The Animals' Agenda by Marc Bekoff

Author:Marc Bekoff [Bekoff, Marc; Pierce, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807045213
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Captive and Companion

captivity late 14c., “imprisoned, enslaved,” from Latin captivus “caught, taken prisoner,” from captus, past participle of capere “to take, hold, seize” (see “capable”). As a noun from c.1400; an Old English noun was hæftling, from hæft “taken, seized.”

JESSICA: GROWING UP IN A MENAGERIE

My childhood was filled with various pets, from the crazy Irish setter Jesse after whom I was named, to Snoopy the rat, the fourth-grade class pet whom I adopted and then decided to let free in our garage (much to the dismay of my father), to a cat named Estes. When my own daughter was young, she, too, wanted to fill her life with animals. Following family tradition, our house became a neighborhood zoo. We had three dogs, a cat, rats, guinea pigs, mice, a snake, a gecko, a tarantula, a salamander, and various fishes. All the kids wanted to play at our house, and all the parents knew that if their child had grown bored with a pet, I would be the sucker who would agree (after a long session of begging by my daughter) to take over the animal’s care.

It was during the height of our pet-keeping craze that my research took me into a serious study of the literature on animal emotions and cognition. The more I read about what’s really going on in the minds of other creatures, the more uncomfortable I started to feel about holding them captive in our home. I especially worried about the gecko, Lizzy. She was such a beautiful and exotic creature, and so alien. Yet the life we provided her was actually quite sad. She had fake vines, a few plastic plants, and a daily diet of crickets from a box—and that was her twenty-gallon glass world. She spent her days either standing motionless, or trying to claw her way through the clear wall of the tank. She lived about two and a half years, out of a natural lifespan of twenty-five.

I instituted a no-replacement policy, and as the various creatures finally passed on, our census dropped. I no longer felt comfortable keeping animals locked up in cages. I told my daughter, “Only dogs and cats.”

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