Reading an article about animal liberation (in this case, whale/shark/fish/sea cucumber liberation) started becoming a little awkward when I began noting the author's and the interviewees' struggles with pronouns. Here I was, sprawled nearly upside-down on my couch (head on the butt cushion, legs over the back cushions), meant to have my heart breaking for these poor sea creatures. I mean, these guys - these volunteers who had sacrificed whatever they left back in their normal lives to come out here on what were essentially pirate ships for all the protection they got from any government - were describing the bloody struggling fin-thumping sharks on the decks of boats, and tuna dangling by the roofs of their mouths, and so forth, and I was going along, heart in my own mouth, wishing I hadn't been raised on sushi so I didn't love it so much, when suddenly the pronouns started becoming palpably forced, or else noticeably omitted.

Neither the author nor the interviewees knew what to call these suffering, dying creatures as they described them gasping on deck. It? Him? Her? You can't tell the sex of a madly thrashing shark by glancing at it (or even a calm shark, for all I know), and 'it' sounds ridiculous when you're talking about that kind of suffering. 'It' implies something that doesn't have the mental capacity for suffering. 'Him' sounds the most natural, but why assume it's a him? And 'Her' sounds like you're just forcing the issue of women's equality, pronoun-style, in a totally inappropriate and unrelated situation. And 'him or him'... um, well, let's insert it in context in an otherwise intact quote: "[t]hey just cut the line and threw him or her back into the water like he or she was a piece of nothing." Yeah.

Mostly, they fell back on 'him' - they were animal rights activists, after all, not ones to particularly give a shit, at that heightened moment, about offending pronoun-sensitive women - but it still read awkward and messed up the narrative. Suddenly, I wasn't seeing the suffering anymore, but rather thinking pedantic thoughts about pronouns.

The problem's been considered, I'm sure, even though I've never heard it discussed for animals, since they indisputably HAVE a gender (or at least a sex, depending on what your definition of both terms is, and whether you see a difference). But I have definitely heard it debated in genderqueer circles. Hir, ze, zir, etc (there's even a Wikipedia subsection on it, so it MUST be major!). These are supposed to be gender-neutral - to throw the intrinsic labeling and subsequent stereotyping of gender out the window. Maybe also to discount the importance of gender completely.

So I sort find it odd that there isn't a gender-neutral pronoun for animals, at least one that could be in use when gender is completely and totally beside the point, such as when one is fucking flopping around dying on a deck.

A lot of the time, in stories, human victims are given an (often exaggerated) gender so the reader can either identify with, want to rescue, or be attracted to them. The comically long hair of Rapunzel, the flexing muscles of an injured soldier strugging to drag himself to safety. It tugs at heartstrings (groinstrings, whatever). But what use is that in an animal? We feel weird about animal gender in a way we don't about human gender, unless their gender is useful somehow (milking cows, siring bulls) or else just a fact, always known, parceled in with everything else we know (pets, mostly). But to give a dying animal a gender, one that's destined to be either food or bycatch? In suffering, it's a he, in death, he or she is an it.

And everything is awkward about that. There's no option that ignores gender while still acknowledging suffering.

There's a fox who lives, or hunts, or both, in the area around my workplace. She's always emerging out of the tall grass that borders Goose Creek, or trotting out from under a tow truck in the city towing lot, her mouth full of fresh rabbit or mouse, and nearly making me wreck on my bike. Today she was on the bike path, following it, as if she were human. When the path turned, she turned; when it went under a bridge, she went under the bridge with it. Due to it being 6AM when I'm riding, and not wearing my contacts, at first glance I thought she was a human - maybe a super short human, but a human nonetheless - taking a morning jog on the wrong side of the bike path. My first reaction was actually to be annoyed that some idiot would be jogging on the left side.

The feeling persisted, even after I saw that it was the fox, carrying a prairie dog this time. As we approached one another - we were going opposite ways - I felt this innate sense of wrongness riding my bike on the left side of the path, for fear this fox would suddenly realize that she was breaking the human laws of multi-use path etiquette and run over to her right, only to be squished by my tires. I actually looked around guiltily to make sure no one would note this egregious misuse of the creek path as we crossed.

We passed one another without incident - the fox is so accustomed to humans that she was not fazed at being passed at close quarters by a speeding bicycle. She glanced at me without the least bit of trepidation in her eyes.

Even though I know that kind of fearlessness is only in place because we're encroaching dangerously into these wild animals' territories, and that it would be healthier for them to maintain their fear of and separation from us, there's something I like about this effortless interspecies mingling. I like passing foxes at a distance of less than three feet and exchanging our species-specific pleasantries.

Once, Dan and I were lying on Norlin Quad and a fox came up and licked his foot. I liked that.

Once, back in Chicago, probably 10 years ago, I was walking home from a babysitting job in the dark and I saw a little oddly shaped black and white cat wandering in the grass beside me. It slunk nearer and I reached down and petted its back, which was strange, because the fur was long and a little wiry and the body was sort of flat and wide and the tail was excessively fluffy, even for a longhaired cat, and its nose was pointed and it wasn't really doing the cat-threading-between-your-legs thing. That was because it was a skunk. The realization was faster than this writing of the realization, fast enough for me to gently pull my hand away and keep walking. The skunk seemed moderately surprised, but after a few swishes of its tail, decided it was okay with being petted and wandered off without incident. I liked that, too.

And in Colorado, when I first got here, I was taking a hike with Camille and on the descent we walked under a mountain lion, who was stretched out on a high branch above us. All the notices in the mountain parks say to make a lot of noise around mountain lions and they'll be too intimidated to attack, so I said nothing and let Camille, who hadn't noticed it, keep talking. It lazily watched us pass, then turned its attention to more important bird activity higher in the tree. I liked that - later, when I got over my acute fear.

I've never gotten over the charmedness I felt when I fed campus squirrels trail mix from my bare hands. Or when I was driving on a mountain road and there was a certain overlook where, if you stretched out your hands with food in it, a bird would come swooping down and peck it out. It's a sense I didn't get in Estes Park, where they sell bags of chipmunk food for you to feed to their tame chipmunks, or somewhere in South Dakota, where prairie dogs are kept practically on farms and you buy special prairie dog food to feed them. I still chose to do it, hoping it would be the same thing, but it isn't. Not quite.

We went to the zoo this past weekend. I have a conflict about zoos. I love animals, but on the other hand, I love animals.

Sometimes I write sentences like that and think that it would be stupid to explain them because their meaning is completely obvious. I think this because I've got a thread going in my head, something like background music, and with that thread, it would be impossible not to. But then I look back objectively at 'I love animals, but on the other hand, I love animals' and snap back into (out of, actually) context.

What I mean is, I'm not sure if the sum of (1) the joy I get from being able to observe animal behavior, (2) the species who are being saved from extinction by zoo breeding programs, and (3) the awareness of the plight of different species, and by proxy, the earth, given by the plaques, is quite enough to make up for the feeling I get when I see a cheetah pacing a 10x10 enclosure. It's easiest to see with the cheetah - big cats always seem restless, they don't put on even the slightest hint of a happy face. They look as though they have one objective: getting out, and running, and running, and running, and running. It's never as obvious anywhere else, and of course neither I nor anyone else can say what a tiger is feeling even as it paces. The less obvious ones, too... what the lorises think as they creep up and down the same skinny branches over and over. The elephants must know they don't need to hold one another's tails with their trunks to navigate the total distance of a hundred feet, right? Who knows what they know? While we were watching the elephants, some keepers came out with what looked like nightsticks and tapped the elephants' knees. The elephants lay down. They raised their giant feet onto tree stumps. They received treats, put on their necks, and they reached their trunks around to pick them off. Elephants always have what looks like a humongous soppy grin on their faces, with the droopy lower lip and the tuck of the mouth under the trunk. It's hard to imagine them being sad. Maybe they're not.

I know a lot about animal behavior from school, but I don't know this. I felt a lot better about zoos after reading Life of Pi, even though it was a work of fiction. It gave me an excuse, but I knew that it was just an excuse. The truth is, I don't know the truth. I would work in a zoo in a second, even to be the person who shovels hippo poop, because it would give me an opportunity to develop my own observations, and work towards knowing the truth, and using the truth to make better habitats. I always want to jump into the lion cage and pet the lions, and it's almost a drive to make them feel cared for, even though I know that's enormously stupid and not at all the outcome that would result. Lions don't need to be petted to be cared for, but they need something, and if I can channel the ridiculous lion-petting compulsion into something that achieves the effect I'm going for, then I think I'd be satisfied.

We were standing at some kind of bird pond, and one bird, a bird with a giant beak, was swimming in fast circles around this pond as a skinny woman in huge boots threw dead fish at him. He couldn't have cared less about the dead fish; in fact, he seemed like he was trying to dodge them. They sank to the bottom of the pond as he swam faster and faster, and as the woman on the island in the middle tried to hone her aim. It looked more like target practice than like feeding time as the zoo. And she looked angrier and angrier the less and less the bird paid attention to her efforts.

Despite the placing of that anecdote, it wasn't supposed to be representative of anything, or have a moral, or anything like that. I'm just remembering things, and that's what I remember. I remember thinking that despite the bird's disdain, I'd still fight that angry woman for her job. Animals that have great disdain for me only make me fight harder for their affection. That's why I'm a cat person. How is someone supposed to enjoy the challenge of making an animal happy if it's already happy, drooling, bouncing, fetching balls, pooping in people's flowerbeds, and needs nothing from anyone to go on being happy indefinitely? That has nothing to do with the human condition. Being happy despite everything. I can't relate to that.