The Soul of the Animals

Many humans like to believe that other animals don't feel emotion. Perhaps that makes it easier for us to kill, maim, injure, torture, use them in lab experiments, or eat them. If you knew the pain that a fish experiences when a hook rips into its mouth, would you still fish? Some would.

There are videos that show adult Elephants mourning, returning to the place where one of their family or herd members died. They rock back and forth in an Elephant funeral ritual. They mourn. They feel emotion.

Here is a story that will sound unbelievable, but I swear to you it is true...

When I lived in Pennsylvania I volunteered at a wildlife rehabilitation center. House there were a variety of animals including Bear Cats, Vultures, Owls, and Hawks. I helped to feed the animals and clean out their cages.  The Bear Cats, a rare mammal from Madagascar, ate chopped vegetables. The other Birds ate small mice or rats, all frozen. Each day I would go into the freezer, grab a frozen white Rat by the tail, and take it into an Owl pen and place it in the food dish.

One day we started noticing an odor. It smelled of something rotten. We couldn't locate the source of the smell. Over the next several days the odor became more intense, due to hot weather.

In the center of the building where the animals were housed was a large six foot square metal box with three foot high sides and an open top. This was used to re-train the predatory birds to capture mice.

The smell was coming from under that box.

The owner started up her fork lift and drove it to the shiny box. Carefully she slid the forks under the box and slowly lifted it. Then, she backed up. I could not believe my eyes.

There, under that box, were hundred of dead white Rats. Bisecting the stacks of dead Rats were linear pathways. It was a Rat cemetery.

She turned off the fork lift and took her place next to me, staring in disbelief at what we were witnessing. Apparently, the resident Rat population (living) were taking the bodies of the their dead white Rat comrades from the pens and placing them under the box. It was their cemetery, the place where they honored their dead. They did not know the white Rats. But they cared for them anyway.

The owner bulldozed the pile of dead Rats out into the woods. I felt sad for the Rats. All of them.