“This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live...”
Respecting life took on a new meaning for me recently, and it took the simplest of forms.
A dog belonging to some friends of ours gave birth in our laundry room. I was in the middle of doing some repairs to a bathroom, but I dropped what I was doing to go and check in on the situation. Two daughters were doing a very good job attending the birth. I mentioned to the “midwife” that she should roll the Mommie over and see if she happened to be lying on a pup. Sure enough, she was.
The “midwife” daughter took the pup in her hands and said, “It looks like it’s dead.” “Really?” I asked, not wanting it to be true. It took a minute or two to discern that some of the movement we saw in this little guy was a sign of life. She took a towel and started rubbing on the little fellow and he seemed to be rejuvenated. He started weakly wimpering, mewing like a kitten. I encouraged her to try and see if he would attach to one of his mom’s teats. Mom was still as clueless as a teenage mom would be concerning her newfound responsibility. She didn’t seem too eager to have another pup attaching itself to her, and the pup still didn’t seem to have the strength or initiative to nourish himself. We then got a little bit of goat’s milk out of the fridge and warmed it up and tried to feed him with a syringe (sans needle, of course). His response was lackluster and milky bubbles would come out of his nose. After a while, we thought he had possibly had enough goat’s milk and fixed him a bed in a Playmate cooler with a heating pad and a towel. He seemed to settle in comfortably for what we assumed would be a recuperative period.
My “midwife” daughter came in later and told me that she thought Billy (his nickname derived from his first meal of goat’s milk) was dead. I went in and checked and sure enough, she was right.
In the meanwhile, while Billy had been fighting for his life, Mom had delivered three other siblings. They all seemed hale and hearty, as robust as newborn pups can be. Billy, on the other hand, had seemed a bit runty and frail, wrestling with the doggy Grim Reaper from the get-go.
Ice still covered the ground outside, so an immediate burial was out of the question. I performed my mortician’s duty and prepared the body, placing him inside a clean paper towel, which I placed inside a clean Ziploc bag, which I placed inside a clean kitchen garbage bag, which I folded over repeatedly and sealed with duct tape. I then placed the remains in a holding crypt (i.e., the upright freezer in the laundry room) where it would remain until the thaw permitted a respectful burial.
Well, I didn’t embark on this lengthy narrative to illustrate anything except this: the lengths we were willing to go to for the life of one little puppy.
I talk big. Leading up to this birth, I talked about “taking care” of the puppies, not in a caregiving sense, but in a euthanasia sense. Unwanted puppies, you know. Overpopulation in the pet realm and all that rot. However, when faced with the reality, taking care of these little pups, in the caregiving sense, not only did not seem to be that big a chore: it seemed, very clearly, the right thing to do.
I’m not a tree-hugger. The value of an animal’s life cannot even approach that of a human life, created in God’s image. I don’t even believe that killing animals is wrong. Given a choice between a few endangered owls or a mall, I say, "Goodbye, owl. Hello, Chick-Fil-A!" I have also intentionally killed animals many times in the past and will most likely do it more in the future. In my book, capital crimes for animals can be as simple as just being a pest or a danger to people or being good to eat. I also believe human life, while valuable in the extreme, can be required in defense of other human life or in punishment for heinous crimes. However, my beliefs concerning life, human and animal, have been distilled. The lives of God's non-human creations have been elevated. A little higher than before, but still not nearly so high as human life.
Life, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is a mark of God’s handiwork. We handle it carefully. Holding that little frail puppy in my hand, first living and later dead, this all became crystal clear.
