What can we learn from animals about love?

“The innocence and silence of the animal world has a huge subtlety to it that is anything but dumb, but rather notices everything and is present in everything. Animals carry a huge ministry of witness to the silence of time and to the depth of nature.” Pg. 64 - John O’ Donohue

What do we all want? We want to be worthy of giving and receiving love. How might we get there we might ask? To better understand this predicament, it might behoove us to take a step back and look at animals as a primal version of us. From the quote above, it makes sense that noticing and being fully present in everything is an antecedent step to love. When we are fully present, we can then move onto caring about others which looks a lot like love. Noticing these points, perhaps we can learn something about this process of love from animals. Let us visit a story about a feral cat to find out.

There once lived a stray cat who was a bit smaller and slower than the other cats, so he was often picked on. His fur was mangy and covered with scratches and wounds. He didn’t look for a fight, but would if necessary. He could only see out of one eye and had one ear severely torn from a scuffle.

This stray cat spent his days wandering through people’s yards. He gained a reputation in the neighborhood. Folks would avoid him and even try to scare him off by throwing rocks or spraying him with a hose. The cat would stand and take the spraying of the water. These actions could be perceived as negative attention; the cat craved it so severely that he stood there and took it often until he stopped being sprayed.

One day a new neighbor moved in. The new people on the block had two dogs. It didn’t take long before the cat saw these two dogs. The cat had faced and defeated dogs in the past. So it entered the yard with confidence. As soon as the dogs spotted the cat, they both were in hot pursuit. They attacked the cat viciously. A neighbor heard the commotion and ran outside to find the cat badly maimed and laying on the ground.

The man knew not to touch the cat from what he had heard. However, he decided to pick the cat up and try to save it somehow. As the man scooped the cat up, he had a sense of fear, even terror. He saw how scraggly the cat looked and remembered what he had been told. However, as soon as the cat was in his lap, he began to forget about all of the warnings. He could see that the cat was in trouble and soon realized there was little that he could do. So he decided to pet the cat and not let it die alone. As soon as the man began to pet the cat, it leaned hard into his hand. After a second the cat started to purr.

The man sat there and began to think of the life that the cat led. He thought of all of the abuse and neglect the cat had felt. Still, inside this ugly cat was not unpleasant at all. The man quickly realized that this cat only wanted to love and to be loved. The man wondered how it was that he had such a better life than this cat, yet he does not try to love in such a simple manner. In the end, this experience left the man feeling as though something was wrong with him.

What can we learn about love from such a story? It seems as though our natural inclination is to love and be loved. When we have a healthy upbringing, that is what we aim for, and often that is what we get. However, when we do not look or act a particular part, perhaps we do not get the love that we need. In some ways, this might feedback into how we operate. If we do not have our need to be loved and give love fulfilled, we might start acting in ever more desperate ways. If this gets bad enough, perhaps negative mental space could be formed. It seems to me that philosopher John O’ Donohue wrapped up this difference between humans and animals best:

“I think one of the terribly destructive areas of western thought is that we have excluded animals from the soul, the awareness and the thought world. I feel that animals are maybe more refined than us, and that part of the recognition and respect for the animal is to acknowledge that they inhabit a different universe from us. There are sheep and rabbits and cows [...], and none of them know anything about Jesus, about the Buddha, about Wall Street, about zero tolerance. They are just in another world altogether. Part of the wonder of the human mind is when you look towards animals with respect and reverence, you begin to feel the otherness of the world that they actually carry. It must take immense contemplative discipline to be able to hold a world stirring within you and to have no means to express it, because animals in the main are silent and they don’t have access to the paradoxical symbolic nuance of language as we have. [...]

Where I envy animals is that I don’t think they are haunted by consciousness in the way that humans are. I think that one of the most beautiful and frightening days in the life of a human person is when their mind really wakes up. Often when you watch a new baby or a little child, you see that they’re still within the pastures of wonder and innocence. Then you think of them coming out of that, and traveling the longest journey that all of us have made - the journey of innocence to experience through adolescence. But that isn’t really the worst journey. The worst and most frightening moment is the day that your mind really wakes up and that you suddenly know that everything that you think, everything that you feel, everything that you know and everything that you are connected with is somehow dependent on your awareness and your consciousness. You know if you are graced with creative and compassionate and warm awareness, you are going to have an incredible life. You are going to suffer as well, but you will always return to that place of warmth and fire within yourself. But you know too on that day that if your awareness goes away or if it gets into the totally chaotic, symbolic world of otherness that we call madness that you are totally gone.” Pg. 25

Are animals, not humans stripped of intellect? Perhaps an overdeveloped logical brain hijacks our emotional capacity and freedom to love. Why is it that we are living in a time of such a sharp divide between our intellectual, emotional, and spiritual selves? Was this cat not a purely emotional and spiritual being?

We want to love and be loved. We can only love another after we love ourselves. We can only love ourselves after acceptance is born. It is said that human’s need work and love to be happy. We can find happiness through loving of another. Much of how we act seems that we do not believe that the fundamental human precept is the desire to be loved and to love. Perhaps we know this intellectually. However, there are many flaws in the way we nurture our young that most likely give rise to these broad societal divides. We are social beings, with real social needs. Once we realize this and begin to act from a place of understanding, then perhaps we will be able to give and receive more love. For now, perhaps we can try to take a lesson from the animals and lay our intellectually bound egos aside.