May 23, 2002

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  Kinship with All Life

  
  

  A little while ago, I had occasion to point out to someone that we are all animals, that drawing a distinction between “man” and “animal” is fallacious. I’ve no such quibbles about drawing distinctions between us and vegetables or rocks, but as for myself, I’m an animal. And I can tell from looking at you, that you are an animal too. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s just a real thing, an actuality.

  
  

  And we animals can join the vegetables (and maybe even the rocks) in the big inclusive family of life. Animist shamans of my acquaintance say, “everything that is, is alive.” Rocks do seem to resonate…they “speak” to psychometrists, dowsers and other sensitive individuals. I can’t say with certainty that they are not alive or conscious in some way. Just to be safely all-inclusive, I’ll say that we are all one on this planet… and beyond.

  
  

  The title up there, “Kinship with All Life” is a book title, a book by J. Allan Boone, about a remarkable dog, Strongheart. Personally, I remember Strongheart only from legends, and from his picture on the labels of dog food cans. Rin Tin Tin and Lassie came after Strongheart in the movies, and I loved them, but I still wish I could have known Strongheart.

  
  

  Boone got to know Strongheart when they were thrown together by their movie work, and the dog taught the man–no, showed him–the kinship of all life. Their telepathic bond gave the man the dog’s perspective and *how can I say this?*…altered his paradigm. I know how that is. I’ve bonded with some animals that way.

  
  

  I’ve formed deep bonds with cats of both domestic kinds (tame and feral) and a zoo tiger I used to visit daily; with birds (remind me to tell the bird stories sometime), squirrels, chipmunks, fish, turtles, mice, rats, snakes, lizards, sheep, horses, deer, guinea pigs, a couple of chocobos, an opossum, a tarantula, a raccoon, and a huge polled hereford bull named Buddy. With the chocobos, it was a really one-sided relationship, but I loved them nonetheless.

  
  

  They were all interesting, rewarding, and comfortable, companionable relationships–definite feelings of kinship, of shared affection. But none of them ever reached the depth of devotion, the breadth of understanding and profound kinship I feel with the canids. Wolves, foxes, coyotes and all kinds of dogs have shown uncommon affinity for me and aroused the same feelings in me. If I’m ever privileged to meet a dingo or a hyena, I suppose I’d feel the same way with them.

  
  

  Wolf cubs, puppies, and especially little baby coyotes are irresistable to me… and not to me alone, I know. Seeing pups playing brings joyous laughter bubbling over. Seeing them hurt is like a wrenching blow in the part of me where my motherhood lives. Seeing one taken by a lynx or an eagle is always a shock. I wince, and then I remember the kinship of all life. Can’t blame a predator for its predation, or begrudge it a meal.

  
  

  Coyote Oldman, the storyteller, the one who made this world: Coyote of the mythic tales from the American Southwest, has had significance for me for as long as I can recall. Some of my work, the lessons in shamanic techniques and reviews of books on shamanism, etc., I sign, “Coyote Medicine”. Coyote is part of my identity. Nothing else thrills me like the yips and wails of coyotes in the desert night. Moving to Alaska was a big adventure, but I missed the coyotes.

  
  

  Then the coyotes followed me up here. Within years of my arrival in Alaska, in the mid-seventies, people had started reporting seeing them. By the eighties I had seen some near here myself. As coyote sightings became more common, wolf sightings became more rare. There are wolf-hybrid dogs around here, and I’ve heard rumors of wolf-coyote crosses.

  
  

  I know we have cross-foxes in the neighborhood: big, sturdy, vigorous crosses between the red and arctic foxes, and others whose build and masked faces suggest a cross with sled dogs. I love every doggy one of them, wild and domestic, and none more than my own best buddy Koji, whose ancestry is almost as mysterious as that of those anomalous wildlings we get the occasional glimpse of.

  
  

  As readily as the canids interbreed, they are equally as ready to compete for territory and prey. Dog eat dog is the way of the world.

  
  

  I’m fully aware that it wasn’t my relocation that brought the coyotes into this valley. Habitat destruction in their home ranges down south, global warming, the waning of wolf populations in their old ranges here, all had a part in it.

  
  

  The other night, I caught part of a PBS show on mass extinctions. It’s a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to. Those epochal events were impressed on my consciousness from early childhood by the evidences left in the fossil record. There at one level was great abundance and diversity of species, then in the layer just above was only a small fraction of that. Then populations increase, boom, and eventually there will be another of those discontinuities where the process starts again with the sparse survivors of some catastrophic event.

  
  

  Until very recently, the old fart and I had a long-standing disagreement about mass extinction. His contention was that “man”, our species of domesticated primates, was going to kill off itself and all the rest of the life on the planet. He said it was a sure thing, inevitable.

  
  

  I wasn’t buying it. I just do not see that happening. After years of intermittent discussion, the weight of facts on my side has convinced my old fox, too. Now the whole family agrees that life will probably survive on this planet. Aren’t you relieved? Well, I can assure you that the old fart is not.  He was rooting for the human villains to die off in their own stink.

  
  

  We have already annihilated no-one-knows-how-many species, and the actions of our generation and others before us have set into motion processes that will kill off some more species even if we were to stop killing right now. But we’ve also begun taking steps to slow the rate of extinction, and precautions to preserve threatened species and sensitive habitats.

  
  

  Life is tenacious, tough and durable. Geologists can show you how, time after time, even when the vast majority of species couldn’t adapt fast enough to a changed environment to survive, there have always been a few that made it. I prefer to think that domesticated primates can be among the survivors of the next mass extinction. I can’t prove it. I can’t even state it in terms of belief… I just know it is possible.   We might have to drop some of our domestication to do it, but we’re survivors, I think.

  
  

  With much more certainty, I can say I think life in some form will survive. Even if the last animals left are a breeding pair of coyotes and a swarm of cockroaches, we will make it. We are all One, and we will survive.

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