Meerkats and Polar Bears

[pcw_rcw]

One of Richard's sisters, "E", has been a faithful viewer of Meerkat Manor, a real-life animal drama on Animal Planet on TV. [Richard watched it for the first season, but I (Perri) have avoided it because, being a real nature show, I knew that nasty things couldn't help but happen to the meerkats]. Meerkats are charming little creatures which

Comments

[kalimac]

I don't think the problem comes with becoming emotionally attached to animals, even to animals on TV. (Some people become intensely emotionally attached to fictional characters on TV.) What I think one has a duty to recognize is that wild animals are going to die horrible meaningless deaths, and even pets live short lives by our standards. Grieve, by all means; just don't act all gobsmacked with dismayed surprise whenever it happens.

My friend nellorat keeps pet white rats. (I've been to see them: they're awfully cute.) She has a whole colony of these rats, and their lifespan is three years at the very most, so every few months she's grieving rat death. But she recognizes that this is the way of things when you keep rats, and doesn't act as if the universe has an animus against her (or them).

In 18 years of keeping cats together, B. and I have had three cats die, and one of our current two is beginning to get on in years. That's about as much as I want to handle.

[pcw_rcw]

I (Perri) agree with what you say. Wild prey animals are going to die before whatever their species' natural age span would be. That's a given. Even predators in the wild are at the mercy of starvation, disease, and other predators [humans count as predators here]. It's just a question of how and how soon. The lifespan of wild animals can be anywhere as much as 2-3 times longer when they are well-kept in zoos and animal parks, and their deaths are as humane as animal caretakers can make them. Since my totem animal is the polar bear, an almost pure carnivore (unlike brown and black bears, whose diets can be composed of as much as 60-70% vegetation), I have had to come to peace with the 'nature, red in tooth and claw' concept.

Pets do have short lives. Those of us who have had pets long enough for them to die, know what we face whenever we take another one into our hearts. It always startles me how shocked and surprised some people are when their elderly cat or dog dies. Sadness and grief is a given, of course, but surprise?

[fidelioscabinet]

I'd avoided watching the meerkat program, as cute as the critters are, because I figured this was likely to happen, and didn't want to have to tough it out when it did.

My sympathies to "E", because it really sucks to go through that.

[pcw_rcw]

"E" is beginning to get a handle on things. Fortunately she lives near one of two zoos in her state which actually has a meerkat colony, so she's been able to go and get some comfort from visiting them. She's evidently also collecting meerkat photos and posting them on her refrigerator, etc. Pretty soon she will be as bad as I am with my polar bears!

[smills47]

My husband and I once had a parakeet. Psittacines are normally rather long-lived, but he succumbed to an air sac infection at 5 years old. It felt perhaps a little absurd (in the existential sense) to be grieving for a one-and-a-half-ounce critter with a brain the size of a lentil. But we did. To grieve for an animal, meerkats, polar bears, or any other, seems perfectly natural to me, and I can't imagine why anyone would think it was stupid or foolish.

[pcw_rcw]

Sorry to hear about your parakeet. When I was growing up, my family had a number of parakeets as pets [as well as canaries and finches, from time to time] but we didn't have much more success than you did. Richard and I stick with cats now

[smills47]

Do you know about the book (also made into a movie) The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill? There used to be articles periodically in the San Francisco Chronicle about the guy who eventually wrote the book. He has a web site (naturally!) markbittner.net with lots of pictures of the various parrots he befriended.

Our parakeet, I recall, used to only visit his seed cup when we sat down to eat. How did he know that these humongous beakless creatures were engaging in the act of eating? *I* think they really are intelligent!

[pcw_rcw]

Thanks for the recommendation of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. We not only had never heard of this book [or the movie, either, for that matter], but we also didn't know that there were any wild parrots in SF. Sounds interesting--we'll have to run down a copy.

Stranger things have happened in nature than parakeets/parrots being intelligent, so we're perfectly open-minded on the subject. Crows and ravens, for example, are very intelligent birds, so there's no reason that other bird species can't be so as well.