All Birds Must Die

“All birds must die” according to my dogs. Small birds. Big birds. Medium birds. Noisy birds. Quiet birds. All of them. Must die.

Why? Well, I’m not entirely sure. It might be because the white-backed ravens enjoy taunting the dogs. They are intelligent birds, and naughty. I like to think they have a rather wicked sense of humour. It certainly seems that way. They will hop around on the grass like spastic little penguins, waiting for the dogs to notice them. When the dogs finally spot the ravens, they run at them at full speed. The ravens act as if they are slow and decrepit, and only just manage to get away at the last moment. They don’t fly far - they go perch on a tree somewhere in the garden, and make cawing sounds at the dogs. The dogs proceed to hop, skip, and bark up at the ravens. The ravens proceed to flit from branch to branch, sometimes choosing a low branch that is juuuuust out of the dogs’ reach. It drives the dogs mad. The ravens know it. The dogs just go with it.

I do have a point to this story, I am getting to it. Gawd.

When I walk with the dogs on the farm there are inevitably birds about. The birds make merry in the sugar cane and tall grasses, and the dogs go on a rampage, flushing the birds out. Very often the birds fly up in one direction so that the dogs lay chase in that direction, but then the birds perform a sudden change of direction and get safely back into the cane behind the dogs. The dogs, in their frenzied rush, fail to notice this almost every time. They are so consumed by their desire to get the birds that that don’t use their senses to properly track the birds. Now I’m not saying that all dogs are like this, maybe it’s just mine that are… challenged. Some dogs are superb hunters. Most domesticated dogs don’t need to be good hunters, so they don’t practice the skill of actually catching prey in order to survive.

Onto the point of my story, at long last:

I think that we behave like my dogs far too often. We get incredibly excited about something (in a positive or negative way). It becomes all-consuming. We lose our ability or willingness to think rationally about the situation. We go running off after our birdies without any thought of the potential consequences. Sometimes those consequences can be severe, such as for one of my dogs that fell down a cliff after chasing a troupe of monkeys in a red haze of bloodlust. Fortunately she was (miraculously) unharmed, but she was very nearly dead.

I lose myself too. I lose myself in anger, sadness, self pity, and even occasionally in a delusional excitement for what unrealistic magic the future may bring. I get lost in the chase of these experiences - and yes, even the unpleasant ones. Just because an experience is negative doesn’t mean that we are any less likely to chase after it, like a drug, than a positive experience. Take a look at the world - most people are depressed, or suffer from some kind of debilitating psychological issue that makes them miserable. Some people are better at hiding it, but the truth is still the truth. Life is pain a lot of the time, and it’s a pain that most people simply don’t know how to deal with in a healthy way. And so we lose ourselves in it.