Rex

          June, 1983.  Two o’clock a.m.  Rex was pawing my cheek.  From slumber I awoke.  To my horror, I saw jets and balloons of orange exploding outside the second-story window of my apartment.  A sea of fire that was to take the life of a seven month old baby girl was consuming the building.  Thick, billowing smoke enveloped me as I hurried out with the barest of clothes and nothing else apart from my beloved pet Rex, who saved my life.  Enshrined my memory forever will be my hero and friend Rex Aslan Wik.   

      I’ve always liked cats, perhaps because I share many of their biases and also because we had a pet cat Tigger in Malaysia and more cats in Ivyland.  In 1982, Rex came into my life.  “Over the last four years, my constant companion and source of joy is Rex, a large pedigreed Persian cat with glowing, copper eyes and silky, cream-colored hair,” I wrote to Maybeth Gray.  “He has an aggressively-pleasant personality and a sense of adventure—always opening things and getting into trouble—perhaps a bit like me when I was at Ivyland.”   Rex’s ancestors were champions and grand champions going back at least four generations.   Rex, born April 25^th 1981, had a flowing cream coat and copper eyes, a gentle disposition, a melodious voice, relentless curiosity, insisted on attention, and was a regal decorating accessory but also an Olympic-class sprinter and jumper as well.  It wasn't unusual for him to leap on our three-foot high cabinet.  Interestingly, both of his parents had black hair.  The cream came from the paternal side of his great grand mothers. 

        In the waning months of his life, as he lost his hair, weight, and flexibility, I struggled with the question of euthanasia.  I remember taking Rex to the vet once.  In the lobby was a burley teamster with tears streaming down his face.  He had just watched his doctor put his dog “to sleep.”   The subject of euthanasia is too complex for this essay, but needless to say, I just couldn’t bring myself to take that step.  So long as he wasn’t in acute pain so far as I could tell, I resolved to continue to provide as best as I could and play and comfort him until the end.  After giving him a bath one night, he had a stroke and died the next morning. 

         I suppose I could do worse.  

        “Yesterday, I went to our garden and picked seventeen flowers to put on the grave of our beloved pet Rex Aslan Wik,” I wrote to my parents in March 1998.  “On April 25^th, he would have been seventeen years old.  Rex died yesterday in his sleep.  I like to think that in his last sleep, his dreams ranged over his life of love and adventure—how he bagged two mice in Elgin, how he rescued me from the fire, his three homes, and, especially, the fun and comfort he gave me, Nancy, and the boys. 

      “In life, Rex taught me so much,” I conclude in my letter.  “He taught me that the core of love is commitment, in sickness or in health.  He taught me to look sometimes at the cares and the concerns of his world through his playful, copper eyes.  These are lessons that have helped in my relationship to my wife and in raising my boys.  I will hold on to these lessons—these memories—of our friend and pet for the rest of my life, for in teaching me about life, he taught me something about death.”

        The possibility of non-human morality raises all kinds of questions.  It’s hard to deny that some higher animals, such as elephants, dolphins, cats, and dogs, lack altruistic impulses and moral sensibilities.   And it’s clear to me that the least ethical man is far inferior in his morals than the most ethical ape.  I recently read a news account of a child who had fallen into an ape pit at a zoo.  A larger ape gently pulled the unconscious child to safety while fending off the more rowdy juvenile apes.  While it’s possible that the ape’s mothering instincts might have kicked in, it seems to me that it was just as possible for her more brutal instincts to kick in as well that would have resulted in the death of the child.  In other words, it seems to me that the ape made a moral choice.  If it’s true that animals have a moral sense, should we follow in St. Francis’ footsteps and preach to the birds?  Do snails have souls?  Can animals be redeemed and have a redeemer?  (My interlocutor sarcastically asked me, “What are you saying?  Is there a Jesus rabbit and a Jesus fox and rabbit crucifixion and a fox crucifixion?”)  If there is the spark of the divine within beasts, what then should our relationship be to them?  Does human contact with some animals—such as my affection for Rex—imprint on that creature in some way a moral sensitivity?  Can we teach animals morality?  Should we avoid all foods that once had faces?  Ban vivisection?  Liberate the barn and zoo animals and pray over the burial of our leather shoes and fur coats?   What about intelligent non-human life elsewhere, perhaps in other solar systems?  Did they too undergo the passion pageant and if not, how should we regard them?  As our moral superiors?  (I suspect that if we have the means, we’ll probably try to kill them.  But this is an academic question as we have no basis whatever to believe that such life exists.  Although I’m an avid science fiction fan, I find no convincing evidence from 7,000 years of recorded history to support the belief that UFOs are real or that space aliens exist, and I consider the search for extra terrestrial life to be a waste of effort and money.)  What about artificial life?  It may be merely a matter of time before we can code robots to have cognition, consciousness, feelings, superstitions, and theistic longings.  Can we manufacture a soul? Can we program an android to have free will? Should we still treat them the same we treat a toaster?  I don’t think I have many answers for these questions.  But, in general, I think we should treat animals, aliens, and even androids and appliances ethically, as our actions reflect for better or for worse our ethics or our lack of ethics. 

       In the Turing Game, proposed by Alan Turning in the 1950s, two players are behind a curtain communicating with you by a console.  If a robot can be substituted for one the players and it is impossible for you to determine that, presumably that robot will have reached the level of conceptual thought.  But I think that this test doesn’t scratch the surface in emulating genuine human consciousness.  It would also be more impressive if the android interactions reached the level of self-initiated perfidy, as in the case of HAL, the computer in the movie 2001, or self-directed superstition in the movie AI.  Human self-consciousness would have to include all the virtues and vices that we manifest, as well as our inner world of thought, doubt, confusion, dread, greed, dishonesty, intentionality, dreams, speculation, and mysticism. I see no basis for assuming that we are anywhere near that point, even at a rudimentary conceptual level.      

         If man is merely a more complicated machine that the lower orders going down the smallest bacterium, is man therefore truly unique?  What is it exactly that makes man a little lower than the angels and a little higher than the orangutans?   And why does this matter so long as we are ethically grounded?  If we view man as merely an advanced machine or animal, will it necessarily follow that we must treat men as machines or animals?  I think the answer can only be: no.  The way we treat anything reflects on our respect for life and on our attitude to man himself.  “They are only rats” becomes “They are only Jews.”  

     Hope has been at war with my reason for my entire life, and this may be a case where hope has won.  Ezekiel 18:4 says that God regards that “all souls are mine”, and I’m more certain that Rex had a soul than some folks that have made the headlines.  I’m reminded of the Prayer of Saint Basil of Caesarea:  “O God, grant us a deeper sense of fellowship with all living things, our little brothers and sisters to whom in common with s you have given this earth as home.  May we realize that all these creatures also live for themselves and for you—not for us alone.  They too love the goodness of life, as we do, and serve you better in their way than we do in ours.”   Lions and lambs are in Heaven, according to Revelation.  Romans 8:21 says that all of creation will someday be delivered from corruption, which I take to mean all of nature.  James 3:7 talks of man taming all creatures.  I was recently saw a sparrow trying to move or comfort a dead or dying bird, an expression of empathy that both startled and impressed me.  In two places, Jesus makes references to pets, dogs (Matthew 15:21-28) in one case and birds (Matthew 10:29)  in another.  My belief in animal souls is in part a retort to my Uncle Ray’s rhetorical verse:

It little matters sparrows

That the Father notes their fall

They die like all the other beats

Both big and great and small

And they might justly wonder

If they could cogitate

Why the Father would simply note their fall

When death is still fate?

        Shortly after Rex died, I had a dream in which he was sitting at the end of my bed in a puddle of light, but he looked as healthy as he did ten years earlier.  He looked at me with his Cheshire gaze and rumbled a purr.  And then the vision melted, but I was left with the feeling that he was letting me know that he was happy and waiting.  “My Mom has had several Near Death Experiences over the past twenty-five years,” someone wrote me.  “And she saw for herself that animals, too, are as important to God as we are.  During Mom’s first NDE while she was reuniting with her own deceased mother, she felt something touching her hand.  She looked down and saw a dog nuzzling it.  She was simultaneously amazed and thrilled to learn that animals pass over to Heaven to same as us and are held in equally high regard in God’s eyes.  Mom almost didn’t recognize the dog because the last time she saw him on Earth, he was quite old and crippled from arthritis.  He was healthy and youthful looking in his heavenly body.  And he remembered Mom!  It felt as though they had never been separated even though so many Earth decades had gone by.  Your sweet Rex is very much alive and well in Heaven and will be pushing his way through the welcoming committee to greet you when it is your time.  He’s watching over you now!” 

        I wrapped Rex in a knitted blue pillow cover with his favorite catnip toy that he used to race after as a kitten.  I dug a hole and put him under a grapefruit tree in a corner of our yard.  

       After we buried Rex, I took Zachary and Benjamin to the park.  They enjoyed playing on the slides and swings and in the sand.

       In 2001, for my birthday, the family got Kitty, a fluffy-tailed tawny-colored Somali kitten.  And so our fur-children continue to enrich our lives.   

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