Saving Simon (14 page)

The sound of the crickets and the frogs down by the creek had deepened and become louder, anchoring the night. The
gnats and flies were gone. The mosquitoes had risen up, but were held at bay by the breezes that swept the valley for much of the night.

Mercy was very much on my mind. Theologians such as Thomas Aquinas believed that mercy was the greatest of all of the human virtues. It implies a measure of grandeur and nobility. It is the most selfless of human emotions, in that it calls for the generous relief of the needs and miseries of others, out of our own abundance of spirit or wealth. We help others out of our own store of wealth, knowledge, skill, or strength, and if we are truly compassionate, we do so whenever we see sentient beings in need of aid and assistance.

Aquinas did not believe in being merciful to animals out of generosity or compassion for them. He believed we should be merciful to them because it taught us how to be merciful to other human beings.

In his time, most great thinkers believed animals to be inferior to human beings, as they had no conscience and always chose pleasure over virtue. In our time, many people believe animals to be superior to human beings, and sometimes, watching the news, I think they make a good case.

Mercy is a simple thing, really, in Aquinas’s time and ours. It is a positive action undertaken for the good of another, to relieve misery. And the worst kind of suffering, Aquinas wrote, is the suffering and misfortune that strikes those who in no way deserve it, the innocent.

This group would include animals, to my mind. Simon was an innocent, a creature of moral value. He had no conception of greed, anger, revenge, or envy. The suffering of animals touches people so deeply, I think, because it is so unprovoked, so impossible to justify.

Animals are dependent on us, they are vulnerable to us;
when we mistreat them we are diminishing ourselves, destroying our own humanity.

But it seemed to me, I thought, standing out in my pasture, that the love of animals has made many people less compassionate to humans. The very idea of animal rights in our time is equated with hostility, rage, and self-righteousness.

What was I supposed to feel for the farmer, lost in the story of Simon, and his wife, who was also caught up in it? What is supposed to become of the boy who loved Simon, who tried to feed him, and who set his rescue in motion by making that phone call?

The answer became clear in the pasture. I needed to feel as much compassion for the farmer as I did for Simon, and not because I am morally superior or campaigning for sainthood. I needed to do it for me, for my own soul.

I didn’t understand the farmer, and nothing I learned in our talk helped me to understand how he could have gone about his business while this innocent creature lay dying a few feet away. But that was not a reason to hate him, or even to judge him. He deserved as much compassion as Simon did, although no one will come to help him and guide him back to the light. Perhaps he will figure out how to do it himself.

I saw that this contemplation of what measure of compassion is owed to the farmer was a dialogue between Simon and me. It wasn’t that he had the words, language, or emotion to join in the discussion or have theories about it. But he had opened up this vein in me. As a person with a lot of anger and judgment inside of him, I found this to be new and challenging terrain.

When I wrote about my reluctance to judge the farmer on my blog, I got a lot of messages from people who were incredulous that I would have any sympathetic feelings for the man
after what he had done to Simon. People said that what he had done was too hateful to forgive. But that, I thought, is not compassion.

And why, I kept asking, are people who love animals so angry at people? Animals are perhaps better treated now and more appreciated than at any other time in human history. Why are we so drawn to their abuse and mistreatment, so repelled by our own?

Our society offers us few ways to be merciful. The poor and the dying are hidden away in ghettos and nursing homes. More and more, we communicate through avatars and devices, and we hear fewer human voices and stories. Our so-called news has become a vehicle for transmitting conflict and tragedy, and we spend more and more time closeted in our homes, flickering screens our most frequent companions.

It’s easy to avoid suffering and easier to feel disconnected from the people experiencing it. There are millions of animals in need of care and homes, and it’s curious that the idea of animal rescue is so new, even though needy animals have always been around.

Rescuing Simon brought me many gifts. I felt good about doing it; it was immensely satisfying in the most profound way. I was also showered with praise from all over the world.

And you know what? It wasn’t very hard to do, it didn’t cost much, and it was not complicated if you had a pasture and a barn—I had four. All that was required was hay, several different medicines, and a willingness to put your hands on the tender and private parts of a donkey. I suppose I could admit to a certain squeamishness at the open sores and lice and maggots, but squeamishness is easy to overcome, and I had had a lot of practice dealing with it during my years at the farm.

I did feel generous and noble. Everybody in town knew
what we had done for Simon. Everybody thanked me and thought it was a wonderful thing to do. So this is where I put my compassion, my mercy, I thought, here, where it is easy and recognized, not there, out in the country, with that sullen man and his frightened family.

But I was coming to see what mercy and compassion really meant, and where I wanted it to take me.

I went into the house and wrote a letter to the farmer. It said:

And I mailed it off.

The next morning, Simon and I went for a walk in the woods. Except for one standoff—he was determined to veer left to sample some grass he liked the smell of—our walk was easy. He seemed eager and trotted alongside of me. It was warm that morning, and there was a soft breeze blowing down the path. The rustling of the leaves seem to fascinate Simon. I am not sure he had seen them before or paid much attention. For many years, I hadn’t, either.

We stopped every now and then so he could lean over and snatch a fat leaf off of a maple tree. He stopped and chewed the leaves thoughtfully. I was beginning to see why so many writers throughout history loved to take walks with donkeys. They are
wonderful companions, and they appreciate the natural world, noticing everything in a way that is infectious.

I didn’t say much until we turned around and started back toward the farmhouse. By now, the sun was peeking through the forest cover and it seemed as if we were walking into a tunnel of light.

“It’s easy to talk about being merciful and compassionate,” I said to my donkey. “It’s not so easy to figure out how to live that way.”

TWELVE
 

There is a particular
feeling of self-worth, even righteousness, that comes from saving a helpless animal from suffering or mistreatment. When I rescued Simon, there was no ambivalence or second-guessing; there was nothing but praise. Praise feels good. I was learning that compassion also feels good. It is both healing and affirming, but for me it was also confusing and troubling. Simon had me all stirred up.

It’s so easy to help an animal in need, especially if the animal is cute or nice or amenable to being helped, or shows affection and what we like to call gratitude. People tell me how grateful Simon seems to me, how appreciative. It’s nice
to hear, but I’ve studied and lived with animals long enough to know I have no idea what Simon is really thinking.

Gratitude is a very human kind of emotion. It requires a sense of narrative and reasoning I don’t believe animals have. When animals are fed and given attention—fresh hay and an apple a day will do it—they attach very powerfully to the people nurturing them. Their lives depend on it; their instincts proffer it. Dogs and donkeys have been around people a very long time—they know the game. Simon plays me like a Stradivarius, braying and sighing whenever he sees me until he gets a cookie or a carrot. If someone else comes along with a cookie or a carrot, he is off like a shot.

Perhaps the longing look Simon gives me is gratitude; perhaps it’s just the excitement any domesticated animal has learned to display when food or attention is in the picture. This may sound cynical, but it is not really. Simon is attached to me; he is also attached to the many hundreds of other people who visit and bring him carrots and treats. We see what we want to see and need to see. This is the role animals play in our distracted and intense world.

Animals can’t leave, talk back, disagree, or challenge our assistance. There are few, if any, laws or regulations governing caring for them. They can’t sue us if something gets screwed up or go on Facebook and air their grievances.

As I thought about it, I realized that I was pretty careful in my choice of compassionate opportunities. I didn’t feel too much compassion for snakes or coyotes, cows or rabid raccoons and skunks. I wondered how much compassion I would have felt for Simon had he been ill-tempered or resistant to treatment, if he hadn’t watched me carefully with his big brown eyes as I read to him, or loved children and visitors so much.

When it came to my being compassionate toward people, I was even more selective, as Simon helped me to see. There was a sweet woman down the road with cancer, and I took her food and offered to help her every day. Another neighbor was a mean drunk living alone in poverty. I never thought of taking him food or visiting his house.

I began to see I was making decisions about compassion, and recalibrating those decisions all the time. For instance, we had a big beautiful rooster named Strut, who I took a lot of photos of and put them up on my blog. Eventually he began to turn aggressive, as many roosters do, and attacked Maria one afternoon. The attack was disturbing. Strut threw himself suddenly at Maria’s legs as she walked by, raking her with his beak and claws, attacking again and again, even after she kicked at him and blocked him with a bucket.

Before she got away from him, her legs were covered with blood and scratches. Maria is the kind of person who rehomes spiders and moths; compassion comes much more naturally to her than to me. Still, she was shaken by the attack.

I went into the house, got my .22 rifle, loaded it, and walked out in the pasture where Strut was pecking for bugs with his hens. I shot him through the heart, killing him almost instantly.

When I wrote about this on my blog, I got many messages of understanding from farmers who had known roosters and had been through the same experience, and many from people with pets who expressed outrage that I would kill the rooster rather than rehome him or confine or separate him in some way.

“I suppose,” one woman fumed, “you would shoot a sheep if she attacked your wife.” Well, yes, I thought, I would.

None of those people expressed any concern or compassion for Maria or for the idea that the safety of a human is of equal importance to the well-being of a rooster.

So there were different dimensions to my practice of compassion: While I tended to be compassionate to people and animals I liked and who liked me, I found it hard to be compassionate or empathetic to people whose beliefs and actions were offensive or disturbing to me.

Compassion, like freedom of speech, is one of those ideas we all love to talk about until something vile happens, then not so much.

And yet, I thought, wasn’t compassion really about empathizing on a broader scale than that? Simon had entered my interior world. Empathizing with him was easy; he touched on many of my own painful childhood issues—loneliness, abandonment, neglect, abuse. I didn’t experience the same things he had, but I did experience what I imagined were some of the things he suffered. I related to them.

Strut didn’t receive the same empathy, and I can’t say I regret it, either.

I began reading the works of some strong thinkers on compassion—the Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Saint Francis of Assisi, Plato, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer—and I kept running across another view of it. Compassion is not really about our personal interior world but the exterior one. It extends to living things beyond our yards and pastures. It extends to people as well as animals, encompassing things we don’t like as well as things we do: animals that are not cute and endearing, but are simply suffering and in need.

My ideas about compassion were small and immediate—my interior world—but compassion was a much bigger and
more complex idea than that. I did not come close to understanding it yet—not in me, not in the world beyond.