Compost Studios

I’ve often written about my children’s love of all living things. My son "A," in particular, loves and nurtures animals with a passion. Not just typical pets but frogs, grasshoppers, crickets, roly-polys, beetles, ladybugs, lizards, and other wild things. When we lived in the States, both A and E-Grrrl attended Camp Creepy Crawly, an educational camp run by a herpetologist and elementary school teacher. It was all about the exciting world of amphibians and reptiles.

We encourage this respect and appreciation for all living things in part because it develops compassion and an appreciation for the Creator. I also believe it’s a blessing to find wonder in unexpected places in the natural world.

And so my children have always had their own plants to tend and care for as well as the family dog, cat, fish, and hamster. We’ve had an ant farm, seen moths and butterflies emerge from coccoons, have raised frogs from tadpoles nearly every summer, set up terrariums for lizards and bugs, and cared for a variety of small creatures.

In dealing with wild animals like the frogs, our approach was always to have our son research the animal’s care, set up a habitat for it, tend to its needs, study it for a finite period of time (weeks or months), and then release it back to the place where it was collected.

"A" has always been responsible and careful in this regard and never lost interest or taken shortcuts in caring for his menageries. He dutifully caught bugs all summer long for his frogs and even collected mosquito larvae for their terrarium “pond” so they would have an ongoing source of fresh food. He collected aphids for his ladybugs, grubs for his beetles, and let his creatures go after a period of time. The sad and disturbing truth though is that accidents happen, and sometimes in the process of caring for an animal, it gets killed.

This was the case with our first hamster, who was so beloved the children were constantly handling it. One day A had it out to play with and put it down on the floor so it could “exercise,” which it did until E-Grrrl stepped on it . While my children sobbed, I held the quivering hamster in my hand and witnessed its last death gasps. It was awful.

Ditto the two tree frogs we’d cared for for months. Peeper and Popper were fun to watch, but in August it was time to return them to their natural habitat. They lived in a terrarium on our covered terrace. On the day they were to be released, the terrarium had been moved slightly on the terrace. When the sun unexpectedly came out, it shone into their habitat, and they became overheated and died. The cruelty of it all—to be killed by sunshine in a summer where the temperature had rarely reached 65 degrees and the clouds and rain had been relentless. To die on the day that freedom was calling.

This past July, "A" amazed us by catching a lizard at a castle we were visiting. He brought it home, researched it, and set up a sandy and rocky habitat for it. The source of water was a jar lid, shallow and not too wide. We kept the lizard for about two weeks and then one morning came out to discover it had drowned in its tiny oasis of water. All we can guess is that the slick bottom of the lid made it impossible for it to climb out of once it went inside. I don’t know. More tears, more pet funerals.

Last weekend, "A" was camping and found a baby mouse. Its mother and siblings had been killed by a cat and it was left in the nest to die. "A" brought it on home, and we fed it every few hours from a one-milliliter dropper, mixing up formula that we bought at a pet store. We tucked it into a fleece nest with a rock we periodically warmed in the microwave, and much to our surprise, this tiny creature, no bigger than my pinky with its eyes still closeded, thrived, learning to "nurse" from the dropper and becoming more and more active—until this morning.

"A" was trying to feed it and accidentally dropped it onto the unforgiving surface of the ceramic tile floor. He didn’t tell me about the fall until later. I felt sick when I tried to feed it later, and blood and spittle bubbled from its mouth as it struggled for life.

Such guilt for causing suffering and death in this poor animal, as well as some of the others that were in our care.

I know that these creatures are fragile, that their natural life spans in the wild are short and often end abruptly when they become another creature’s meal. I know we did our best to care for each and every one of them, but the fact remains that we killed some of them. And while the kids are the ones who openly mourn and cry, I can assure you my soul shrivels up a bit each time this happens, and I question whether we should have brought the animal home in the first place.

A favorite Native American prayer:

Dear Father hear and bless

Thy beasts and singing birds

And guard with tenderness

Small things that have no words.

October 18, 2006