A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [150]
One bird looked especially pathetic, a forlorn adolescent evidently unpracticed at scooping up starfish. He looked hungry. Julie tried to throw him the scrap-end of her meal. Another seagull swooped for the snatch of bread before it hit the sand. Julie reached into the bag for another piece. Another toss, and another seagull had a snack. The young bird still stood, still seeming pathetic and hungry. Again her hand went into the bag, and again another bird snatched the bread away.
I laughed, then said, "It's a bait-and-switch routine they've got set up. They take turns being the orphan."
Julie didn't think it was funny. She kept throwing food until the Pathetic One had tasted a bite.
A large part of me had not been laughing, but had instead been wanting to grab the bread and repeat to her the warning I'd heard repeatedly as a child: do not feed the animals. Do not cause them to become habituated to humans. It will only hurt them in the long run. Don't feed the seagulls, because they will just be a nuisance, and besides, they will not learn to fend for themselves. And if they can't learn to catch starfish they die. It's survival of the fittest. The same is true for all others. Don't feed the bears, or they'll lose their fear, and having lost their fear they may attack. Even if they do not attack they will knock over trash bins and iceboxes, and we will have to shoot them. Then I remembered the offerings I give the coyotes, and noted my own hypocrisy.
Julie said, "I've always loved feeding animals. Ever since I was a child. Do you think it's wrong?"
I wanted to say yes but heard myself say, "No."
"I don't think so, either," she said. "I think it's what we're supposed to do."
I didn't have to ask why. I just nodded, agreeing now, and thought of salmon swimming toward bears waiting for the food that would last them through their long winters sleep. I thought of the duck, giving his life to me. Part of our task as members of a community is to feed each other. I thought again of our fundamental inversion of all relatedness, of how we nearly always ask precisely the wrong question—What can I get from this?—and so very rarely the right one—What can I give back? Even when we try to learn from others, it is from this same spirit of acquisition: What can I learn from this forest ecosystem that will teach me how to manage it for maximum resource extraction? Rarely: What can I learn from this forest community that will teach me how to better serve it?
We did not talk for a long time. Instead we sat watching seagulls lose interest and trot away to stand one-legged in the wind. My fingers picked at the huge log of driftwood on which we sat, and I felt the softly textured surface, worn smooth by sun, salt, water, and sand. For some reason I thought of bear baiting, a process in which for months prior to the season, a "hunter" places edibles at a spot in the forest. Come season, he sits in a tree, waits for a bear to show up for dinner, and shoots him or her at point-blank range. I've often wondered what that bear must think and feel while dying, lying next to an offering of food. I would imagine shock, sorrow, and a deep sense of betrayal. How could you? I thought you were giving me this meal.
Times like that—times I consider the duplicitous nature of so many of our relations—I think back to a time I've never known, when children painted the faces of wolf pups and placed them gently back in dens, and when wolves found lost families and led them home. A time when humans and nonhumans conversed, and when the world and all in it were not resources to be consumed but friends and neighbors to be loved and enjoyed, and even when killed and eaten to be perceived with a sense of gratitude and wonder. Times like that I think back to when men did not rape women,