I will confess that as a gardener I have more sympathy for Mr. McGregor than for Peter Rabbit. Heresy, I'm sure, to most people. But I do take pains to keep animals out of my garden, and I don't regard all animals as necessarily natural. For instance, the absence of any natural predators has spiked the deer population in my neighborhood. The result is that the wooded commons are not regenerating -- deer are eating all of the new growth from native species and avoiding the invasives, which they don't prefer. I think Leopold's essay "Thinking Like a Mountain" is germane: a mountain lives in fear of its deer, if the wolves are removed. One person's opinion 😊
I love the way you wrote this post with two answers to your question: Schweitzer as a role model and your honest picking and choosing of critter-neighbors as counterpoint. The Recovering Academic also makes an excellent point. :-)
I do prefer all my critters outside. We had a squirrel in our basement….I actually saw it, got a have a heart trap but was going away for a few days and didn’t want the critter to die so left a small container of water in the trap along with the bait( also left the basement door open prior to departure.)knock on wood…never caught him/her/they and havent seen said critter since.
We share our stoop with a snake. The first time I saw it I did the eek! and the jump. I wondered how to get rid of it. But then something strange happened. I watched it. Really looked at the snake. I saw how beautiful it was, how elegantly it moved. How it seemed to luxuriate in the sun on the warm concrete step. We stopped avoiding each other, the snake and I. Now I step over it on my way out. I look forward to seeing it, and sometimes I say hello.
I will confess that as a gardener I have more sympathy for Mr. McGregor than for Peter Rabbit. Heresy, I'm sure, to most people. But I do take pains to keep animals out of my garden, and I don't regard all animals as necessarily natural. For instance, the absence of any natural predators has spiked the deer population in my neighborhood. The result is that the wooded commons are not regenerating -- deer are eating all of the new growth from native species and avoiding the invasives, which they don't prefer. I think Leopold's essay "Thinking Like a Mountain" is germane: a mountain lives in fear of its deer, if the wolves are removed. One person's opinion 😊
I love the way you wrote this post with two answers to your question: Schweitzer as a role model and your honest picking and choosing of critter-neighbors as counterpoint. The Recovering Academic also makes an excellent point. :-)
I do prefer all my critters outside. We had a squirrel in our basement….I actually saw it, got a have a heart trap but was going away for a few days and didn’t want the critter to die so left a small container of water in the trap along with the bait( also left the basement door open prior to departure.)knock on wood…never caught him/her/they and havent seen said critter since.
We share our stoop with a snake. The first time I saw it I did the eek! and the jump. I wondered how to get rid of it. But then something strange happened. I watched it. Really looked at the snake. I saw how beautiful it was, how elegantly it moved. How it seemed to luxuriate in the sun on the warm concrete step. We stopped avoiding each other, the snake and I. Now I step over it on my way out. I look forward to seeing it, and sometimes I say hello.