The Saunterer

More truthful had René Descartes proclaimed, “I rescue animals, therefore I am.”

    Purely as an item of general interest, Michael Jablonski sent us a story. We saw more in it, a perfect example of love’s perseverance. For of all people, we most prize those whose perseverance goes to rescuing animals. We reprint the story with permission:

Hi Charles,
    This may interest you.
     Cindy drove to Colorado yesterday to visit her family. She took a dog with her, a hound from 4 Paws Rescue, to a new home in Loveland, Colorado.
    Near Sage Junction, a few miles into Wyoming, she saw a small white dog by the highway. She stopped, but not before rolling the windows up in our VW because the hound was baying at the white dog. She didn't want the hound to frighten the white dog. She had trouble getting the white dog to come to her. Then another car stopped to help. The woman in that car was on her way home to Sun Valley, Idaho. She had some cat food with her, and like Cindy she too works with an animal rescue group.
     The white dog came to them. It was malnourished, no tags, had porcupine quills, and was limping. The other woman said she would make every effort to see if it was a lost dog from the nearest town. Otherwise, she said she would take the dog to Idaho and find a good home for it.
    When they got back to the VW, the hound had managed to lock the doors. The keys were inside. Cell phones didn't work in that location, so the Idaho woman left to get a locksmith. It was getting warm and the poor hound was in a car with closed windows. Then, by chance, one of our friends drove by. He saw Cindy and stopped. He used his skills to open the sunroof about one inch to get fresh and cool air into the car for the hound. Then he tried to use a piece of wire taken from a nearby range fence to unlock the car via the newly opened crack in the sunroof. By then, however, a locksmith showed up. The car was opened and all was well. The white dog went off to Idaho and the hound to Colorado.
     Next on my agenda is to hide a spare key somewhere under the VW for next time Cindy gets locked out.
 
Mike J.

    For professional information about Michael Jablonski, click here.

John Muir on sport hunters

    John Muir despised sport hunters, for this reason:

Let a Christian hunter go to the Lord’s woods and kill his well-kept beasts, or wild Indians, and it is well; but let an enterprising specimen of these proper, predestined victims go to houses and fields and kill the most worthless person of the vertical godlike killers -- oh! That is horribly unorthodox, and on the part of the Indians atrocious murder! Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.

    (Quoted from page 138 of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, by Donald Worster. Oxford University Press, 2008.)
    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here. For images of or relating to John Muir, click here. For a brief biography of Donald Worster, click here.

William James on our lilliputian importance in the universe

    Away from city lights, one look into a cloudless night-sky should make it clear that we are out of touch with reality, for thinking that whatever made the universe did it just for us or cares one fig about us. In the words of William James,

I believe that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wide life of things.

    (Quoted from page 72 of The Arrow That Flies by Day: Existential Images of the Human Condition from Socrates to Hannah Arendt, by Bernard Murchland. University Press of America, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of William James, click here. For images of and relating to William James, click here. For Bernard Murchland’s website, click here.

A. E. Housman on “the happy highways where I went”

    A. E. Housman’s lines below are good to carry around in memory. They go particularly far into oneself, and farther with age:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

    (Quoted from page 57 of A Shropshire Lad, by Alfred Edward Housman. Avon Books, 1972)
    For a brief biography of A. E. Housman, click here. For images of or relating to A. E. Housman, click here.

Richard H. Tawney on why the Chinese population grew without check

    As population growth seems irreversibly headed to destroying the natural world, it is instructive to look historically at how population can grow without check, as in China.    

Chinese habit and doctrine put a premium on the growth of population, which appears to Western eyes unnatural and artificial. Sentiment, hallowed by immemorial tradition, makes it a duty to leave sons, and the communism of the patriarchal family dissociates the production of children from the responsibility for their maintenance. Hence prudential restrains act with less force than elsewhere and population, instead of being checked by the gradual tightening of economic pressure on individuals, plunges blindly forward, till whole communities go over the precipice.

    (Quoted from page 104 of Land and Labor in China, by Richard H. Tawney. M. E. Sharpe Publisher, 1932)
    For a brief biography of Richard H. Tawney, click here.

Leszek Kolakowski on exile

    Here we are in the modern age and all these people are still going to church. What’s going on? Listen to Leszek Kolakowski:

For the people of the Book, both Jews and Christians, exile is the normal and inescapable lot of mankind on Earth. One can go further and say that the myth of exile, in one form or another, lies at the core of all religions, of any genuine religious experience. The fundamental message embedded in religious worship is: our home is elsewhere.

    (Quoted from page 3 of Religion: From Place to Placelessness, by Yi-Fu Tuan. The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Leszek Kolakowski, click here. For images of or relating to Leszek Kolakowski, click here. For Yi-Fu Tuan’s website, click here.

Louis P. Pojman on how modern technology is destroying our quality of life

    About the effect of modern technology on us, Louis P. Pojman wrote:

Medical science found cures for tuberculosis and syphilis and has aided in greatly lowering infant mortality, but in the process we have allowed an exponential growth of the population to produce crowded cities and put a strain on our resources. The more people, the more energy produced, the more pollution; the more our lives are threatened by disease. . . . And so the story goes. For each blessing of modern technology, a corresponding risk comes into being, as the tail of the same coin.

    (Quoted from Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, by Louis P Pojman. Wadsworth, 2nd ed. 1998.) For Louis P Pojman’s website, click here. For images of or relating to Louis P Pojman, click here.

Vita Sackville-West on autumn gardens and poetry

    Be with the two in childhood -- autumn gardens and poetry -- and the chances are good you will carry their enchantments throughout your life. To wit, Vita Sackville-West wrote on October 15, 1950, this:

The autumn garden. . . . It has its beauty; especially, perhaps, a garden with an old orchard attached to it. When I was very small, about four years old, I suppose, a line of poetry entered into my consciousness, never to leave it again:

    Rye pappels drop about my head.

I had no idea what rye pappels might be, but they held a magic, an enchantment for me, and when in later life I identified them as the ripe apples of Andrew Marvell’s poem they had lost nothing of their enchantment in the process of growing up.

    (Quoted from page 131 of In Your Garden, by V. Sackville-West. Oxenwood Press, 1996; first published in 1951.)
    For a brief biography of Vita Sackville-West, click here. For images of or relating to Vita Sackville-West, click here.
    A garden surrounds the Saunterer’s house, and already autumn is busy working its magic. This post is partly because of this, and partly because Jan Johnsen, who has posted on The Saunterer, is dedicated to reminding us all of the tranquilizing capacity gardens have (far more natural and healthier than drugs). To visit Jan’s weblog -- Serenity in the Garden -- click here.

Albert Schweitzer on the ethical spirit

    Nothing worthwhile can be achieved without it being spiritually worthwhile. For instance, peace is most worthwhile. Thus unless we hold in us the spirit of peace, we will never find peace. Let me quote Albert Schweitzer from his Nobel Lecture, 1954:

Their [the League of Nations’ and the United Nations’] efforts were doomed to fail since they were obliged to undertake them in a world in which there was no prevailing spirit directed toward peace. And being only legal institutions, they were unable to create such a spirit. The ethical spirit alone has the power to generate it. Kant deceived himself in thinking that he could dispense with it in his search for peace. We must follow the road on which he turned his back.

    (Quoted from page 223 of Albert Schweitzer's Ethical Vision: A Sourcebook, edited by Predrag Cicovacki. Oxford University Press, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Albert Schweitzer, click here. For images of or relating to Albert Schweitzer, click here. For Predrag Cicovacki’s homepage, click here.

Senator Robert Byrd on kindness to animals

    People can change. Robert Byrd entered politics as a Ku Klux Klan organizer and someone who had butchered hogs. He died at 92 on June 28, 2010, a promoter of kindness and fairness to all creatures, people and animals. Among his remarks posted on the website of The Humane Society of the United States are these:

About the extreme confinement of animals on factory farms:

    Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric. Six-hundred-pound hogs—they were pigs at one time—raised in 2-foot-wide metal cages called gestation crates, in which the poor beasts are unable to turn around or lie down in natural positions, and this way they live for months at a time.
    On profit-driven factory farms, veal calves are confined to dark wooden crates so small that they are prevented from lying down or scratching themselves. These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain. Egg-laying hens are confined to battery cages. Unable to spread their wings, they are reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine.

About the inhumane treatment of farm animals:

    It is one thing to determine as a culture that it is acceptable to raise and rear and then eat animals. It is another thing to cause them to lead a miserable life of torment, and then to slaughter them in a crude and callous manner. As a civilized society, we owe it to animals to treat them with compassion and humaneness. Animals suffer and they feel. Because we are moral agents, and compassionate people, we must do better.

About cruelty to animals:

    Animal cruelty abounds. It is sickening. It is infuriating. Barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated even if these animals are being raised for food. . . . Such insensitivity is insidious and can spread and is dangerous. Life must be respected and dealt with humanely in a civilized society.
    Let us strive to be good stewards and not defile God's creatures or ourselves by tolerating unnecessary, abhorrent, and repulsive cruelty.

About animal fighting:

    Pitting animals against one another and causing them to fight just so that we can witness the bloodletting presents a clear moral choice for us. There can be no confusion on this issue. As decent people, we must act to stop it.

From a speech in 2007 where Senator Byrd condemned dogfighting:

    The immortal Dante tells us that Divine Justice reserves special places in hell for certain categories of sinners. I am confident that the hottest places in hell are reserved for the souls of sick and brutal people who hold God's creatures in such brutal and cruel contempt.

    For a brief biography of Robert C. Byrd, click here. For images of or relating to Robert Byrd, click here. For information on The Humane Society of the United States, click here.