Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Randall Johnson, who has been a frequent commentator on this blog, as well as a frequent guest author and commentator on the Dog Behavior Blog.
Finding a way to reconnect
with nature can take place on a grand scale by walking through a tropical
rainforest and feeling, rather than seeing, the immense variety of life it
supports, swimming with free-ranging dolphins, or, say, coming face-to-face
with a great whale. However, more often than not, it’s the everyday, seemingly
mundane, events happening around us that have the power to call us back from
our artificial steel-and-concrete world and ‘ground’ us, as it were, in the
natural world.
A few years back, my wife
and I bought a weekend / vacation home in her hometown, Lagoa da Prata, a small
town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.
At the time, we were living in Belo
Horizonte, the state capital, working as teachers and
translators and coping with the all the stress that goes along with big city
life.
The house was part of a
new development on a large tract of land that used to be part of the town’s biggest
dairy farm and the setting clearly reflected its past: a long stretch of dirt
road ran in front of the house led to the colonial-style farm house and then
into a patch of dense forest. On one side of the road, there was a wide expanse
of open meadow and on the other side, behind the house, a huge fenced-in cow
pasture.
Shortly after buying the
house, we were ‘adopted’ by a scrawny little street dog with short dull gray
fur that my wife decided to call Suzie. Following a couple of days of eating
kibble and drinking fresh water, Suzie underwent an amazing transformation: her gray fur was replaced by a glossy, uniformly
black coat. (She was later identified by
a friend of mine as a miniature pinscher, although with a non-standard color
pattern.)
We soon discovered Suzie
had a friend—a short scruffy male who looked a bit like Toto from The Wizard of Oz , except his fur was
dirty-white. After trying several names, including Toto, we settled on Toby. Unlike Suzie, though, Toby showed no interest
in being adopted. He hung out with us
while we were at the house and we gave him food and water. Sometimes, he took an afternoon nap inside the
house, but he rarely slept there at night.
Anyway, my wife and I got
into the routine of taking a walk down the dirt road early in the morning and
again in the evening, right before sunset. Suzie and Toby invariably
accompanied us.
As we
strolled along, I watched Suzie and Toby as they ran through meadow, Suzie leaping through
the tall grass like a gazelle. Toby was
less graceful, but he kept up as they chased after butterflies and small birds.
Sometimes it looked as they were running for the sheer joy of it. Once in while, they teamed up to harass the
cows on the other side of the road, yapping and lunging at them, and then they’d
take off again. It looked like a pleasant diversion (from their perspective,
not from the cows’), maybe even a kind of adrenalin rush, because if a bull
happened to be nearby, he wouldn’t hesitate to charge after them.
These were
moments of boundless exhilaration. They were being themselves, having fun, unfettered
by other worries or concerns, enjoying the “here and now”, which is something
we 21st century humans often have trouble doing, even in small,
rural towns. They were wild hearts and free spirits, very much part of the
world we share together, but more viscerally attuned to it.
Walking
down that country road was one way of seeking a reconnection with nature, but
the active ingredient, the ‘bridge’ that made the connection real, was watching
Suzie and Toby’s innocent, high-spirited capers as they gave me a glimpse of a purer,
more primal connection that I myself cannot feel with the same intensity. Still,
occasional glimpses have been enough to keep me grounded, and by reminding us that
we are, first and foremost, products of the natural world, our companion
animals may yet have another useful service to offer us.
--Randall Johnson
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