It's Just A Complicated Game

Build Your Own Taco Bowl

Have you noticed in the last 10 to 15 years that animal behavior is evolving to integrate more with us and other species than ever before?  My late night playlist is filled with amateur videos of wild animals interacting with people or taking on some polar opposite buddy.  Deers befriending dogs, bears making rabbit besties, turtles asking for help, all kinds of unusual encounters.  And I wonder, is this new or is it merely that people hold the ability to record these occurrences and share them so much more easily and frequently.  I would imagine the latter must be true but even so, are animals also changing? 

Is it just nature?  I mean if someone moves next door to you, too close say, but you both keep your boundaries for the time being.  Then something bad happens, your house burns down or your power goes out for example.  That might prompt you to start communicating with these neighbors and see if you could work a trade or mutual partnership.  At the very least, become closer.  Could this be what we're seeing with the animals?  They suddenly need us for water, food, sometimes to take a plastic bucket off their heads or cut fishing line from their fins.  But what if it's more than that.  Animals share this finite space and have also lived with the changes of the landscape along with us.  They must have their own level of perception and consciousness.  This earth is our common ground.  Perhaps they, like the moderates who so far have been silenced by all the far left and right finally feel the need to speak up and participate, throw their dog in the fight.

I admit, I have mixed reactions to some of the co-mingling.  I'm thrilled with the interspecies relationships.  Not as much with people feeding raccoon families on their porch, then taking them in as pets.  Allowing bears to frolic in their pools and walk into their houses, opening fridge doors to get a good video share.  But the minute that bear does real bear things, that same community kills it, even though they were complicit in it's behavior.  There is a protective bone for the animals, something in me wanting to warn them not to trust the friendship with humans, to keep their natural separation.  I guess I fear like the Indians, the animals are going to be roped into some bad trade deal that they'll forever regret.  But also there is a defiance that I resent.  People changing the natural order to fill some need in themselves to feel like heroes.  I might have it all wrong and admittedly go back and forth on this one.  It's touching, that people want to help creatures, the vast uptick in rescues is inspiring.  Even down to the tiniest living things.  So many people really going the extra mile to aide our fellow seemingly helpless critters.  Or saving something that may have once been disposable, like a baby squirrel or a racoon abandoned by it's mother, a tiny bird that fell out of a tree.  One woman made friends with a wingless bumble bee until it died and damned if that lady didn't make me believe that little bee was her best bud.  Wild animals, willingly living as domestic pets.  It's odd to me.  People scolding a bear like that thing couldn't turn around and eat the shit out of them.  Or you see the big game exotic animal keepers.  I'm not comfortable with this idea of a full grown cougar taking a bath and laying on the bed acting like a common house cat.  Are they seriously okay with this?  People are kissing crocodiles and hugging coyotes.  Rolling around with big brown grizzly bears, playing hide and go seek.  Is this living in love or some bizarre fetish?  At least with some it's a power grab.  But for others it could be a genuine desire to add meaning to their lives, to get out of their own heads and affect something real.  I get that part.  Since we've been so isolated, I find myself staring at trees, talking to fish, seeking out birds.  A butterfly followed me on my bike for about a block the other day and you should have seen the dumb grin on my face, I was so thrilled and affected.

I sent P to the store for peppers without specifying which kind, so that's on me but he comes back with small red chile peppers, you know, the kind we buy, NEVER!  They were super smoky though, so I invented a strawberry red pepper salsa cruda.  Unconventional yes, but it did turn out pretty cool.  Interesting and unexpected kind of like a lion friending a wiener dog.