I've often wondered about the human propensity to make all living creatures, well, human. That, is, to attribute human characteristics to any animate object around us, giving them personalities and lifestyles like one reads in children's books or cartoon strips. And these tales--from the likes of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit to Jim Davis' Garfield--tend to mirror our own, very human, lives.
We all do it. And it has nothing to do with intellect-or lack of it. It's emotional--and all too human. I won't even illustrate my point with my two Shih Zhu pooches...we've pretty much convinced them that they are human (there I go, persuading you that they even understand the concept). I call them my babies. Enough said.
Then there's the rabbit. My daughter is convinced that the rabbit "loves" me best because she follows me everywhere I go: upstairs, downstairs, onto the sofa or under my bedcovers. My daughter disregards the obvious reason--I am the only one in the house who feeds the critter--preferring to believe that the rabbit has cultivated a deep, emotional, human attachment to me. And when I'm snuggling beside her, running my fingers through her soft, furry pelt, don't I buy right into the idea? Of course! That little bunny really does love me best!
If we could contain our little predilection for humanizing our pets to the privacy of our own home, we'd never have to endure the amused teasing of friends and family, but we must love the punishment because we've taken our cockeyed notions to the great outdoors. Our newly built pond is now the hub of all humanizing efforts--namely the frogs who mysteriously appeared in a "build it and they will come" sort of way last spring.
The first to show up was a big green guy with a brown face and my hubby dubbed him "Sir Edmund." Not too crazy, right? Naming a frog? I mean, just like the man who was first to climb Everest, this fellow was a trailblazer. Perhaps more frogs would follow. They did. Big ones, little ones, green ones, brown ones, solid ones, striped and dotted ones. We sit at the pond on a lazy Saturday afternoon counting the many frogs frolicking among the plants and stones and we sigh with nostalgia because it reminds us of a favorite childhood activity: counting the hidden pictures in our Highlights magazines.
One day my husband arrived home from work to find me out by the pond scooping up algae. I told him Mr. Grouchy was acting up again, stirring up the whole frog clan with his loud croaking. My husband nodded sagely, knowing exactly which frog I was referring to and it was then that I realized
we'd probably gone off the deep end of our proverbial pond.
But we, like every other animal lover in the world, are undeterred. We'll probably always speak in "baby talk" to a puppy and feel special every time a duck eats a cracker straight from our outstretched hand. We'll always be convinced that the animal world is interested in joining our human existence. In fact, as I write this, I see the fattest Robin going to town in our backyard birdbath. Will you look at the way he shimmies and shakes? He's really trying to get his undercarriage clean! Come to think of it, we really need to get a book on birds...figure out how we can get them to nest in our eaves....
