Rehab

On the way to the center this morning, KEXP was playing an interview with a woman who runs a rehab center for chimpanzees who have been lab animals or performers. She was highly, spittingly indignant; she detailed the outrages of tooth removal for circus animals (no biting), darting for lab animals (no struggling), the suspended cage from which one (if one is a chimp) may be attacked from all sides (Foucault would be proud). Eventually I became sick and had to turn her off. The very real horror of what she was saying was overcast by her sense of affront. Animal activists have a unique talent for forgetting their audience -- which may be one that agrees, as I am inclined to, that fuzzy people are still people -- or maybe one that exceedingly does not.

This morning I moved a squirrel for the first time, and the first time I moved an animal that I could vividly imagine hurting me. Squirrel teeth are sharp, or at least I think they are. I've never been bitten by one, but I have the impression that rodents can give a good nip. This squirrel is blind, though, and he just huddled in misery and fear as I draped a towel over him, tried to find his head so I could control it, and then worked my mad yoga skills (negligible) moving the other arm around and behind to take the weight of his body. If he'd nipped me I would have been relieved.

I moved him to the new cage, and the rehabber told me I could add more greenery and it might give him minimal comfort -- the smell -- but that it probably wasn't worth it, since he couldn't even see the box we gave him to hide in. He had found it, though only managed to hide his face in it, like the famous child who thinks you can't see him if he can't see you. I found some pine and ripped it fresh from the branch. It smelled good. I hope he liked it.

The blind animals are the hardest for me. I sympathize, as my own eyes get by deceptively easy steps closer to a blur that isn't dark but definitely isn't light. And it emphasizes the ridiculous alien-abduction nature of wildlife rehabilitation. Stuffed into a box by some well-meaning incompetent, hauled off in a foul-smelling automobile, stretched on a table and palpated and injected, shoved into a cage by volunteers who barely have their learner's permits. Even more appalling if you are blind. Squirrel, Cooper's hawk; scamperer and flyer; our blind animals are just waiting to die. They can't be released. Their entire world is gone, and their last few days will be spent in abject terror and incomprehension. I would like to be with him when he's euthanized, but admitting that would demonstrate attachment and make me the last possible candidate to assist.

The rest of the day was a more cheerful and smelly kind of comedy. Seals shit A LOT, even baby seals, and when they're moved from one pool to another, the old pool must be cleared. Enter nonprofit equipment: a faltering sump pump, a broom, a hose, a writer working an extra volunteer shift. It took me two hours of sweeping, hosing, pumping, in various combinations. Scrubbing his seats sprayed watery shit all over my shirt and pants; the sump pump, whenever it lost suction, aerosolized the same solution into my face. A metaphor too close to life: the more clean water I poured in, necessary to keep the pump running, the more dilute the shit became, in an infinite regression of pool drainage. I can never shower enough.