institute rigid rules that have to apply to everyone in the same way. The circumstances dictate what relationship is best. I keep Bow to myself, because I recognize that at the moment, in our current society, he would not be safe if I allowed him to roam. But I still remember the story the breeders told me about the chimp they had who broke into the neighbors' house and sat in their kitchen eating cherry pie filling, until the neighbors called his owners to come and get him. No police, no shooting, no violence.
The degree of freedom that is allowed depends on the norms of the society we live in. Right now, my daughter does not get to roam the streets in the same way I did at her age. It's sad, but it's a commentary on the times. At least I know Bow is safe when I say good night each evening. He can't visit the neighbors and raid their pantry while I am asleep, but given the times we live in, he has a pretty good life.
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