Dogs and Bluejays

Last week, baby blue jays were in the yard at my apartment. Three, I think. Too young to fly, they hopped along the ground and cried for food, which their mother regurgitated for them after swooping down from the trees. In the backyard is a fenced area where the first-floor tenants let their two dogs out a few times a day. I expected the baby birds to hop into the fenced area at times, and wondered if I should warn the dog owners. But would they care? Who am I to tell them what to do with their dogs? Who cares about a couple of baby birds anyway? Besides, blue jays are bullies.

Beautiful bullies, I argued to myself. I didn’t say anything. On another evening I came home from work, entered my apartment, and soon heard a dog barking. Looking out my back window I saw one of the dogs from the first floor barking at a baby blue jay, which was trying to hide in the ivy at the back corner of the yard. There is a solid brick wall at the back and sides of the property, so the bird was trapped. The dog was alternately sniffing at the bird and then recoiling when the bird jumped. After a short while the woman who owns the dogs came out and called for them. The dog that was after the bird initially came to her but then ran back to the bird. She called the dog again, and again, and again. But the dog didn’t listen and was becoming more aggressive. I wanted her to run across the ten feet it would take her to get to the dog and pull it away. But she just repeated the dog’s name in the same tone of voice, with no result. Perhaps she didn’t see the bird. Or perhaps she didn’t care. While she called, it looked like the dog may have stepped on the bird, and may have bitten it briefly—and that could be enough.

She finally walked (slowly) to the dog and pulled it away, the baby bird sitting right where its feet were. She made a groan upon seeing the bird, as if that were the first she knew of it. After she had gone inside, I saw the baby bird move slightly, lying in the ivy, no longer trying to get away. I shook my head, assumed the bird was dying, and started to make dinner.

And I was mad. I was mad at the woman for having a horribly disobedient dog. I was mad at the dog for its senseless act of violence, killing a vulnerable creature that it did not need to eat. And I wondered if I should be mad at myself for not telling the woman about the birds.

Then I remembered some thoughts I had a while back about pets. I wondered where the culture of having pets came from. The practice of keeping a domesticated animal in one’s house merely for—what? amusement? companionship?—seems to have a relatively short history. In the Bible, people kept animals for farming, food, transportation, and sacrifice. They always had a functional purpose, in other words; they were never just for fun, or for a friend. Certainly God makes clear in Genesis that animals are not suitable companions for those of us made in His image. If they were, women would not exist. Ahem.

So, what changed? How did the practice of keeping useless animals in our homes become the norm in our day? Why do we purchase animals that have no practical benefit to the functioning of our lives? Well, why not? It’s just to add some more spice to life, more entertainment, a sense of the exotic. Or, to help chase away that dreadful silence, perhaps to soften the blows of loneliness. It seems that most of the reasons I can think of, or have heard, are inconsistent with a relationship with God. Why would Jesus want me to have a dog?—especially given the time and money spent for the pet’s care over the course of its life. Shouldn’t this be spent on people?

But we can also ask the question from the perspective of the natural world. Where did domesticated dogs and cats come from? Special breeding, in many cases—breeding that often results in animals that are ridiculously unfit for survival in the wild. Imagine a poodle trying to make it in the outback. If an animal can’t flourish in nature, and take its place in a functioning ecosystem, what is it? Have we created a breed of creatures best suited for life in a human household, eating only the food we place in front of them?

And they affect nature. I’ve been to several talks and conferences in the past year dealing with environmental sensitivity. Whenever the topic of our embarrassingly polluted waterways has been discussed, pet waste has been named as a primary culprit. Of course there’s lawn fertilizer and motor oil and lead from brake linings, but I think I’ve heard pet waste mentioned most frequently. This had never occurred to me. Poop? Isn’t that natural? Wouldn’t that be good for nature? No, apparently the volume of waste making its way to streams has created a significant bacteria problem. This is where our tap water comes from. Sure, if everyone picked up after their pets every time, this wouldn’t be a problem. But that won’t happen.

And, pets still have a residual instinct to kill—though they have no need to. I grew up with cats; the ones that weren’t too lazy were always trying to kill something, a mole, lizard, baby squirrel, baby bird. Surely this is a lesser problem than bacteria in our waterways. But my recent experience seeing a domestic dog attack a wild bird became a symbol for me of the relationship between all the pets in the world and all of wild nature. The two cannot be friends. Pets are hostile to nature.

Of course you can make a “pet” out of an animal that flourishes in the wild. I did. I grew up with both cats and parakeets. The last bird I had died last August after eleven years. I was very sad—over a parakeet?? Oh, but what a cool bird he was! So tame and affectionate and fun, and funny. I bought him before I started dating the girl I would marry, and he died a month after our divorce. The bird outlived an entire human relationship. I buried him in the back corner of the backyard here, where the baby blue jay was. But my parakeet’s ancestry is in Australia, where he would have flown in great flocks, dodged hawks, eaten all kinds of berries and nuts and leaves, mated and raised baby parakeets. But instead he was caged in the US, fed seeds every day, and seldom met another parakeet. Oh sure, we let him fly around the house all the time. He didn’t seem to know what he was missing. And he fell in love with his reflection, more than any other bird I’ve had. He tried to mate with mirrors, and with people’s faces. I wonder if he had gone insane—a flock animal made to live alone with humans. We are not suitable companions.

I wonder if one of the deeper reasons we like living with domesticated animals is that it simulates a characteristic of Eden, and the New Earth. Once, there was no fear between man and animals, and in an eternity yet to begin, “the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them.” But ever since Noah—if i recall correctly—animals have been instinctively fearful of humans. And why not—given the havoc we wrought. Lately I’ve liked to use the word “enchanting” to describe moments when this and other enmities of our fallen world seem to be briefly suspended. A Carolina wren flew into a room of my apartment once through an open window, sat on the handlebars of my bike, and sang his song, as if to test the room’s acoustics. He was not bewildered, like all other wild birds I’ve seen trapped indoors. He flew in on purpose, exploring, curious, and then flew out at will, alighting momentarily on the windowsill to sing once more. That was an enchanting way to begin my day of work—an ancient and future harmony, which my soul remembers and longs for, made an appearance in my apartment. It was a symbol, not the reality—the wren never lost its fear of me, it just didn’t know I was there, peaking through a doorway. But the symbol is divine, a blessing, a prophecy; if we interpret it correctly it can lead us to worship.

Perhaps enchantment, however, cannot be forced without dire consequences—both for the natural world and for our spirits. Trapping or breeding animals to live with us is not an attempt to create a symbol of lost harmony, but to remake Eden here and now. Subconsciously we know something is missing, so we try to fix it by our own hand, ignoring the fact that this universe does not sustain our imposed order. I feel this temptation as an architect. I want to make Edenic places—walled gardens, pristine and perfect and clean, and crystalline glass boxes. But when I see places like this they make me hurt, because they remind me of what is lost without telling me what to do about it. I couldn’t live there; it’s untrue. It’s kitsch. It’s a Thomas Kinkaid painting. Indeed a place should give us glimpses of Eden through intense beauty, but it also must open to the world and deal with its ugliness.

I had almost turned on the stove to cook dinner when I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and the woman who owned the dogs was standing there. She said she had a strange question for me, and told me about the baby bird, asking what to do about it. I asked how badly it was hurt, thinking it was nearly dead. She didn’t know, and was palpably relieved when I said I’d come down to take a look. She had walked the two flights of steps to my third floor apartment about the baby bird, and on the way down spoke to me in somewhat desperate tones that she didn’t know what her dog was after until he had already gotten to it—as if defending herself against my unspoken suspicions. I knew then that she cared. I walked to the bird and took it into my hands, cringing as I expected to see crushed legs, broken wings, mortal wounds all over. But instead the bird pushed with two surprisingly strong legs and nearly broke my grasp. I held a little tighter, spread each wing, scanned the back and belly, and saw no scratch nor missing feather.

The last time I held a blue jay in my hands, it was an adult gasping for breath, dying. I had shot it with a pellet gun, in my teens—a nasty habit I now see as another horribly misplaced attempt to bring animals close. Rarely, if ever, had a bird I shot died in my hands, and none so handsome. At that time I remember this thought shooting through my head, probably not from my head: His colors will never again be as bright as they are right now.

I assured the woman that the baby seemed fine, and quite lucky to be. I stretched my arms over the brick wall and dropped the squirming bird into a yard without dogs. It hopped several feet away from us, and sat still. I went back upstairs, started dinner, and looked out the window. The woman was still standing at the wall, looking at the baby, then up at the trees, then checking her cell phone. I debated whether to say anything, but didn’t hesitate long. I told her from the window that she should go inside, because the mother would not come to the baby while she was standing there. She agreed, and left.