A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [57]
My suspicions were confirmed when I arose the next morning. The countertop in my bathroom was covered with mouse droppings, probably fifty pellets where in the several years before there had never been any.
The message seemed unmistakable, but in the two years since, I've not been able to take the communication further. I've heard other stories of animals defecating to communicate displeasure, of travelers returning home from a too-long vacation to find one pile of cat manure in the center of the bed, or of people who quit feeding squirrels on their porch, only to have the squirrels first beg, then scratch at the windows, and finally leave a neat row of pellets along the railing where once peanuts were placed.
Perhaps the question of further communication is not so important. Do I really want to carry on an extended conversation with a mouse? I don't even like mice. Perhaps a better, or at least more immediate, question has to do with our status as neighbors. I have to admit the mice didn't ruin all the stored boxes, or even that many. Perhaps in the years before I went on my cleaning frenzy, we were simply coexisting, the ruined boxes my tithe to them, and the occasional nests I found and destroyed in the process of doing my work their tithe back. If I had an arrangement with coyotes whereby they relented from taking "my" chickens in return for a tithe, perhaps the mice, too, considered themselves to have entered into an arrangement with me.
All of this is speculation. What I know is what I experienced: I made an unprecedented incursion into the place they live, into their home, if you will. That same night they made a similarly unprecedented incursion into the place I live, into my home. Was this a reprimand? A warning? A simple statement of frustration, sorrow, and anger? Or was this, as mechanistic explanations would require, simply random?
I learn and forget repeatedly that my claims to ownership— especially with regard to living beings—are inevitably illusory. Do I own the barn, and with it the right to end all life that enters? Do I own the beeboxes, and so is it acceptable for me to feed every baby mouse I encounter to my chickens, ducks, dogs, cats? It strikes me that ownership as practiced by our culture is an expression of a will and capacity to control, and even to destroy. It's my barn, so I can do whatever the hell I want with It. The mice are in my barn, so they're mine, too, to trap, poison, feed to chickens, or simply stomp on, if I so choose. The land I live on is mine, so I can poison it with herbicides, pesticides, and Kentucky bluegrass, or I can cut the trees, sell them for two-by-fours, and put up condos if I've a mind to. If I had a wife, she would just as surely be mine, as would any children we might have.
What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better, we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn't mean that none shall die, nor even that I won't kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitos, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other