Inner City Wildlife

Silo The Black

I think that I could turn and live with animals,
They are so placid and self contained.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania
Of owning things.
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived
Thousands of years ago.
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
(Walt Whitman 1819-1892, from “I Sit and Look Out”)

I have been around animals much of my life. I learned to love them as a child in my Bubbe’s (o'h) home in Crown Heights, where she would feed the dozens of stray cats and dogs that roamed the alleys behind Carroll St. During my days away in yeshiva and during my marriage, I did not have much occasion to be around wildlife (unless you count Israelis.) The axe-wife, holding to the normative orthodox position on pet ownership, was not predisposed to sharing her home with tumadike zachin. (I think that’s why she divorced me, too.) To the orthodox Jew, if it can’t be eaten or made into Kodesh, then who needs it? If every other species on the planet were to disappear, it would matter little to them.

I have also experienced close encounters with bison, bear, wolves, and moose. (I’ll leave these for another post.) I also enjoy horseback riding, and when atop a fine stallion or mare, you truly feel what it means to behold a powerful and elegant creature. There is no art that can capture the true feel of nature in its rawness and power. You have to see it yourself to know it. Important note: Try not to fall OFF nature or get trampled BY one of its members while kvelling over its grandeur; that really tends to kill the moment.

My love for all things animal is further enhanced by my sense of compassion and my understanding of the science behind life; how our natural destiny is inexorably linked to theirs. I behold the incessant urban sprawl and rampant over-development extending cities further and further out into an already shrinking countryside, eating up the habitats of many species of birds, mammals, insects, and others too numerous to list. We have deer running through the suburbs, being hit by cars, and dying of starvation and tuberculosis. I have seen small deer in the park behind my home and I live in Detroit proper. The worst insult to Nature is that so many of us refuse to share our space with them, chasing them from our yards, our attics, and our garages, without ever considering what we have already taken from them.

My neighbors, mostly rednecks and shvartzas, are not as enlightened as I would like them to be either, and I’m hoping they relocate to Ekveldt or Yenne Veldt soon. They are nice enough, but overall, poor white folk and most black folk consider any animal other than their own dumb-ass ill mannered dogs (Rottweilers and Pitbulls) to be for food or target practice, and show absolutely no compassion/respect for anything that they can shoot at and can’t return fire. If I were a raccoon, opossum, or skunk I would high-tail myself right out of Detroit altogether. (Probably not a bad idea for humans either.) I attended a wedding reception held at a very nice banquet club in the city. It was a fairly swank affair (I had to go out and buy a tie for it). One of the bride’s relatives, a middle-aged Fred Sanford look-alike, brought a fully dressed and cooked opossum to the dinner! So, in the middle of the buffet sat this mound of grey flesh-and-bone road-kill, specially grilled by one of the locals for my culinary pleasure. The gentleman took great pride in telling everyone (who would listen) of his finding this metziah during one of his morning strolls around the ‘hood’. Others began to share their ‘varmit-killing’ stories, too, and I had to politely excuse myself before I went ‘PETA’ on them.

On the other hand, Detroit can be an attractive destination if you are a rodent on the run. There are plenty of abandoned homes, offices, garages, abandoned automobiles, and unkempt parks and alleyways to find shelter in, providing these fine, upscale accommodations are not already fully occupied by crackheads or wanted fugitives. The denizens of this fair city are very generous with their garbage, too, leaving mounds of it wherever they think it convenient. You’d be amazed at the amount of crap that lower income people buy, hoard, and summarily discard. It’s a disposable world for them, I suppose. It’s sad and angering, but it’s what we made them to be. Many of the poor don’t have the mind or money for quality, and even if they do, don’t have the means to shlepp it with them when they move or when some other tragedy occurs that prevents them from holding onto what little they have. There isn’t any wealth in what they own; it’s just stuff.

My home, small as it may be, is a haven for anything furry or feathered that needs a meal. My neighbors complain, but I don’t care. (They think I’m crazy enough to be dangerous, and that kind of fear is far better than any security system on the market.) The crawl-space under my home and the skirting around my deck provide good shelter from rain and snow, and each winter opossum, raccoon, and skunk find temporary relief from the vagaries of urban mammalian life. We have taken so much from them over the centuries that I feel obligated to give back to them, in whatever small way that I can; be it a place to keep warm for the night, escape from a dog, or some food. Anything I don’t eat myself, gets thrown out into the yard, be it chicken bones, steak bones, leftover salad, bread, etc., and it ALL gets eaten by something. I also put out cat and dog food, bird seed, and sunflower seed. The kitchen is always open and the bowls are seldom empty.

The only creatures I have actually allowed to move into my home are cats. One of them, Princess the Calico, was reputed to have belonged to the previous owners of this home, and simply returned from wherever it was she went to reclaim her territory. The other, Silo the Black, just showed up one day, got his back scratched, and mooched some catnip from a big pushover (me), purred once or twice and never left. There was a raccoon that would come into the kitchen every so often, but Camo hasn’t been around since last autumn. Willie, the opossum, is the current inhabitant of the crawl space. He comes out in the very late night hours to eat and heads right back under the house when he’s done. I keep a litter box outside under the awning so that cats, when escaping the snow or rain will use it, instead of just doing their ‘business’ right on the deck. I have seen Willie in the litter box, too. (Maybe it’s the cat food?) The cats don’t seem to mind him or any other creatures either. I see Silo coming out of that same hole in the skirting all the time. The various types of furry things are probably used to each other now. They see eye to eye. Literally.

Squirrels are really obnoxious little mamzerim. Cute, but horribly obnoxious. There are one or two of these megalomaniacs that frequent my living space and DEMAND food! I remember one instance when unloading groceries from the car, that one of them jumped into the bag and began tearing at a loaf of bread! I shooed him off the bag and he then turned at me, chattered, and stomped his front paws on the ground in anger before walking off. They will come up to window and tap on it with their nails. Who do they think they are? Cats? Squirrels also never forget where their last meal came from (kind of like an ex-shvugger of mine), and are so familiar with Princess that I have caught them chasing each other around the yard or up into trees. Princess NEVER plays with other cats. I don’t think that animals exhibit the same prejudices or divisions among other animals like we do. They avoid threats, pay little or no attention to anything that doesn’t immediately affect them, and are sometimes willing to strike up a new game with a stranger. I might try that philosophy someday soon myself.

I have a couple of bird feeders, too, and the usual assortment of cardinals, robins, sparrows, and other birds native to the upper Midwest peck and poke at the seed and grain, sometimes competing for a good seat at the trough. The numbers recently have been way down since the West Nile outbreak and if I see a crow at all, it is a very special occasion indeed. Princess is an excellent bird-hunter, and the feeders provide her with a non-ending supply of things to stare down and patiently stalk. When she came in one day with a medium sized crow in her mouth, proud as I was over her accomplishment, I was worried because crows aren’t known to be susceptible to predation by housecats, so this bird must have been very weak or sick. A few days later, Princess became lethargic and listless, and after another expensive visit to the veterinarian, she was put on antibiotics and eventually recovered. If you haven’t experienced a challenge in your life yet, try giving Princess a pill to swallow. I keep an old pair of extra thick oven-mitts handy for just such an occasion. I think she has forgiven me. Or maybe not.

Silo, and the other hand, is NOT what you would call a successful predator. Coupled with, and perhaps surpassed by, his reluctance to overexert himself, is his inability to defend himself from the more aggressive cats that he mixes with. What makes this even weirder is that Silo has enormous teeth and claws for a cat his size, but won’t use them on anything other than my hand, some clothing (when we wrestle), or the back of my office chair. Losing fights is costly, and he loses badly. He’s just too much of a sweety-boy, and even Princess bullies him around when she wants, though I have caught him tormenting her on occasion. (You go boy!)

Some of my lesser-brained neighbors attempt to artificially enhance their own self image or create their own uniqueness by owning exotic or unusual pets. These could be iguanas, tarantulas, pythons, and alligators. Some idiots have housed tigers! Ferrets, however, seem to be the most popular of the exotic sorts, and let’s face it, those damned weasels are very cute. They are also very mischievous and sneaky, especially for the three hours a day when they aren’t asleep. My neighbors, the ones with the highly pornographic case of Tourette’s Syndrome, have a ferret who managed to get up into MY house on one occasion. Imagine sitting at your desk while surfing the web, and out of the corner of your eye you catch something slinking past along the baseboard, and not knowing what it is or where it came from. It took a while to coax this ferret out of from under my bed, but like his semi-lobotomized owners, he was easily hypnotized by small, worthless shiny objects haphazardly strewn about the room, and emerged from hiding anxious to gather the eye-catching booty.

We have confiscated much too much from those that preceded humanity on this Earth. I’m not saying that we should forcibly remove ourselves from the places we are now, but we should at least STOP new development, redevelop what have already let go of, and reconsider a better plan for everyone and everything involved. Building and paving and paving and building cannot go on forever. Besides, where are all these people coming from to buy these new homes in Ekveldt anyway? I, too, might have considered purchasing a home out there at one time, but, thanks to Wal-Mart, greedy land developers, and cities seeking surplus tax revenues, the Fustelandt of yesterday is rapidly becoming the Farhrshtuptegasse of tomorrow. I suggest that if you are seeking peace and quiet, that you stay put in the city. At the current rate of attrition, it should be pretty close to empty in a few years. I yearn for that day.

There are a zillion stories to tell about my experiences with Nature, and I could go on and on (and will in another thread), but I’d like to hear YOUR stories and opinions, too. If you like to comment, and I hope you do, feel free to share them here.

Peace!