Animal Magnetism

Every Animal Has a Gift

Mother told me every animal has a gift, and that gift keeps it alive. I could easily see a cat’s gifts. There are so many: a cat can turn on a dime and give you a nickel’s change. Their eyesight is much better than ours as are their hearing and sense of smell. Add to this the fact that cats don’t give a damn. They’ll do as they please.

The sheer athletic ability of a feline is astonishing. Foxes display much the same agility, although they can’t jump quite as high as cats. At least, I’ve never seen one do so. But I’ve seen them jump straight up and twist over backwards to land on their feet. Impressive.

Foxes fascinated me as a child. Still do. If I didn’t have my retriever Chaps with me on a walk, they’d pop out of their dens to look at me. A bark or little gurgle might let me know their opinion of me. Sometimes a fox would walk along with me about twenty yards off. As they are omnivorous, whatever I chewed on interested them. I’d leave out hard candy or pieces of my sandwich. This found favor with them. In many ways, a fox is like a dog: intelligent, curious. But they hunt differently than dogs do, which I figured out by following the gun dogs, usually English Setters or small Irish Setters. Some of these setters were red and white, and are now recognized as a separate breed by the AKC.

Foxes hunt like cats. They stay still, then pounce. If there’s snow on the ground they’ll cock their ear in one direction, then the other, only to pounce in the middle where imaginary sound lines intersect, for they can hear the mice under the snow. This only works if the snow is light on the ground so there’s air and tunnels. If it slicks down like vanilla icing, the mice stay in their nests. Who wouldn’t?

I also realized that the fox mind works more quickly than my own. Yes, humans gave us the Brandenburg Concertos, As You Like It, the Sistine Chapel, etc., yet grand as these contributions are, you can’t eat them. Even if a fox could write the vulpine War and Peace I doubt he or she would. What’s the point? We need distractions and lessons in a way no other species seems to, which, as a child, I found confusing. I loved to read, I’d even read to the foxes and the birds. Mickey and Chaps would sit and listen and sometimes the wild animals would tilt their heads and listen for a time. I expect my cadence held their attention.

What mystified me was this: What is the human gift? I’m still working on that. What I was told in school proved untrue. My teachers would trumpet the superiority of the human animal. Point one: we walk upright. That’s a recipe for slowness and a bad back later in life. Point two: we create tools and other species don’t. Apparently, my teachers never watched a blackbird, a monkey, or even a house cat use an object to acquire what they want. Then came the big revelation of the opposable thumb. It’s helpful, but it isn’t the end-all be-all. Finally, they seized upon language.

Chaps understood nouns and verbs. How many, I didn’t know, but he knew language, even though he couldn’t reproduce it. The draft horses and mules in my life clearly understood commands in English. Humans do seem to have a more sophisticated level of language skills, but I suspect that this is as much a curse as a gift.

Mostly it’s noise. Few people say anything of consequence and mostly they talk about themselves or their family. Nothing too original there, but being another human, one must listen and pretend the news is incredibly fresh. For any of us, probably one percent of our talking life we’ve uttered something profound or important. I count myself in that number. My advantage is I don’t talk much unless I am called upon to give a speech.

Mother, shoving me into cotillion, harangued me to be a good conversationalist. I can do it. Hell, after twelve years of various forms of cotillion plus her relentless instruction, I’d be a blistering idiot if I couldn’t chat. That doesn’t mean I like it one bit more than when I was a child.

When I would sit a ways from the fox dens, I could hear them chattering inside. Sometimes one would come out and chatter at me. It wasn’t a “Get out of here, Two Legs” bark. It was “Hi” or “You won’t believe what my wife just did.” By age seven I knew the difference. Yet the fox, for all its intelligence, evidenced no need to say much more.

The one time a fox isn’t intelligent is if you give the distress call. There are little wooden horns, sort of like geese call horns, that make the fox distress noise. They’ll run out to help, and in this way they are trapped. I am bitterly opposed to trapping unless it’s a humane trap. John Morris, who works with me, traps our foxes so we can get the rabies and distemper shots in them. We can only trap them once in the Havahart traps. They know the drill after that. Since chasing foxes is the grand passion of my life, their well-being matters. I’m proud of Oak Ridge Fox Hunt Club’s work in keeping them healthy. Hunt staff perform numerous services that benefit pet owners, but we don’t advertise our efforts. People in our territories, much less cities, don’t realize that in a small way we are reducing the incidence of rabies, distemper, and mange in these beautiful creatures. (And no, we don’t kill foxes in our foxhunts, so don’t get your knickers in a knot.)