Lauren Slater recounts her time spent in a foster home and the pet raccoon that helped her adjust:
When Amelia came to us she was wild, but within 24 hours it seemed to me she’d consented to tameness. I had no way of knowing that this was untrue. I didn’t understand that when Amelia followed me everywhere she acted out of instinct, not fondness. Later I read the work of the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who made famous
the fact that orphaned wild ducklings would cathect to the first person they saw after struggling free from their shells, that person’s face indelibly imprinted on the infant animal’s malleable brain. I’d see in Lorenz’s book photos of him walking like the Pied Piper, a long line of geese waddling behind him. Lorenz also discovered that if, upon birth, the wild geese first saw a boot, or a spoon, in motion, they would imprint upon it with the same ferocious loyalty, longing only to be near the inanimate object, somehow sucking from it succor and safety without thought or plan.
Amelia, in other words, was not following me because she loved me; she followed me because some dumb drive urged her to do so, the drive itself as wild as wings or water. Does this diminish the encounter? Not at all. We adore our pets not because they love us, but because they prove to us, day after day after day, that we love them with a purity not possible in human-to-human encounters. Our animals prove to us how capacious the human heart can be, and in doing so they give us a great gift.
The Dish 