Hi,Barbara –

I was crying yesterday when I wrote about my girl, and thank you for having the heart to have known that.

As usual, my thoughts are non-linear. The subject of the post was kidney transplants, but I bent that into our fur-kids’ pitiful lack of choice, the power we have over their lives: how long they may live, and when they must die. And it’s all done in the name of love.

But the subject revived what I’d been reading for several weeks. And everything I read, both books ad websites, drove home the same point: psychopathy is the absence of feeling. It isn’t necessarily cruel. A few years ago, a psychopath in England, if I recall a website I read several weeks back, committed multiple murders without a trace of dislike for his victims. He did it, he said, because he was bored – and according to theory, psychopaths suffer overwhelming boredom. Moreover – again, according to theory – psychopathy is a ‘sliding scale.’ We’re all ‘that way,’ to some degree.

Which may be true, though I also think rhino-hide indifference (the word is ‘oblivion’) is partly economic. Unless a person is Mother Teresa, how can he bear to feel, without surcease, the suffering of others? Our monetary funds are finite, and so are our emotions, unless we are saints. Or am I wrong?

Although it is dated, I’ve been reading The Territorial Imperative (title underlined), by Robert Ardrey, who wrote extensively in the 1960s.

(As an aside, Elaine Morgan, a jolly, delightful woman and a wonderful writer, died last year in her hometown in Wales. While she too, in common with Ardrey, never studied it academically, she had it in for both Desmond Morris and Ardrey because of their macho approach to anthropology. Her books, like theirs, are exhaustively researched. They’re also engagingly written and filled with dry humor at the expense of these two guys, whom she targeted for decades.)

As for Ardrey, his prose is poetic: dense and rich as Victorian fruitcake soaked in brandy. His style is pure pleasure, whether or not you follow his reasoning on every page.

Be that as it may, he describes what he sees as a gruesome trait in human nature.

Specifically, a group of people (a clan, a society, a nation)is gung-ho in its solidarity and reciprocal ‘caring’ so long as they have a foe against whom to aim their aggression (which is inborn, according to Freud, and a bunch of anthropologists). But when the ‘enemy’ is ousted or otherwise defeated, the group’s aggression loses its outlet. At that precise juncture, it splinters into factions that turn on each other hammer & tongs. True? Witness Egypt and Libya and the Syrians: the ‘good-guy’ rebels are whacking away full-tilt at their former comrades-in-arms even, sometimes – as in Syria – where the villains are still enthroned.

Question is, how can a person not
shut down sooner or later? How can he find the resilience to feel the never-ending energy of human aggression and the suffering it produces? Or the suffering caused by disease and natural disaster? Eventually, how can he not need to tune out the deaths from ebola, AIDS, starvation, torture, snipings, car-bombings, ad infin.?

Isn’t it the same with milder degrees of human sadness? Do you burst into tears when you read the obituaries? Do you sit sobbing at your desk? Do M.D.s collapse in sorrow over their dying patients? (And they all pop their clogs.) My vet wiped his eyes with the back of his hand when I said goodbye to my little girl. Was he putting on an act? I don’t know. They might have been crocodile tears shed to endear himself to the client. Yet I think they were real to some extent, though vets are accustomed to giving the needle to animals every day.

The opposite end of the spectrum? When I was breaking down over my boy – and I’m sorry I lack the stoicism of someone like, say, the late Jackie Kennedy in the presence of death – my other vet, in an edgy tone of voice, briskly gave me to understand that she’d ‘put down’ 1,500 cats over the years. So what was my problem? Did I doubt her competence?

Michael wept over his old lady when she passed on. But she was his daughter and he was her dad. And I could read about her and look at her photo and not shed a tear. I can read about all the cats you and Ruthie have lost over the years, and not cry. On a cognitive level, I understand what other parents have gone through. But I don’t feel it. I can understand how Marc must have felt when he held Red in his lap and cried over him. But I feel nothing of what he felt. Nevertheless, would I feign the emotion? For their sake, of course. I’m not that thick. I certainly couldn’t let it drop in nonchalant silence, or chat away about something else. What’s more, would I feel what you felt if I were in England and saw you in tears? Yes. I’d cry over Poppy – even now, years after her death, if I saw you and Ruth sobbing away. And I also had tears in my eyes when I looked at that photo Ruthie e-mailed last week: to see the beautiful handiwork and craftsmanship. But no more of that, or I’ll break down again. . . and can only imagine what you have gone through.

To read, though, about tragedy or to hear it on the radio? No. After a while, I tune it out. And this is what the scientists label psychopathic non-feeling. But isn’t it also emotional economics? Self-preservation?

For all its good and happy news once in a while, it seems one has to forget a fair number of posts on this website. Yet many of its regulars have what it takes to immerse themselves in surfeits of misery and do everything they can, to their extraordinary limits, to alleviate the pain. Could I do what they do? No. I’d fold. The most I can do is donate whatever I can afford to animal rights (it’s the elephants now), or care for stray cats I’ve fed and ‘vetted’ over the years.

Anyhow, as I usually do, I strayed from the subject: I veered off from kidney transplants to the overwhelming – but rightful? – power we have to deny the least choice to our children. With neither the strength nor the knowledge to resist, they can only follow their parent in gentle affection. And there you have the hell-fires of pathos, the source of all our tears – our torrents of tears: our children’s unblemished innocence, their unknowing trust in us to the end, never to glean that we mean to kill them, beloved as they are. Is there nothing wrong in this? But what are the choices? When he loves his child, a parent will chose the act that ends pain.
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As for your comments on kidney transplants, I wish I had your fluency in describing your opposition to transplants. I had no idea the donor suffered. I thought the procedure was only mildly painful from that end – though risky, it goes without saying, with only one organ to do the work of two.

As to the other point you made, you’re on target again. As surely as the sun sets in the west, the procedure is guaranteed to devolve into still another lucrative scheme. And, as you say, who knows what the donor and recipient are feeling (assuming the donor is still alive, which he likely is not. When the money comes rolling in, the declawing vets will be ripping kidneys left and right). What’s more, can you give the poor cat the drugs he’ll need to take every day to slow the rejection? I also abhor chemotherapy for any animal. That’s nothing but cruel. It’s all for the people – not for their suffering children.

Hastily written and poorly thought through.

Don’t work too hard, and pet the Boyz! xx