My daughter used to cry when the cows approached to eat some apples over the fence from my wife’s hand. But now she just watches them, their slow, powerful movements, as they lumber down the hillside for some tasty scraps.
My daughter isn’t quite a year old. But I hope that, as she grows older, the cows will become a fascinating fixture in her life—other living beings that aren’t like her or her mom and dad; creatures that somehow transform the grass outside into warm, creamy milk to accompany her breakfasts; creatures that meander along the slope that leads up to a tree line of pines that creak and sigh in the wind; a backdrop of stable and peaceful life encircling her own.
Within the book of nature, animals are key characters, and observing them may impart much wisdom to children. As a rule, children are enchanted by animals. This is why so many children’s clothes, toys, and books are covered in a herd of creatures that creep, crawl, gallop, slither, and fly. But there’s no substitute for the real thing.
Why should children be raised with animals as a regular part of their lives? There are many reasons, not the least of which is that the symbiotic relationship between humans and many species of animals stretches back to Eden itself. We depend on animals, and they on us. They’re a thread of the human story that can’t be pulled out or ignored without unraveling the whole tapestry.
Animals weave in and out of stories, poems, and songs of our ancient past. One thinks of Patroclus’s noble horses, which wept over the warrior’s dead body on the beaches below windy Troy in “The Iliad.” Homer knew, of course, that horses aren’t rational, that they don’t cry, but in the figure of this weeping horse, he captured an elemental truth about the bond that’s possible between a man and his animal. To deprive a child of the opportunity for such a bond is to deprive him or her of something of the richness of reality and the human experience. At the very least, to deprive a child of interaction with animals is to deprive him or her of an understanding of his or her own heritage.
Traditionally, most children grew up in close contact with animals because most of Western society was agrarian. Children (and people in general) used to understand far better than they do now where food comes from and how our human life is supported by a complex network of microbial life, plant life, and animal life. This is the natural order, and we forget it at our own peril.
Which leads to two of the most important benefits of children’s interaction with animals: it teaches discipline and responsibility, and it teaches about the natural cycles of life.
When children have regular chores to attend to that involve another living thing, they learn concretely how their negligence or inconsistency in performing a duty can cause suffering for other creatures. A mooing cow, whining dog, or sick rabbit makes that abundantly clear. Conversely, children see how their own consistent efforts to feed, water, clean, and care for an animal leads to the flourishing of life as the happy cat or dog or goat grows up to be what it’s meant to be.
There are deeper lessons yet. The experience of animals teaches children about the realities of life, both the joyful and the sad, the miracle of birth and the mystery of death. I remember distinctly an episode from my childhood: carrying in my arms the lifeless body of a black female cat that I was particularly attached to, after she was hit by a car. Her eyes had turned glassy, her body limp. I was saddened, but even more so, I was thoughtful as I contemplated how something could go from purring, climbing trees, and resting in my lap to this motionless lump of fur, quickly losing its warmth. It was a kind of gentle introduction to the reality of death, and it helped to prepare me to encounter and process deaths among human beings later in life.
When I was a teenager, my parents began to raise sheep on a small acreage in the country one fall. The ewes got pregnant, and we had our first experience of lambing in the spring. Unfortunately, things went poorly. Many of the lambs were born dead. Others died in utero, and the vet had to be called to get them out of their mothers’ bodies.
But some lived. Anyone who has watched an animal give birth, seen the struggling lamb in the grass and its mother sniffing, licking, nosing, and helping it up, with the sharp odor of the iodine on the lamb’s newly cut cord filling the crisp air, knows the magic of such a moment. The mystery of fecundity, moving and thrumming through animals, one generation to the next, as it does through humans, when witnessed firsthand, teaches us something about the sacredness and fragility of life.
