kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with animals

To people with oodles of money: please don't do this. This sucks.

I had a dream about walking down the street and being assailed by a woman with several pets who would not leave me alone. She was walking dogs and small alligators -- I'll probably have to unpack that symbolism in meditation -- and the only way of dealing with it was to stand with my back to them in silence and stillness. One of the dog's had a gimpy leg, red and shriveled against its body.

I am always being threatened or harassed in dreams. My challenge is not to react poorly. My instinct in the dream mentioned above was fight or flight. When my escape in dreams is stymied, I have been known to lash out and stab/kick/assault my way through. I know I am not alone in this response: my husband reports he has fighting dreams all the time. When I was a child, my friend and I would talk about our dreams while walking to school. Her dreams were turbulent and threatening like mine. Overall, the collective astral is a teeming mess. To perceive it as a general threat is extremely common. I am confident most people's dreams are worse than mine, and those who cannot remember their dreams or believe they do not dream are in the worst spot of all. Lacking the benefit of prayer relationships with deities, discursive meditation, banishing rituals, and daily divination, the average person is like the lone kid being dodgeballed to death in the corner of the gymnasium; he just doesn't know what is happening because most people have the astral plane equivalent of leprosy.

Despite the ritual practices I do every day, I am often a sitting duck for malevolent entities who eyeball me on the astral plane and think "Mmmm, tasty!" The more I react by becoming upset or violent, the more I become a resource for negative entities to feed.

Rich People and Animal Hoarding: Let them eat peacock

Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had an abundance of animals at Versailles. Louis's grandfather, Louis XIV, collected exotic animals from around the world; this is when the term "menagerie" came into fashion. Versaille's forests were stocked with animals for daily hunts. Versaille's stables were full of horses as horses were to the 18th century what cars are to the 21st. The Petit Trianon, Marie's LARP of the idyllic peasant life, was stocked with farm animals. Marie Antoinette purportedly had many dogs that her servants looked after within the Versaille palace. When the royal family was taken captive during the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette was able to hang on to a single, favorite dog named Thisbe. Nobody knows what happened to Thisbe after Marie Antoinette was executed. One question that is seldom mentioned about the botched escape of Louis, Marie, and the kids is: What happened to the animals of Versailles? Were they euthanized? Adopted? Eaten?

The landlord class loves to dictate what poorer people can and cannot do with animals: every rent in existence now goes with onerous pet fees. The only way to escape them is to become a homeowner. When it comes to animals, rich people hoard them like they do any other possession. I would argue rich people hoard animals far more frequently than poor people, but we don't hear about the most egregious cases because they are quietly swept under the rug. My upper middle class family dipped its toes in animal hoarding: though our animals were never neglected, we had fish, rodents, a cat, a dog, and reptiles all at once several times during my youth. My brother abandoned his pet turtle in the mid-eighties. This turtle was taken in by the next door neighbors and survives to this day.

Dumbai

Rich People and Vanity Projects

A collection of animals is often another rich person's vanity project. Rich people indulge in vanity projects because they can, not necessarily because they should. At the moment, there are several bazillion rich people spending thousands if not millions or billions of dollars on projects that would have been better left undone. From horrifically narcissistic movies and documentaries to huge additions added on to already overlarge houses to restaurants nobody asked for, there is a lot of wealth being wasted that could have been more useful elsewhere. The ultimate pinnacle of profligate waste is the city of Dubai. Dubai is the vanity project to end all vanity projects. Its buildings are stupid. Its practices are exploitative: if you think brown people are oppressed for the sake of their labor over here, you ain't seen nothing. Dubai's manmade islands (hotels literally built on sand) are an ecological holocaust. Someday Dubai will be a pathetic memory of porta-potty influencers who sold their souls and bodies for doodads and a fleeting mirage, but for now, it parties on as the Weimar Berlin of the moment. Everything and everyone is for sale.

The House as Wendigo

I can see why people rent. I used to rent. The American dream of home-ownership is a nightmare and more specifically, it is a Wendigo. Every house with the exception of new construction is a constant money pit of maintenance and renovation. My husband and I have a mortgage on the cheapest house money can buy in our particular area of the world. Our pathetic earnings were barely enough to snag our tiny home for well under 100K in 2015. We could not afford a condominium because the presence of an association fee disqualified us from having the income necessary to afford to own, at least on paper. Since moving into our dumpy place, the site has been a whirlwind of improvements ever since: tree removal, new roof, gutters, plumbing, electric, yard, and so own. Our wee, one-bedroom cottage has demanded so much work that there is no way it would be livable if my husband lacked the skill to force the issue. Despite the huge amounts of labor and money spent on our place, I guesstimate that we could spend 35K on the yard alone if we made all the improvements we want to make, and as we are lower middle class, it is not going to happen. At some point, you have to look at a house, throw up your hands, and say ENOUGH.

The rich person would hire it all done, or worse, skip off to a new construction "home" in an exclusive area in a gated community. Furthermore, all of those annoying etheric labor tasks such as vacuuming the floors and cleaning the toilet are someone else's job. For many in the upper middle class, it does not seem like it will end. I would argue that for most of them, it won't end in my lifetime. They will live and die without knowing what it is to sweat over making a car payment. They will go to their graves without ever having to decide between buying needed groceries or paying the gas bill. They will have plenty left at the end of the month for their overlarge home, their next vacation, their kid's college education including rental of an off-campus apartment, a small fleet of leased cars, and one or more vanity projects outside the house as vanity project.

A fake influencer... for real. Her name is Imma. She's AI. If this is how they represent their ideals, I want zero part of it.

Invoking Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and differentiation the sincerest form of insult. What I hate, I refuse to imitate. I don't play the lottery because I don't want unearned "security" in the form of unearned wealth. If I didn't earn it, it means that someone worked to get it for me. Wealth, like any form of energy, cannot be made out of nothing. It is neither created nor destroyed; it only changes form. The fantasy of would-be lottery winners is what they would do with an obscene amount of (unearned) wealth. Many would cancel their debts, including me, because that is a common instinct. Many would dump funds into their house, or into getting a house that would be a typical money pit. Some would throw their cash into stocks, retirement funds, or crypto, all of which are socially-approved forms of gambling. Some would overhaul their appearances, feeding another Wendigo that only gets more uncanny with age. Some would indulge in vanity projects as an attempt to fill the void within. There is nothing wrong with the "if I get really rich" fantasy as long as it is always counteracted with "if I get really poor" fantasy. Of course we should also have some thoughts and planning for what happens if we remain in-between the two extremes, which is the most likely scenario.

In my own case, I have a constant battle with Virgo-rising perfectionism. It is only by letting go of my fetish for perfection that I can live a good and happy life. I used to equate having a certain amount of money with security. I now realize, with the help of Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics, notably Epictetus, that security via one's physical wealth is a sham. Security does not exist. Nobody gets out of here alive. The point of the test is not to see who had the most and nicest stuff. I don't think it would be this bad here if it wasn't meant to proof us and to crucible us into being better people. No wonder the rich are so miserable -- look at the children of the wealthy right now with their Five Minutes Hate, preening on university campuses about "injustice". All they have is a Wendigo which is the legacy of unneeded vanity projects and spiritual leprosy. They may have money but they are very poor where it counts. Spiritual leprosy can be ameliorated and potentially cured, but like any cancer, it takes some fairly radical lifestyle changes most are unwilling to make.

When my husband and I moved into my house three years ago after long stints of living with my parents between apartments, it felt amazing (still does!) to wake up under my own roof and to have my own yard. One of my many headstrong notions when I got here was to provide a feeding and watering station for the wide variety of northern Illinois animals who frequent my yard. Within weeks of the move, I was feeding and watering everyone from the raccoons evicted from our fixer-upper’s attic to sweat bees to the occasional fox on the move.

In exchange for the regular grub and drink, the animals provided us with plenty of visual entertainment, of course. Additionally, the feral cats unwittingly policed my raised garden beds of lettuce: I was the only person in the suburbs hauling garbage bags full of fresh lettuce out of my beds during nearly three months of temperate 2019. Elsewhere in the suburbs, rabbits ensured that didn’t happen. From the beginning, there was a sense of a relationship being built between me and the birds, squirrels, bugs, cats, raccoons, opossums, and skunks.

After only three years, the garden is barely established. It isn’t yet the sanctuary for animals (including human animals) I intend it to be. Nevertheless, when a skunk came into my yard to die three days ago, it wasn’t the first time an animal had sought shelter in my yard. Approximately five seconds after the garden shed was built, raccoons and skunks started living and hiding under it. My husband became concerned about this, but I was adamant that as long as I live here, let it be. The shed is the epicenter of the yard for animals at this point — it is where the animals eat and close to where they hide out storms and terrible weather.

For nearly a year, we’ve noticed one skunk who did a strange dance out by the feeding station, circling around, doing the skunk version of backflips. This was not mating behavior. The skunk, who dragged herself into my yard to die a few days ago, most likely had distemper. Distemper is similar to rabies. It is always fatal. The poor skunk wanted shelter and had dragged herself to the feeding station in a last-ditch effort to stay alive.

My husband was in the yard, so he picked up the twitching, flailing skunk with a shovel and put her out in some brush near the alley behind our house. At first, I wasn’t happy he did this, but when I realized distemper is spread through feces and bites, I thought it was for the best because the animals congregate in fairly close quarters near the shed, and I think nowadays most of us are acutely aware of social distancing when it comes to combatting viruses.

This is where I went wrong. We both knew the skunk was not going to live from looking at her, but we left her by the fence in hopes nature would take its course. Nature had slower plans. I kept checking the skunk throughout the day. Though her flailing slowed down, by the evening, she was still going, having dragged herself about six feet across the fence’s length in her agony during the long day. During the day, I called half a dozen different public institutions that one would think could have come and dispatched the skunk, ending her misery. Shockingly, even with the help of the Animal Help Now app, there wasn’t a damn person on government payroll willing to put down a skunk with a contagious virus. This begs the question why my tax dollars fund the Department of Natural Resources in the first place, and I’m mad enough still to write them a scathing review, but at any rate, my mistake was in not hiring a private service to euthanize the skunk the same day she wandered into my yard to die.

The issue was mostly about money. Because a skunk is considered a “nuisance” animal, and because skunks can spray, the charge was $150. In hindsight, I didn’t want to upset my husband by spending $150 during a time he has been laid off from his job, but then I realized my own hypocrisy at dropping $30 every few days on takeout in an effort to keep a new vegan restaurant in my area alive. I went to bed that night and slept fitfully and badly, hoping the skunk would die a natural death.

I got up the next morning and went outside. No such luck. She was still twitching and worse yet, raising her head. Distemper had made her into a skunk zombie. The look of it reminded me of the final stages of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, when the brain is gone and the body clings to life. I immediately called a private animal control service. A guy named Frank came out and ended the skunk’s life on the spot. I won’t say how, because people in the suburbs can often be complete asshats. It took two tries. The poor creature was finally off to the next phase of incarnation after a forty-hour ordeal. My only consolation was that I had surely shortened what could have been an even more obscenely extended death.

The thing that upsets me about my own behavior is that I kowtowed to financial and social pressure not to save an animal. A little over a year ago, my reclusive aunt died, and I braved social/physical/mental hell and high water to save her two cats, so I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to muster up my usual fire to dispatch a little skunk. Yes, it’s frustrating that government services failed me. That said, as I have gotten older, I have realized that most people in this culture shut down when it comes to dealing with animals. Our relationship with them is deeply fractured, and there’s nothing like a wounded animal wandering into one’s yard to remind us of that. Like many, I have had to start from scratch when it has come to how I think about animals, and ignoring the plight of the skunk for nearly forty hours was a nasty reminder of my old habits.

Compassion and bravery are traits we humans think we can pass on when it comes to animals. We are raised thinking they exist to serve us, entertain us, clothe us, and feed us, when the truth is closer to what Alice Walker said:

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”

Inasmuch as they were not created for me, I believe that all humans have an innate responsibility to act as animal stewards and protectors. Most of us shirk that responsibility our entire lives. Sadly, in order to get the job done for the skunk, I had to go against the grain. Just like the time when I rescued the cats, it quickly became abundantly clear that I was the only person willing to act like an adult where the skunk was concerned. Everyone else, including the state services which are supposed to do jobs like this, shrunk away in cowardice, leaving the skunk’s fate to chance. This was eerily similar to what happened when my aunt died, as nobody else considered going to her place to get the cats who would have frozen to death within a day or two if they weren’t attacked and killed by other animals.

Our relationships with non-human animals have been terrible since the day some dude decided to get a party together to spear a mammoth. Our despair and haplessness manifests itself in myriad ways. There are the sick, well-intentioned efforts of those who try to keep pets alive at all costs, making them go through hellish surgeries and veterinary treatments because they can’t bear to allow Fido or Fluffy to die a few years ahead of the ideal schedule. Worse than them are those who buy or adopt an animal and then abandon them because they are tired of the responsibility or because they birth human kids or because they move. Several of my neighborhood’s ferals started out as someone’s house cat. The primary reason I chose not to have children is because I didn’t want to end up with the horror of regretting it. When I adopted my cat, I knew I was signing on for no less than 16 - 23 years. The choice to abandon is just as bad with a non-human animal because neither baby nor puppy can understand what is going on or fend for themselves. And that’s just our relationship with pets…

Anyway, the poor skunk is gone now and bless her little soul as she makes her way through the planes, only to return again. I hope to see her again soon.