Flying solo

A couple of weeks ago, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker wrote a piece about pets. Or rather, the deliberate choice he's made of not having a pet. His decision was based not on a dislike of animals, nor on the costs of looking after them, nor on the concerns about allergies that some people have, nor even on worries about leaving an animal alone at home during the working day. No, Charlie's reasons for not having a pet were more philosophical: because animals have short life spans and they die too soon.

It's an interesting viewpoint and one that I understand. Like most pet owners, I sometimes have to pull myself up short at dwelling too much or too often on the morbid thought that it's more likely than not that my own companion animal will die before I do. Charlie acknowledged this opposite number in his article too: that pet owners feel that the joy an animal brings into one's life far outweighs the grief at its passing. I've always had animals and I'd concur with that wholeheartedly.

It's something that Mark Rowlands touches on in his book The Philosopher and the Wolf. In essence, that we humans are alone (as far as we know) among all other living things on earth in that we have an awareness and foresight of our own mortality. This is the price we pay for our human kind of intelligence, the devil's bargain if you like, like Dr Faustus. At some point in evolution, our species traded its delicate bloom of immortal ignorance for the abilities that we posses and that make us what we are: language, invention, adaptability, abstract thought and so on. But the price we pay, if not with our actual Faustian souls, is a high one. We live out our lives against the backdrop of the ticking of the clock, the beat of the metronome, the pulse of our hearts in the sure and certain knowledge that one day there will only be a deafening silence. We don't know when that one day is precisely, but we do know, with every day that passes, that it's one day closer.

The other animals, unburdened with the knowledge of their own demise, are free to just live and be and take each day as they find it. We are rarely content to just be. Instead, we rush and push and strive like a swimmer against the current, looking to acquire, to develop, to achieve, to be better than we are in whatever way our personal paths and circumstances dictate, be it wealth or status or possessions or even spiritual enlightenment. This behaviour is in and of our nature and is perhaps not wholly because we have an awareness that our time is limited, but I'm sure that is a (sometimes subconscious) contributing factor. Or another way of putting it, maybe, is that all of us living things are time travellers, but it's only we humans that know it.

It was finding my injured seagull on the beach last night that put this back at the forefront of my mind. I managed to feed him a few shrimps and water using a spoon, and by this morning he was much perkier than he had been when I'd found him - as judged by the rate at which he tried to peck and bite me anyway. But he still couldn't stand or spread his wings and I was concerned, after speaking to the vet, that he might be in pain and that by keeping him alive I might be causing him suffering - I have no idea how to tell if a bird is in pain when it has no obvious wounds. I had, I knew, interfered in a well-intentioned but nevertheless perhaps inappropriate and clumsy human way to change the course of natural events.

So in the end I made the very difficult decision of taking him to the vet. Wildlife is notoriously difficult to rehabilitate, and I am fairly sure that the journey in the car with me will have been his last. But, terribly sad though I was to do this, I did at least have the slightly reassuring knowledge that of the two of us travelling through time in my little car today, I was the only one aware of it.

Ignorance is like a delicate fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone - Oscar Wilde

Charlie Brooker's article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/15/charlie-brooker-pets-death