I am an animal person, which, I suppose, is one way of saying that, when I'm unable to find any redeeming traits in myself, I declare that I am kind to animals.  Of course, human beings are also animals (we aren't exactly plants), but I am arrogant enough to mean "lower forms of animal life" when I refer to animals.  Thus, when I say that I like animals, I do not necessarily include my own species, among whom are large numbers of individuals for whom I have no fondness at all, and some whom I hold in utter contempt.  Indeed, I sometimes wonder why "You're an animal" is an insult; it seems to me that, if animals could talk, "You're a human" would be one of their favorite insults.

Certainly, I don't like all nonhuman animals equally.  I have, for example, no great affection for cattle, which is just as well because I eat them.  The same is true of chickens, but, though I eat them too, I would have qualms about killing one myself.  I have a sort of double standard here, I suppose.  I've actually killed a number of fish, but I can recall getting very choked up as a kid when a goldfish died.  I can step on an ant, squash a roach, or swat a fly without the least hesitation, but I don't feel comfortable killing certain bugs.  I would never, for instance, intentionally kill a praying mantis, and, if a ladybug gets in our house, I will capture it and release it outdoors rather than kill it.  I recently had occasion to inflict armageddon on a whole nest of yellow jackets, but I did that only because they could sting me.  Long before I was born, my species and other species such as yellow jackets, mosquitoes, and scorpions declared war on each other, and there's not much I can do about that.

I do not have the extreme aversion that some people I know have to virtually all bugs.  Indeed, as a child, I had a weird fascination with them that bordered on affection.  My older brother used to tell stories about how I would take bugs to bed with me and sing to them.  The family would be sitting downstairs after I was put to bed, and he would hear me start to hum, "Hummm, hummm."  He would say to our mother, "Mother, Richard has bugs in bed with him again."  They'd go to my bedroom to check, and, sure enough, there I was, singing to a nearly dead grasshopper or beetle.  I was a weird child, and some people who have seen me interact with animals since then would say that I haven't changed much.  Though I no longer sing to bugs, I sometimes have very interesting conversations with the squirrels that we feed on our front porch.

As I grew older, the bugs gave way to the more usual pets.  Ours was a household that never lacked pets, usually a cat or a dog and sometimes both.  One of my fondest childhood memories is the time my older sister brought home a pregnant cat.  My sister carefully instructed me that, when my mother discovered the cat (which she was bound to do), I was to say that the cat had jumped in through the kitchen window.  More fearful of big sister's wrath than of mother, I told the whopper, which did not go over at all well because the kitchen window was at least six feet above the ground, and the cat, in its condition, would have had to have been launched from a catapult (no pun intended) to get in the window.  As usually happened in such instances, my mother displayed the appropriate exasperation, and the cat remained to have its kittens and become a member of the family.  When the kittens were old enough, we, with considerable sadness, gave them away to proper homes.

When I was a boy, my pets were usually dogs, but I outgrew that foolishness as I got older.  ("Dog people" may want to skip this paragraph.)  Dogs may be inclined to boost their owners' ego by their eagerness to please, but they are yappy, need baths and walks, and haven't the good sense to disappear when they are not wanted.  I have gravitated toward cats, who are intelligent enough to train their owners and not vice versa.  As cat lovers freely admit, they do not own their cats; their cats own them.  Indeed, the very characteristics that make "dog people" despise cats are the ones I admire the most.  Cats are independent; they don't need to be bathed or taken for walks.  Most, except for Siamese, have the sense not to vocalize too much because they can let anyone who is sensitive to them know with a certain look exactly what they want.  Cats have a mystique that makes some people uncomfortable and are much more adept than dogs at reading subtle human emotions.  As has been said, cats know how we feel; they don't give a damn, but they know.  Curmudgeons and cats usually get along famously because we have a mutual disdain for foolishness.  I've never met a dog that I would describe as "sophisticated"; the orneriest, most scraggly alley cat has more sophistication than a dog, whose pedigree (if it has one) says more about ancestry than character.

Let us not, however, make an issue of dogs versus cats.  The human world should not be divided into "cat people" and "dog people," for many of our species are a little of both.  The real division is between people who care about animals and those who do not.  Even though I am a cat person, I can fully understand how someone can be devastated by the loss of a pet dog.  What I cannot understand, though, are people – and I've met a few like this – who are utterly dumbfounded when one is grief-stricken over the death of a pet.  "Hey, buck up," they say, "It was only a dog (or cat)." Only?  Even harder for me to understand are people who are mindlessly cruel to animals, who think it's fun to try to run over squirrels in the road, or who kill for sport.  People such as these often make me feel that the so-called lower animals are more closely attuned to the divine scheme of things than we humans are.

Since that viewpoint is rather much a given for me and my wife (though she grew up in a pet-less household), it is not surprising that our daughter, Kate, was raised as an "animal person."  Besides cats, of which we always had at least one, Kate had hamsters, gerbils, hermit crabs, and a rabbit – though not, thank heavens, all at the same time.  Once she found in our yard a wounded baby possum that had perhaps been attacked by a cat.  (The next part is a bit graphic, so you may want to skip it too.)  The possum's wound, it turned out, had served as a repository for a fly's eggs, which hatched into maggots the day after we brought the possum into our house.  Wearing gloves so as not to be bitten by the distraught possum's razor-sharp teeth, Kate used tweezers to remove the maggots one by one.  She was in her early teens at the time, and I marveled at her patience – and strong stomach.  The possum seemed to recover, and we had found a wild animal shelter where it might be placed.  Unfortunately, before that could happen, we found it dead in its cage one afternoon, perhaps of some internal injury that we hadn't known about.  Kate cradled it in her arms for many minutes before we buried it in the back yard.  That's the kind of kid we raised.

Not surprisingly, Kate went to a small college in Wisconsin that emphasized environmental studies, majoring in biological science, with emphasis on the animal kingdom.  Here she developed an affinity for wolves, learning how to track them and "talk" to them by howling.  To this day, her home is decorated with portraits of wolves and tapestries depicting wolves.  She hasn't been able to work professionally in her field, but, though she now has three small boys and a full-time job, she works as a volunteer in a wild animal shelter.  She's the only person I know whose eyes can light up when she talks about handling or feeding turkey vultures.  Her husband is, ironically, allergic to animal fur, but they have two pet ferrets because his allergy does not extend to ferret fur.

Kate has, I can see, a deep affection for the natural world and an abiding respect for all the creatures that live in it.  She's an animal person, and that's a very good kind of person to be.