While browsing on the internet the other day, we came across one of the innumerable strange and compelling books which live on in a half-life of bytes. This one, which also has a physical presence, at least in the collection of the New York Public Library, is by John Howison, a Scotsman who journeyed to North America in 1818 and for the next two and a half years traveled from Montreal to what is today Toronto, taking careful notes and paying particular attention to the lives and customs of Canada’s First Peoples.
On his return to Scotland, in 1821, Howison published the book “Sketches of Upper Canada,” in which he relates that on one Christmas Eve, he found himself alone in a forest under a full moon at midnight. He was suddenly roused “from a delicious reverie” by a dark object moving between the trees:
“At first I thought it was a bear but a near inspection discovered an Indian on all fours.”
The Native motions to Howison to be silent.
Howison creeps closer and asks what the man is doing.
The man explains, Howison writes, “Me watch to see the deer kneel. This is Christmas night, and all the deer fall on their knees to the Great Spirit, and look up.”
Did Howlison see the deer kneeling? If he did, he never mentions it — a stunning omission.
Long before that, and by some accounts even before Christianity, there have been stories woven into our Northern cultures of a night when the other animals can express themselves. These tales seem to have centered around Winter Solstice in pagan times and then Christmas later on, although no one can be sure anymore. This idea of a magical night deep in wintertime, when the other animals can kneel to God or speak — when they suddenly can be understood — persists because humans feel a deep connection to it. Even today, our culture is riddled with talking animals, in animations, books and cartoons.
Before we had other animals as pets we lived in even more intimate contact with them, as labor and food. And from the time we first domesticated them, about 10,000 years ago or more, we have underestimated them — their intelligence, their ability to dream, to feel pain, to be themselves. We did this collectively, out of necessity; because if we were to fully credit them with interests like to our own, our guilt would be unbearable.
This is also why each new study that finds a dog can differentiate 500 nouns in a human language, or that mice can dream, or parrots grieve, is a breakthrough: because we started by crediting them with nothing.
Now we know better, but it is a realization only slowly dawning and we do not yet know where it will end. Because we are so bad at reading them, common sense says that the other animals, especially the ones that live with us today and curl up peaceably by our feet and in our beds, are already doing the lion’s share of communicating across species with us — every day of the year. And that is a great gift. So have a word with your pet before you go to bed tonight.
And listen.