By Mike Donahue

Moapa Valley Progress

We can learn what makes us human by watching the animals

One of the greatest benefits we enjoy as rural residents of Clark County is the right to raise animals: pigs, goats, horses, cattle, sheep; just about anything we want including emus.

While human culture, language and awareness of self are supposed to be unique to us, to our species, many believe we share with the animals a lot more than just the air we breathe and the water we drink.

It is possible to see the qualities, traits, emotions and characteristics that make us human simply by seeing similar or even identical attributes in the other species with which we share our lives.

Anthropomorphism, also called prosopopeia or personification, is attributing human characteristics and emotions to animals.Many sneer at the idea that animals, like humans, have emotions and feelings on a par with ours. These scoffers must never have seen a young foal dance in the early morning across a grassy Moapa Valley pasture with the sheer joy of being alive.

They’ve never seen two animals bond in a human-like happy friendship that transcends species. I have a ram that lives in a small pasture with his flock. Although this young guy has been among his own kind for his entire life, somehow, he became buddies with the stallion next door.

Those guys are the best of friends. They run back and forth in play almost daily, each to their side of a dividing fence. The ram stands on his hind legs and he and the horse nuzzle muzzle-to-muzzle like long-lost lovers. Happiness, apparently, is where we find it.

Some insist the expression of happiness is an emotion restricted exclusively to humans. They’ve apparently never seen a Chihuahua smile, actually SMILE, when he’s happy. One lives at my house.

My freezer is currently about half full the meanest, orneriest steer that ever lived. Although it was hand fed and watered its entire life, that animal was so full of rage and anger he would have been a great subject for a blockbuster movie, “Raging Steer.”

Ed and Gerry are rural Moapa Valley neighbors who have for a long, long time over the years raised and enjoyed all sorts of animals.

While the couple always enjoyed the stock that mooed, clucked, whinnied or what-have-you around the house and yard, when their kids were young, many of the animals were often part of a 4-H project or some other rural-related growing-up pursuit. The animals they reared grew fat and contented and usually earned the attentive young prospective farmer or rancher a blue ribbon or some other prize for their effort.

Today, while the kids (grandkids, too) have pursued other goals and found other interests, Ed and Gerry continue to keep a pack of happy dogs and, until not long ago, a couple of horses.

Those two horses, Joshua and his lady Scammer, were a couple for just about 20 years. Of course they had their disagreements but they were soulmates, living for one another, perhaps like Ed and Gerry.

Then one day, as we all eventually will do, Joshua died. He was buried not far from where he passed, in the big old dry corral once shared with the light of his life.

Scammer is inconsolable. Grief stricken and full of sorrow, she eats and drinks, but merely seems to exist. Where once when allowed she would run to whisper with the horse across the fence, even when Joshua was alive, she now neither runs, nor whispers

Like a human woman, or man, who’s lost a loving mate and perhaps waiting for her own death, she refuses to go far from Joshua’s grave. Perhaps she understands, like a human, that’s where her heart lies.

Grief, sorrow, rage, happiness, friendship, joy are just a few of the many qualities that make us human. To ignore that the animals around us express those same emotions, those same quailities is to ignore the reality of being human.

“Rural Rants” is a column about rural living and the people who live here. Your comments and input are important and will be appreciated. Contact me via email at mouse@mvdsl.com.