My Own Butterflies

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 novel Vacuum County.

Forever Homes

When it is sunny out, Bow enjoys lounging in the sun. But this morning, it is quite foggy.

So Bow is napping on his blanket.

Wherever he is, Bow is secure in the knowledge that he is loved and protected.

However, this does not mean that I can never leave him. I have periodically taken a week off and gone someplace else and left him in the care of interns he knew or of  Lawrence, and he was still secure in the knowledge that he was cared for and loved and that I would be back.

Ezooz eating raw meat on his birthday
Behind him: myself and my friend Haya

I have been thinking about the recent dogma that has surrounded what exactly owners owe their dogs, and it reminded me of Ezooz, a dog I knew in my childhood, but who was not ours. He belonged to an academician who lived in Jerusalem, but when his owner went on sabbatical to the United States for a year, he left Ezooz in our care. We lived in Rehovoth, and my father worked at the Weizmann Institute, and we could not commit to a dog full time, because we traveled, too. But it just so happened that we were able to provide Ezooz with a temporary home for a year, until his master returned and reclaimed him and took him back to Jerusalem, where he lived with his first family until he died of old age.

Two of Ezooz's offspring and myself

Is that all right, by current standards about what a dog is owed by a family? I'm not sure. Because while Ezooz was with us he had many adventures, and he did things that maybe current standards of dog care would not allow:

• He was not fixed, and he roamed free, and when a female went into heat anywhere in Rehovoth, he would be gone for a few days and then come back.
• He fathered at least one litter of puppies that we know of, while with us. It was with a stray female that lived on the property adjoining the house where we lived.
• He ate a diet of raw chicken heads and other uncooked bones and discards of meat that we got at the butcher shop. Today, Americans are convinced that dogs should not eat bones -- and especially not raw chicken bones.
• We let him have chocolate, because nobody told us that was poison for dogs, and it did not kill him.
• He hated dogs that looked or smelled like poodles, and he did attack one such dog, fatally wounding him,
• He hated religious Jews (dressed in black clothing from a different era and with side curls and long beards), and when any of them came around, he chased them away.
• He barked at horses and donkeys. There were still wagons drawn by such animals that occasionally passed by in the street.

We did not teach him any of these behaviors, and when we found out about them, we tried to moderate his behavior so he would not hurt anyone. But we were not overly protective, and we did not chain him in our unfenced yard or require him to stay in the house all day, taking him out on walks on a lead. In fact, I don't ever remember him being on a lead. He was always free, and he always came home to us because he wanted to, even though he knew we were not his masters, and that his real owner was away.

                                            Ezooz at my friend's house: he was not on a leash

                                                                   and neither was I

My father took Ezooz to work with him, and Ezooz was even listed as a co-author on a physics paper that my father wrote during that period. 

I also was allowed to roam without supervision. I sometimes think that in order to have free range children, you also need to have free range dogs. Today, though, my dogs do not roam. They are fenced in. And Bow and Sword also do not roam, because we would get in trouble if they did.

We visited Ezooz in Jerusalem in his forever home once, and we brought him butter to eat, because he really liked butter. He remembered us, but he was clearly happy with his real owner. I think we all did right by Ezooz, and he had a good life.

In contrast, Ezooz's master had three children, all of them adults. His two daughters we met, but the son was mentally retarded and institutionalized. Ezooz had a forever home in his master's house, but his son, a human, did not.

It's really strange the way things turn out, and how society's standards are different in different eras and locales. In those days, you never saw mentally retarded children in school, not in Israel, anyway, and today, they are not even called that, anymore. It is very possible that Ezooz's human brother would have been diagnosed as autistic if he were born today, and his treatment would be very different. But if Ezooz were born today in the US, would he have been allowed to roam? Become a father? Author a physics paper? Eat raw chicken bones and chocolate? And would his master be considered a bad person for leaving Ezooz with someone else for a year or institutionalizing his son?

I think we judge people too harshly. Standards that change all the time cannot be moral absolutes. We have to let people make their own decisions, and in order to live free in a free world or a free country, we should not dictate to others. This does not mean that mistakes will not be made. It just means that people have a chance to make their own mistakes, instead of those dictated by society's shifting social norms.

Chimpanzees, Dogs and Domestication

Today is Mother's Day, and I am being nostalgic. In the picture above, from nine years ago, you can see me and Bow inside the sun room, while Sword and her friend are out in the yard on the back  porch. They are playing hopscotch on a chalk outline they made on the concrete. Bow was in his favorite pose, riding on my back. And, of course, there's a swing.

Today, the sun room has been transformed into the inner pens, the back porch is the floor of the outer pen, and the swing has been moved outdoors. It's Bow's swing, but today, since it is Mother's Day, Bow let me use it.

Bow was very unconcerned with my use of his swing, but Leo, who is a barker, kept trying to get more attention. If he were inside the pens, he would not feel so left out. Luckily, I do also interact with Leo at other times, so he's not entirely a neglected or a feral dog.

Which reminds me, offhand, of a discussion of chimpanzees, dogs and domestication I recently had with some friends and friends of friends on Facebook.

It all started with someone claiming that humans, even under conditions of slavery, cannot be domesticated, because they are so smart that they can cloak their tendency toward violence and thereby avoid having the violence culled right out of them. This, it was claimed, was in contrast to dogs who have been entirely domesticated, and can therefore be expected to be non-violent toward humans.

I took issue with this. I pointed out how many incidents of dogs killing humans we have in the United States each year. The killings are not breed specific. My point was not  that dogs were bad or that certain dogs were violent, but simply that those dogs who do not choose to kill humans do so not out of some kind of genetic predisposition against violence, but because of the way they are brought up, the way they are treated and the positive relationship that they have with humans. I mentioned that chimpanzees, who have not undergone "domestication", have by contrast not killed any human in the US in decades.

Up popped some woman, a friend of my friend, and gave me a stern lecture. She told me that chimpanzees may seem cute when they are babies, but by puberty they are very dangerous, and I should have a plan in place to get rid of mine. (She assumed Bow was in the cute baby phase, or else I would be dead by now.) Then she explained that domestication is not the same as taming, in case I thought it was, but was a program of genetic selection for certain traits that dogs have undergone for tens of thousands of years and that foxes underwent more recently in a less lengthy process.

First of all, if domestication as a way to disarm populations were really a possibility, whether for humans, dogs or chimpanzees, don't you think it would be achieved by now? The biggest killers of other humans are humans themselves. Governments interested in eradicating resistance are plotting to take away our guns or to drug us, because they don't know of any sure fire way to make us docile.

Many people have their dogs neutered, and it is not just for purposes of birth control. If birth control were desired, why not just perform a vasectomy? The same people who claim dogs are domesticated also push for universal neutering of all domestic dogs. Why?Some of it is to control behavior.

 Dogs don't always do what we expect them to. Neither do humans or chimpanzees. All of us are dangerous, whether armed or unarmed. Many different expedients are tried to neutralize the natural tendency to resist authority that comes built in to any intelligent being.

But even castrati can plot against the king, and neutered dogs and chimps have been known  to do much damage. So neither "domestication" despite its centuries' long breeding program, nor other methods such as drugs and lobotomies, is a substitute for a relationship of trust.

Telling people their dogs are domesticated and hence cannot harm them is an invitation to having people treat dogs badly or fail to relate to them at all, and expect that everything will be fine. Everything can be fine, but first you need to earn respect.

I go into the pens every day, bare footed and bare handed, with only trust for a weapon. It works a lot better than domestication ever could. Nobody in my house is domesticated: not me, not my daughter, not the dogs and certainly not Bow. We all came down from a long line of carnivorous predators, and somehow we avoid killing each other every single day.

Amazing, isn't it? But I bet it's the same at your house, too! Happy Mother's Day!

Eating Cherries

Sword and I went out in the front yard after Bow went to sleep last night, and we picked cherries. There are still plenty of cherries left on the tree. We have two cherry trees. The first one has ripened fruit, and the second is still ripening. "These cherries look almost as good as the ones at Wal-Mart," my daughter remarked.

The truth is that they taste better than commercial grade cherries, but they look worse. Each has its own individual look. No two are the same. Cherries in the store look like clones of each other.

This morning at breakfast, Bow had grapes, cherries and a little milk. In that order.

When Bow was very young, I used to cut the pits out of his cherries. When he was older, I made a deal with him: "I'll hand you a cherry, you give me back the pit, then I'll give you another cherry." Bow wanted to test how solid the deal was, so the first cherry I gave him, he swallowed the pit. "No more cherries,"  I said. The next time I served him cherries, he had learned his lesson, so every time he finished one cherry, he would hand me the pit, and I would give him the next cherry. But when it came to the very last cherry, he gave back no pit. He had a big grin plastered on his face, as if he had double-crossed me and gotten the better end of the deal!

This is typical of Bow's ethics. He doesn't keep a promise because he feels it is the right thing to do. He keeps it, only so long as he thinks he has something to gain. This morning, he had something to gain. First he asked for the grapes. When he had finished the grapes, he returned the stems to me, and he asked for the cherries. We went through the whole rigmarole of one cherry, one pit.  He gave me the very last pit. Then he asked for milk. If he hadn't wanted the milk, he'd have swallowed the last pit!

What does it matter if he swallows the pits? Well, it really doesn't matter, in terms of his digestion, but as long as I have to dispose of everything that comes out the other end, I get to monitor what goes in. When he is self-sufficient, he can eat the pits, and I won't care.

There is another reason I persist with this exercise. I am monitoring his moral and emotional growth, too. Maybe, someday, he will want to keep his word just because, and not because he has something to gain. If that day ever comes, it will be just as big a milestone as the day he began to spell out words!