It's a Jungle Out There

When I saw the first calf walking along the highway by its mother's side, a little part of me panicked.  All of my Croswell, Michigan farmer-girl instincts kicked into high gear and I wanted to shelter that calf, wall it in, give it grain, and keep it safe from harm.

Here's the thing with animals in India: they are everywhere.  Most of them, though, don't seem to belong to anybody.  In fact, I'm not sure on the details, but I think cows in particular are not supposed to belong to anybody.  Dogs, cats, cows, pigs, goats, peacocks, monkeys, and God knows how many others roam the streets as casually as squirrels do back home.  After a while you get used to it.

The thing is, I was raised to raise animals.  Back in the States, I worked on a farm throughout my childhood; my livestock come tagged and penned.  If one of them gets a cut or a sore, it is soaked in epsom salts or coddled in a sick-stall or bathed in the middle of the night when the fever gets too high.  I used to routinely trudge into the black-darkness every night to give this year's pair of petting calves a bottle, and yes I was patient when the damn things pushed me around they were so greedy for milk.

Watching the animals in my Indian neighborhood is a little like watching human society in minature.  There are more of them here, population-wise, and they generally fend for themselves, and every so often you come across one with a gimpy paw or a bent talon and you know survival is just a little bit tougher for that animal today.  It is a fact: life is cruel.  Not much is going to change for that little guy until he either heals, learns to deal, or... well...

On the other hand, one episode sticks out in my mind.  Visiting a stepwell in Rajasthan, I was thrilled to see a giant flock of parakeets flitting and zooming around, chirping up a racket.  Our impromptu tour guide, an Indian gentleman named Rasul, explained that the birds stayed because someone gave them grain every morning and night.  We consider them lucky, he said.  If they were to go away it would be a bad sign.

Sure enough, discarded bits of seed littered the ground outside the stepwell.  I see the same thing in random places across town--in parks, near shrines.  Despite their huge numbers, the human poverty, despite everything: India's wild animals aren't always, well, left to the dogs.

That is, I think, a little comforting to know.