Living together: maybe it's a mother's thing?

By Cindy Ross

07/22/2008

The man was felling a dead tree years ago when he discovered that it was a den tree. The mother squirrel had died from the impact, and the babies left orphans. He asked his wife's opinion and offered to take his chain saw to them and quickly end their misery before their children found out. She protested, so she and the kids gathered them up and took them to a wild animal rehab center. There they were bottle fed, and, when they were older, released into the wild.

The other day the woman was weeding the peas in their garden when she noticed that the resident groundhogs had figured out how to climb their garden fence and had eaten a row.

"Do something," she pleaded with her husband. She was thinking along the lines of raising the fence. Instead, her husband caught the mother in a death trap, her teats swollen and leaking milk. The five babies were left, shivering with fright, seemingly unable to distinguish which greens to eat. Each was caught in the trap, one by one. The man, who only had a pitchfork in his hand, cornered the father inside the garden.

"Doesn't it bother you?" she questioned him.

"They were eating the peas."

Perhaps his attitude is leftover from the age of one animal against the other. Maybe it's about providing for his family, like shooting wolves that eat their sheep.

We, and the animals around our garden, are occupying the same niche and competing for the same food. That is how the natural world works. One gets it and one does not. It is people and ground hogs competing for the peas, in the man's eyes, and he is determined to win, regardless of how that is accomplished.

There was a story in the newspaper about the Allentown, Pennsylvania firefighters who were called to rescue baby goslings from a storm drain. Dressed in 60 pounds of gear, these manly men answered the call and happily saved their little lives, for they mattered.

Everyone draws their line on how they value life at a different place. For some their lines encompass small, young, fuzzy, and cute creatures. Yet others shoot cats when they're bored of hunting and see no game. Why do we make exceptions for one species and not another? Does it only have to do with convenience, location, fear or territory? In another place and time, we might consider those geese a nuisance and the baby groundhogs charming.

On one hand, this issue seems like a small thing...controlling unwanted pests. However, when looked at closer, it may say something big.

The gardening couple's son feels differently than the husband, about the animal world. When he was young, he accidentally stepped on a millipede when they were hiking. Filled with remorse, he sat down on a rock sobbing and pleaded, "Do you think the millipede knew how much I loved him, Mama? Do you think the millipede will go to heaven?"

"I bet he's already there," she assured him.

As a teen, he still relocates spiders outside when he finds them in the house.

Maybe it's a mother's thing. Maybe it's her responsibility to care a few levels deeper and try to balance out the insensitivity. Perhaps this killing diminishes our ability to care, to empathize, to learn how to co-exist. Perhaps we need to instill in our children the value of all life, or the next generation may have hearts shrunken to Grinch-size proportions.

The woman wishes she would not have taken the easy way out and left it up to her husband to determine the groundhogs' fates. She wishes she had insisted on tactics to repel and outwit, not obliterate. She should have demanded symbiosis- the living together of two species in a manner that is advantageous for both.

She recently purchased a copy of Bill Alder's book, Outwitting Critters- A Surefire Manual for Confronting Devious Animals and Winning. She hopes it will help them both make more humane choices. Then when the next family of groundhogs moves in (and she hopes they do), they'll be better equipped to deal with the challenge of living together.

The world may not have missed those few squirrels, or a handful of goslings, but surprisingly, the woman truly misses her groundhogs. There are no longer any brown balls of fur romping across our pasture when she drives down her lane. And the peas no longer taste so good.