A Tale (End) of Two Monkeys
Once, my sister had told me, "maybe you just don't understand death." It was her way to trying to oversimplify why I didn't make it to a relative's funeral. I never really got into it with her, but she was wrong, as she usually is. That had nothing to do with it.
In reality, I am more comfortable with it than most people, but it is not even that. I know all about death, from a biological perspective. I know how much time it takes for each stage of cell death to occur, what is happening inside the body, how long until rigor mortis sets in. I have held hundreds for their certain death, and some died in my arms before we could expect it, or plan for it. I know how quickly I need to tag 'em and bag 'em before the smell starts to penetrate the air. I have sat with a stethescope while a literal wall of dead dogs were piling up before me, verifying death before each body was taken to the cooler. I have walked an old horse over snowy fields with her side cut open, trying to make it to the kill area before she keeled over. I have killed many, many times myself, dogs and cats and a few other species.
I know animals are not exactly like people. I know there is something different. The biology is the same, but our emotional attachment is different. We see humans as intrinsically more valuable than animals, even with our own pets. I know a lot of my vet tech friends consider their pets to be like their children...however, I also know that most of them are like me, in that for their human children, there would be no bounds to saving a life or finding a cure for a terminal disease, but our pets come with a financial limit, and in the end, we would all consider euthanasia as a viable alternative to prolonging their suffering, or reducing the impact on our finances.
These days, I am not going over the bereavement process and asking clients to decide on body care, or pick the urn that best represents the way they want to remember their pet. My patients don't have names, they have numbers. Part of the reason we don't name them is to reduce the emotional attachment to them. I always have to tell myself I love them collectively, not individually. I tell myself that not to make myself feel better about their inevitable deaths, but to feel better about the fact that most of the time, their deaths don't affect me emotionally. It is a reminder that I still care, that I am not so blase about death that it no longer bothers me.
Most days, I shake off their deaths like a pair of dirty scrubs at the end of a workday. Death is a part of the job. For a moment, I did the same thing when I was told the news about a couple of animals I had been working closely with. I received the news with the same shrug of my shoulders and little frown of sadness. I saw with my own eyes that their injuries were catastrophic, and accepted rationally that euthanasia was the only alternative.
Later, I began to engage emotionally with their death, and in this, I realized that some part of death is still a mystery to me. Human death we can convince ourselves to accept through our faith. What I mean is the question of where the soul goes. It is unfathomable to believe that the spirit of a person is simply just gone when the body stills, so we attach cultural or spiritual beliefs to its final destination. We tell ourselves that spirit is now in Heaven, or watching over us, or waiting to be reborn in another body, another lifetime.
Many people who work with animals believe that animals have no souls. I don't believe this myself, but we don't do much thinking on what happens to their souls after death. In my mind, there is a beautiful grassy meadow somewhere on the other side, with dogs chasing elusive squirrels in bodies free of pain. This maybe only a personal myth I created to help me deal with constant death around me, some sort of prevention against what they term "compassion fatigue", a real syndrome among my industry.
What do we define as the soul of a person? Their personality, the "inner core', their psychological attributes? If that is so, how can we look at animals and think they have no souls? To me, animals always have personality. There are different ways of approaching animals with different personalities. Based on their responses towards, say, a human approaching them, you could classify them on their personalities and treat them in accordance. A dog who is predominately fearful is handled in a different physical manner than one who is aggressive.
And I knew the personalities of the ones involved. Twelve animals that I had known for two years were placed in the same room, with the same set of controls. Two were put together, and two were put down. I knew the personalities of everyone in that room.
And yet I didn't ask for an ID number. It's like I didn't want to know, wanted to stumble upon it for next documentation and try to put the pieces on it. I was familiar with each one, how they responded to things. I had classified their personalities. I didn't need to know their number to know how things might have gone down.
And now I wondered where it went, where did it go when that needle hit home. Did the patient just die, and that's all she wrote? Is there a heaven for monkeys up there?
Do monkeys have soul? Do they ascend in any meaningful way? Is there a great reward for them up there, for spending their life in a cage, waiting for their turn to die for mankind?
I hope so. And I do love them. Sometimes I think God is working through me, or allowing me to work for them, as directed by him. Is it all part of some grand design?
The problem is, what happened was something everyone thought I would try, at some point down the road. Maybe, but I was years away from it, I felt. It was a wild risk. Yet, it was performed by...not me. I would not have attempted that, but now that someone has, I feel the eyes upon me.
Lord. Lead, guide, and direct me.

Christmas Presents From Heaven

In the latest move in the square dance between the Fat Cats, The Corporate Suits, the Behaviorist, and Me, I ended up being the one doing the victory dance. The Behaviorist was here doing a review of my program that I have pretty much developed from scratch in less than a year after starting work here. I gave a presentation to him, the Fat Cats and The Corporate Suits, and then I took him around and showed him what I had been doing, and then he gave a presentation to the Fat Cats, the Corporate Suits, and me.
In his presentation, he made some pretty incredible statements. He told them that the level of work that I was doing was equal to that of the best in the business, which was remarkable because they had been doing this for years and I had only just begun. He also was impressed with the results of my work and first said I could publish my data, and then changed his "could" to a "should." The Fat Cats started getting nervous, saying that they would have to talk to their legal department first, but he stopped them right then and made a comment to the effect of "I know you don't want to broadcast that you have this problem, but the fact is that everyone has this problem and no one has been able to successfully treat it before, but she has, and for the sake of our patients, I think the scientific community needs to see this information."
He talked to me privately at some point during the day and told me that publishing my data would be the golden key to unlock a door that had been closed to me. I had been trying to get somewhere academically but those doors kept getting shut in my face because nobody knew who I was. "I promise you," he told me, "you publish this paper, and they will know your name."
So it is settled (well, the Fat Cats haven't told me what the legal department said, but I am not waiting for them, I know how they roll), I am writing the paper.
However, before I could get started analyzing my data, I wanted to go back and validate and quantify it first. It was a rather tedious task and I kept asking myself if I really needed to do this, or if I was just doing this to avoid working on the paper because it was making me so anxious. I decided that I was not avoiding the paper by doing this, because it was an important step that I couldn't leave out.
As an example of why I think this is important, let me give you this scenario: Let's say you have a headache and your friend is recommending a medicine. Would you be more inclined to have faith in the medicine if they said they "kinda had a headache", or if they said "I had a pretty decent headache", or if they said "I had the worst migraine ever" and they took the medicine and it went away? In order to prove that my treatment is effective, I had to show that it worked in not only the mild cases that may or may not have resolved with no treatment, but also in the severe ones where treatment was a dubious proposition.
It took me about two weeks to get over that step, and I wrote a rough outline of my paper and was staring at the data trying to think of where to go next. I had two issues now: I had to translate my writing from layman's terms to scientific jargon, and I needed some more references. I was finding other work to do and pretty much decided that it would be best to put the paper on the backburner until June, when I am going to spend four days at a conference listening to presentations and reviewing the current data in the same field. By the end of that time, I should be able to write my paper much more easily.
I wasn't comfortable with that decision, though. I started to question again if I was just deciding that because I was trying to put off the anxiety of writing it. On the way home yesterday, I realized what part of my issue was. I needed to get my hands on some actual journals and just read them for a while to get a hang of the flow and style. I longed to find a campus library like the one we had at A&M, the Medical Library I think it was called, where there were rows and rows of scientific journals. I used to go there and read the journals all the time, which is why I thought writing this paper would be easy for me. That was ten years ago, though, and I am a little rusty in the pattern of scientific writing.
This morning when I got to work, there was a package waiting for me in my box.
This is strange, I thought. My box primarily sits empty. I opened the manilla envelope that was busting at the seams, and right there in my hands were three current scientific journals in my field.
It is like a Christmas present from Heaven. I wonder if God is watching over me right now, pushing me from behind, blowing in my ear. Write the paper, I feel he is saying, I have more work for you to do in this world. Go, now, and save my animals.

HINDU: REVERE THE COW

Farmer: Feed the Cows

Animal Rightist: Free the cows

Animal Welfarist: Love the Cows

Environmentalists: Reprogram the cows

Recently, scientists in Austrialia have been investigating ways to reduce methane emission of livestock. I find this very interesting. When it was originally presented to me, it sounded more radical than it really is, but in learning about it, I wonder why we never tried that earlier.

I wonder, though, if that is a little too close to "playing God".

And then I get angry, because it makes me think about the stem cell research controversy. I think about how Bush and I are on other sides of the fence on this one. He has vetoed every attempt to get stem stell research federally funded. I think that stem cell research has the potential to help find the cure for Parkinsons, which my father has, and whose symptoms are getting worse. I feel his time is growing short and that research could not come fast enough, and why doesn't the government throw us a bone on this one?

I think about the children who have cancer, and the desperation of their parents for research that will find a way to save their child, ease the pain, provide comfort and cure, as I throw a marshmellow at my "research model." I think about how we should do our best to serve the animals that serve us, and I think about how understanding their behavior will help us build a better research model.

And it takes me back to the cows, because I remembered a day where I believed that understanding their behavior would help us build a better farm animal: an animal that was comfortable and therefore produced more meat, more milk. Now I am trying to build a better research model, one that is comfortable and therefore enjoys better health and more hair.

But it's all the same.

I'm just here to love them.