"I think I could turn and live with animals*,
they are so placid, and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago…"
–Walt Whitman
I stopped the quote there, for I believe animals can be unhappy, which Whitman says they are not.
We have a new animal, a happy animal, a dog my grandson named Zeke.
I just learned that the word animal comes from the Latin word "soul."
Zeke is a German Shepherd mix. Small for a German Shepard. He's a lover, sweet and gentle. My daughter chose him from The Greenhill Animal Shelter.
He has three legs.
He had a genetic deformity in his right leg. The RV Outlet in Eugene, Oregon, paid for his surgery, a generosity for which I am incredibly grateful. They gave that dog an opportunity for a happy life and gave us a happy dog.
When my daughter first told me about him, I was reluctant to have another dog enter our two dogs and one-cat household, but within a day of having him here, I was in love.
One serendipitous part of this sudden experience was that a couple of days before my daughter learned that her dog Laffe has cancer, she felt called to look at dogs at the shelter, and while there she fell in love with this three-legged dog.
I was drawn to Whitman's poem, for this dog does not whine about his condition. He hops about, dropping joy on his three paw prints and us.
Regarding whether animals have souls, a subject I ran into this week, how in the heck would we know? People used to argue about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, and arguments regarding philosophical thought still rage.
I vote that if humans have a soul, and I believe they do—then so do the animals. To me, the spark of life indicates a soul. (Hey, plants are alive too.)
Gary Kowalski took up the daring question of the soul in his book, The Souls of Animals) — an inquiry into the "spiritual lives" of whooping cranes, elephants, jackdaws, gorillas, songbirds, horses, dogs, and cats. At its center is the idea that spirituality — which he defines as "the development of a moral sense, the appreciation of beauty, the capacity for creativity, and the awareness of one's self within a larger universe as well as a sense of mystery and wonder about it all" — is a natural byproduct of "the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life."
Do fleas go to heaven? If they do, they are fed a replicated formula and keep their mitts off the other critters.