I believe that if we taught children to love and protect animals, and if they kept that genuine and pure connection to animals as they grew, that love would not stop at the edge of another species. It would carry. It would transfer. A child who learns that the small and voiceless are worth protecting does not easily grow into an adult who looks away from corruption, or cruelty, or the slow violence we do to each other. An adult who sees themselves as having power with, not power over, animals and ecosystems, is an adult who will help their community to thrive.

The world we live in now, abundant with the killing of innocent people, indifference, and systems that grind whole lives down to nothing, does not happen in a world that values life at every level. It happens in a world that has practiced, from childhood, the art of deciding which lives count.

Loving and protecting animals is cause that, rather than detouring us from human suffering, brings us closer to it with more compassion. It is a practice that reminds us that all life is valuable and worth defending. Animals can teach us how to move away from eyes primed for judgement and hands inclined toward force, and they can move us into such gratitude and awe, that we are left instead with only fierce care, capability, and courage that pours out into the world around us.

This is why I do the work I do. This is why I am in Zimbabwe right now, meeting elephants and hyenas and a twenty-one-year-old pangolin, and telling you their stories. The more I continue to expand my love for the earth and all the creatures in it, the more that love spills over and reaches the human beings around me, too.

Protecting them is also, eventually, how we protect each other.

🐘

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But they aren’t a hypothetical version or a fantasy. They are a real, specific version of you; they’re merely standing on the other side of a choice you haven’t made yet, waiting for you to become them.

I think about this a lot. Especially right now, as I write this on the day I fly out to Zimbabwe, knowing that when you read this, that is exactly where I will be.

Today, I get on a plane. I don’t like flying. But if you’re reading this, then it means I got on the plane anyway, because the version of me who would exist after this trip needed me to.

Let me back up. In the Fall, I decided to step away from my Board role at the shelter where I was embedded and volunteering 3-4 days/week. In December, I decided to begin transitioning out of my clinical practice and go “all in” for Fortifyu by April 10, and I began working that plan.

From December until now, I began saying tearful goodbyes to clients. I stopped volunteering every week at the animal shelter. I dove deep into data analysis and writing and submitting articles about my research for peer-review publication. And I booked a trip to the other side of the world.

That’s what becoming looks like. It’s not a single dramatic moment. It’s the accumulation of choices to stay in the discomfort long enough for it to transform you.

I’ve learned that the human-animal bond is one of the most powerful catalysts for this kind of transformation. It doesn’t just make us feel connected to animals. It makes us more human. It breaks us open with depths of empathy we didn’t know we had. It shows us suffering we can’t un-see. And then it asks us what we’re going to do about it.

Every time we answer that question with action, with courage, and with our presence even when it’s hard, we become someone new. The someone we become is a person we couldn’t have planned for or predicted, but it’s someone the past version of us made possible by refusing to quit.

I’m in Zimbabwe right now because the past version of me refused to give up on animals. And I’m in Zimbabwe right now because there is a version of me on the other side of this trip needs me to be here. I don’t know her yet. But I trust her, because every version of me that came before made the choice to keep going.

The future you is real. They’re counting on you. On your willingness to lean into discomfort, to cross thresholds, to keep becoming even when you can’t see where it leads.

Especially in this work. Especially when the bond asks more of you than you thought you had to give.

The person who gets on the plane is never the person who comes home.

That’s not a loss. That’s the whole point.

Hear more about the topic of ‘becoming’ on the latest episode of my podcast This Too Is Rescue.

For years as a therapist, I held space for my clients’ beliefs and worldviews without ever sharing my own.

My favorite era of my work as a trauma therapist came when I shifted my entire caseload to a team of content moderators, the people who spend their days reviewing the worst of what the internet produces so the rest of us don’t have to see it. I’ve written elsewhere about what that experience taught me about the human-animal bond, and about how that would eventually lead me to veterinary social work. But there’s another thread from those years I haven’t written about yet. It’s another reason I cherish that time so deeply; it’s about how my clients exposed me to the myriad global beliefs that exist in our world, all of them brought into my office. Shared from the couch. Taken in from the therapist’s chair.

Before that, I had grown up Catholic, went through a long period of falling away from God, then a period of finding Him again. I had gone to seminary. I was strong in my faith. I had worked with clients of many backgrounds, but mostly with Christians.

Then suddenly I was working with pagans and witches and Muslims and Buddhists. With nihilists and refugees and hidden high-functioning addicts. With political activists, members and allies of the LGBTQIA+ community, and so much more. And I loved every second of it. My clients brought me content from cultures and contexts all over the globe both from their own lived experiences and from what they were viewing for work, much of which the public will never see. And in so many of our sessions we were discussing things that stood in direct opposition to what I believed, though most of my clients didn’t know that at the time. I held space when clients were angry. When they used offensive language. When they criticized or mocked the very things that made me who I am.

And they loved me. The person they knew me to be — they loved her, and were deeply grateful for her. None of that was inauthentic. I was authentic in everything I said. And when moments came where full authenticity would have meant harm to them or imposing my own beliefs onto them, I chose instead to be authentically silent. To hold them — not physically, of course, but emotionally and spiritually and genuinely — in that room and in my heart.

Because I loved them too. Genuinely and authentically. No matter how differently we saw the world. No matter what words they chose to describe a belief or a value I held dear, I held them.

And I’m not saying that was always easy. There were times it hurt to be called names because of identities I held that they disliked, or to feel judged and misunderstood. But they had also been hurt by those things and I didn’t love them because of any one of their particular views, and I couldn’t possibly hate them for any one of their particular views either. I loved them because of who they were, whole and complete, which included the fear, grief, or anger that came with their lived experiences, even the ones that stood against mine. I have long believed that underneath our differences, we are more alike and have more shared values and commonality, than anything else. It’s what allowed me to stay present with them and not take anything that was happening in that space too personally, so that I could stay close to them rather than losing them. I would sit, co-regulate, witness, and stay true, even if that was truth expressed in authentic silence.

Sometimes they would ask directly about my beliefs. If it was appropriate, if I was invited in, I would share. But that was rare, and when done, any personal disclosure always happened with the focus returning to them, and always with the understanding that the space was never about anyone believing what I believed.

But now my work is leaving the therapy room. Now my work is about having a voice for those who don’t. For animals as well as for people who work to save and care for them in so many hidden spaces and systems in our society. And I am not quite sure how to speak authentically.

How do you move from authentic silence to authentic voice?

I’ve been turning this over for a while. I am far from having all the answers, though my antenna is up and I am downloading all the information that I can about it.

I have ideas, and resources, and when I scan my memory, I also have stories and moments to pull from. Where voice worked, even in the presence of tension and disagreement. It doesn’t always go that way. It hasn’t always gone that way for me. But it can. I know that authentic voice can work even if disagreement remains. What I am not sure of yet, is how that authentic voice shows up in the space I am more fully entering. The animals don’t have a voice at this table, or anywhere in this conversation, and silence here is not the same as the silence I practiced before.

I’m not trying to hold authentic silence for them, because if I did, neither of us would be speaking, and everything that needs to be said would go unheard.

With clients it was me and them. They spoke, I listened and witnessed. With animals, I’m the one that needs to try to speak, to be listened to and witnessed as a stand-in for them. But there isn’t much therapeutic silence going on in our society. To speak — really speak, about what we do to animals — means being met with aggression, ridicule, and attack from people who often haven’t thought carefully about why the subject makes them so angry.

Because of this for years, I’ve tried to show up with what I know, with authentic silence, trying to hear from the opposition and holding it quietly when countless conversations have attacked the very things I believe in, but this time breaking my heart more deeply because it is not just my identity on the line, but their lives, the lives of so many innocent animals.

That tactic isn’t working in this new space. So I need to learn now, how to hold someone in that same place of safety, and trust, and rapport, and non-betrayal that my client felt but with strangers and with voice.

I am in control of how I speak my words. I cannot control how they are received. I don’t have it figured out yet, and would love to learn from others who have ideas.

What I’m learning so far is that authentic voice is not nearly as welcome as authentic silence.

But silence has to become voice when the living beings you’re holding space for are not the only ones in the room. We have moved from dyadic conversation to mediation. When there are two parties opposed, silence for either, however well-intentioned, leaves someone unheld.

So maybe the move from silence to voice isn’t really about learning to speak. Maybe it’s about learning a new way to take on suffering. A new willingness to be misunderstood and ridiculed and to receive blows. The same way I once held space for grief, or shame, or rage in the therapy room. Rage that was often aimed at me, at my identity, at my values. Rage that needed a place to land. So I let it.

In therapy, silence allowed the hurting soul to be heard and held; it was silence that carried the blows and the healing. In animal advocacy, voice is what will allow the hurting souls to be heard and held; it will be through my voice that I carry the blow and the healing, while still, somehow, not leaving the voiceless unheld.

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We chatted in the airport, on the jet bridge, over the seat back. Me: just a girl who loves animals, the people who work with them, and the people who truly see them. And them: an offshore oil driller. A couple going on safari. One of them part of a larger group of ten loud, burly men headed out to hunt. A couple from Alaska. A woman heading home.

All of them had an energy. And our conversations carried it, too.

The offshore driller showed me pictures of his German shepherds. He’d sent them away to a board-and-train to “learn their manners” likely using methods I would never choose, methods I would stand against. Perhaps in some way he loved those dogs. But my energy left the man in front of me and went somewhere far off, praying the dogs would feel my care where he couldn't give it. My energy drained even more quickly as I heard him talk about his travels, as my heart cracked quietly over what his work means for oceans and the animals in them.

The woman going on safari wore a yellow dress, her skin the color of the earth she was so clearly connected to. Life emanated from her. She was joyful. She loved animals. She was also, as far as I could tell, unaware of what it means for them to need protection. I alighted on her energy and innocence, wishing it were always true.

The group of ten were drinking before we boarded, big-voiced and cheerful, going after the very animals I am flying across the world to try to protect. On the plane, one of them lost his sunglasses, and we looked everywhere trying to help him find them. $50 shades felt irreplaceable to him, to wear as he prepared to point a gun at a life.

The woman from Alaska talked about the wilderness there, but also her local zoo and her past work with animals as part of a children’s educational program. My energy felt chaotic flipping from stories of repopulated species brought back from decline to stories of animals in small cages. It spasmed as she held deep love for and connection to these creatures, followed by her plans to book an elephant riding encounter.

The woman heading home sat next to me on the flight. She called the animals majestic. She told me stories of them as her kin. My energy, which had been drained and chaotic, finally settled beside her. She spoke of these creatures the way I think of them, as beings, as relatives, as sentient lives that our own lives are in conversation with. In her words, in that conversation, the cabin felt for a moment like a place where they were already protected. Like we were soaring above the kind of world I dream of, already fully formed in her.

And who am I, next to them?

Small in stature. Small in finances. Small in so many of the traits that seem to count when the work is this big. I am just a girl. Trying to be a protector on a plane.

I’m David standing against Goliath with found sunglasses on, and feeling resistant to breaking the innocence of girls in yellow dresses.

I don’t know what to do with all of this yet.

I only know that I sat with each of them, and listened, and all of them were more than one thing at once.

And I know, too, that we need more protectors on the plane.

I don’t care who you were before. What matters is what you do next.

That goes for the hunters. That goes for the driller. That goes for the woman in the yellow dress. That goes for me, the girl who is small in stature and finances and so many other measurable things, sitting on a plane headed toward animals she has never met, hoping her energy is enough when she lands.

Thousands of these planes circle the earth every day, carrying energy and stories and unfinished potential across the globe. The energy can feel chaotic. But perhaps it can shift. Perhaps it can align. Perhaps, as we traverse the earth, what we carry on these planes can become something that looks more like a hug. An embrace of energy as more protectors rise, move, and breathe life into this place that sustains us.

We need more protectors on the plane.

All of us are someone you could meet on a plane.

This week we’re talking about courage.

Which sounds inspiring; most good values do when we say them out loud. But whether we actually live a value or just admire it from a distance, well, those are two very different things.

We’ve talked before about aspirational versus core values, the ones we want to have versus the ones we actually live. Coura…

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That younger me was scared about beginning to volunteer in animal rescue. She told her friends, “I’m either going to hate it and at least I’ll have tried, or I’m going to love it…and I honestly have no idea what that will mean.”

Current me’s eyes well up just thinking about her. How proud I am that she was willing to lean in. Spoiler: loving this work won out. And it turned into something bigger than I could have imagined.

But it began with washing dishes.

A lot of dishes. And kongs. And dirty toys. And even dirtier laundry.

For months, that’s all I did. Washed dishes, prepped enrichment, left. I barely touched a dog. Staff didn’t talk to me much. The two other volunteers on my shift eventually stopped coming.

But younger me kept showing up. And somewhere in the monotony of scrubbing bowls and cutting up hot dogs, I began spending time with the animals. As those moments became longer, they also became deeper, and something shifted. I wasn’t just helping anymore. I was becoming someone who belonged to this work.

I had to get through the tedious first. But on the other side of it, I was met by the full force of the human-animal bond. And it transformed me.

That’s what the bond does when you let it in fully. It doesn’t just make you feel good. It rearranges you. It restructures your priorities, your relationships, your tolerance for looking away. You start noticing things you can’t un-notice.

This becomes a kind of seeing that makes your life harder, not easier. You become deeply aware of all that is broken in the human-animal bond. You begin to feel how severed we’ve become from our connection to the earth and to natural things.

And then you have to choose what you'll do with what you now know.

Because awareness is not enough. You can be fully conscious of suffering and do nothing about it. Intention is not enough either; you can mean well and never move. The bond doesn’t just ask you to see or to intend. It asks you to act. And acting when it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, or costly is where moral courage begins.

Once this bond has changed you, once you’ve held an animal through something terrible, or witnessed what happens behind doors most people don’t know exist, or given your soul to creatures the world considers disposable — you can’t just care quietly anymore. The bond asks something of you. It asks you to protect the thing that changed you, even when protecting it costs you comfort, relationships, or standing.

It asks you to find moral courage.

Right now, current me is heading out to experience the human-animal bond, and to protect it, in new ways. It’s requiring me to get on a plane (which I really don’t love), and it’s once again requiring me to make a choice to lean in. It won’t be washing dishes this time. It will be mucking out stalls of elephant dung and bottle-feeding rhinos and a lot more. But just like last time, I’ll either hate it (unlikely), or I’ll love it and I have no idea what that will mean.

I just need to believe that we all have the capacity for moral courage within us. So I’m choosing not just the physical courage to step on a plane, but the moral courage to act, to protect the things I love.

New episode of This Too Is Rescue dropped today. It’s about moral courage in animal care. Have a listen, and if it resonates, please subscribe and leave a review. [On Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts]

“But I wanna TOUCH it!” Mabel screamed.

Ashley rooted to the spot, hands clutched on Mabel’s shoulders. Mabel squirmed, a tiny swirl of chaotic motion kept in place by her mother’s grip. Her small arms reached for the grey body standing in front of them. The elephant stood, motionless, his head hung low.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Ashley’s mind raced, trying to reconcile the moment she was in with the moment she’d imagined.

For weeks, Ashley couldn’t stop talking about the adventure. She’d booked it the same day she spotted the travel guide at the grocery store checkout: an elephant sanctuary, just two hours from their quiet Florida suburb. What a chance of a lifetime to bathe and feed elephants! Mabel had jumped and danced when Ashley told her about the plans, though it was Ashley who pulled up elephant photos on her laptop every morning as she got ready for her day.

As a child, Ashley would perform ‘check-ups’ on a long line of stuffed animals in her bedroom and prescribe orange juice and chocolate to all of those in need of treatment.

Whenever asked, she’d answer the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with an unhesitating and emphatic “I’m going to be a vetamarian.” No one ever corrected her and her answer always earned giggles that caused Ashley to stand taller and puff out her chest.

Over the years, balancing budgets, managing oil changes and school schedules, and weekly meal planning had replaced authorizing confectionary medications for cotton-filled patients. These days, animals weren’t much a part of her life, except Abbott and Costello, her two pit mix rescues, whose backyard zoomies were the closest she came to anything wild.

Which is why she had snatched the travel guide from the grocery checkout, loaded her groceries into the car, and pulled out her credit card to book as she sat behind the wheel, making the plans a reality before her ice cream had a chance to even begin melting on the seat beside her. Then she set a daily alarm on her phone. Every morning 8 AM: ‘X days to Elephants!!!’

The countdown finally reached zero, and Ashley and Mabel arrived at the park for the Elephant Encounter Experience as the sun rose, casting bright golds and pinks across the sky. Mabel dozed in the back seat, her mouth open and hands gripping an elephant storybook she had insisted on bringing. A wide smile spread across Ashley’s face as she looked in the rearview mirror.

Inside they joined a group of six other experiencers (that’s what the brochure called them) and settled onto metal folding chairs in the bathing area as Kyle, a teenage guide with khaki shorts and enormous jazz-hands energy, welcomed them. As Kyle wrapped up his rehearsed instructions, a large garage door opened on the far wall. The handler led Cameron, the park’s sole Asian elephant, into view. The group erupted, ooh’s and ahh’s filling the warehouse as the elephant approached. An involuntary gasp escaped Ashley’s mouth, a discordant note against the group’s melody. The warmth in her chest curdled into something sour.

Around her, the newlywed couple on their honeymoon snuggled close and took selfies. A young boy bounced up and down, the whites of his eyes showing, as his grandma instructed him, “Now you be sure to wash him nice and clean!” A woman in a “Just a girl who loves animals” t-shirt covered her open mouth and leaned in closer, giggling. A guy in his twenties screamed into his raised phone, “Yo, guys! This is INSANE!! I’ll be filming this whole experience and back with more later. Make sure you like, follow, and share!”

None of them seemed to notice what Ashley couldn’t look away from.

The chains.

Heavy metal cuffs surrounded Cameron’s front legs, connected by heavy links between them. Matching restraints hung heavy from Cameron’s back legs, dull metal rusted and worn. The handler snapped the chains to bolts in the concrete floor.

“Alright Experiencers! Who’s ready for bath time?” said the guide clapping his hands.

The group shuffled eagerly toward Cameron, grabbing soapy brushes from the industrial-sized buckets, and began scrubbing, hands and bristles all over his skin.

Now, Ashley was jerking her daughter back as Mabel tried to make her own forward movement toward the animal.

“But I wanna TOUCH it!”

She heard Mabel’s protests, and felt her daughter straining toward Cameron, but Ashley’s stomach clenched and her legs locked. Her brain was trying to catch up to what her body was already telling her.

“The pictures online didn’t show this…” Ashley thought to herself as she watched the others crowd Cameron’s unmoving body.

“They all seem to think it’s fine.”

“The website said they are an accredited sanctuary.”

“Maybe they are for his safety…”

“Moooommmmmm! C’mon!” Mabel’s screams broke through Ashley’s looping thoughts.

“Hold on, sweetheart. Give mama a second okay,” Ashley replied trying to make sense of what was happening both inside and in front of her.

“Mom! We’re missing it!” Mabel turned to look at her mother, her eyes begging.

For a second, Ashley’s hand started to release its grip on her daughter’s shoulder. We’re already here. Just this once.

Then Cameron turned his head. Just slightly, but in their direction, and enough for Ashley’s eyes to meet his. There, within the wrinkles and thick grey skin, his brown eyes were small but loud.

Ashley’s throat closed. Invisible cuffs tightened around her lungs, catching her breath, making it impossible for the air to escape. Her vision moistened and blurred.

Looking from Mabel to Cameron’s pleading eyes, both were asking something of her, and she knew that to give to one would mean taking from the other.

Answering Cameron’s gaze, Ashley dropped to her knees and met Mabel’s eyes.

“Mabel, honey, mama’s made a mistake. I know you wanted to touch him, sweetheart. Mama did, too. But we’re not gonna do that anymore.”

Mabel’s face crumpled. “But I was gonna give him a bath.”

“I know, sweetheart. But he’s sad.”

Mabel paused, “Then can’t we hug him and make him feel better?”

“That’s such a sweet thing to want, honey. But that’s part of what’s making him sad. Remember? We don’t touch friends who don’t want to be touched, right? Even if they’re elephants.”

Ashley rose and turned toward the exit, taking Mabel’s hand. She felt the heat in her head and made her way toward the doorway, seizing the freedom she had to walk toward and through them. Were they all staring? She forced herself not to look back, convinced that the only eyes that mattered then were his.

Cameron’s.

They exited the doors, closing out the sounds of laughter behind them.

In the parking lot, Ashley pulled out her phone and typed “elephant encounter experience ethical“. The results appeared. No chains. No forced interactions. Striving for release back into the wild; when not possible, sanctuary resembling natural habitat. Non-interactive public experiences and education.

Every box unchecked.

She sat with her head in her hands.

“Mama? What are we gonna do now?”

Ashley looked in the rearview mirror at her daughter and then out the window at other cars pulling in. More families. More pictures. More Experiencers.

“You know what May-Bee Baby. We’re still gonna go see some animals, okay?” she said typing something into her phone and putting the car in drive.

“Do we get to touch them?”

“No. But we can watch them. Together.”

A short while later, they pulled into Mangrove Marsh Nature Preserve, which Ashley had found as they left the Elephant Experience parking lot. Twenty minutes away. Free admission. Open until sunset.

The woman behind the visitor’s center desk looked up from a field guide, it’s worn cover decorated with leaves and plants, and smiled down at Mabel. “We have some wonderful friends here for you, today!” She leaned forward on her elbows. “Just follow the path markers and keep your voices soft.” She lowered her voice. “You don’t want to startle them. They’ll show you amazing things if you’re patient.” She handed them a map of the park and directed them to the observation deck where they looked out over the marsh below before venturing out along the wooden boardwalks that meandered through the preserve.

Ashley breathed in crisp air that cooled her nostrils despite the Florida sun. Her chest loosened. The sounds of birds echoed overhead as Mabel’s sneakers squeaked on the wooden planks below, bouncing from side to side of the walkway. Ashley pulled out her phone and opened the birding app she’d downloaded on impulse. She held it up and text began to appear: Great Blue Heron. Snowy Egret. White Ibis.

“Hear that sound, May-Bee? It’s a White Ibis.” Ashley wrapped her arm around Mabel and cupped her hand besides Mabel’s ear, directing her attention.

Mabel tilted her head, listening to its nasal grunt. “He sounds grumpy,” she said and they both laughed a soft laughter that felt like exhaling.

They continued on, hand-in-hand, strolling along the wood planks through palm tree lined corridors and green canopies, Through marsh grasses and areas of arched mangrove roots.

Near the end of a trail, they found a weathered bench overlooking a wide pond. Turtles sunned themselves on a half-submerged log. Mabel climbed onto the bench and pressed close to Ashley’s side.

They sat in silence. Ashley’s arm draped around Mabel’s shoulders. Mabel’s small hand found her mother’s and held tight.

“Mama, look!” Mabel pointed out into the blue waters. “Flamingos!”

Ashley followed her daughter’s finger and spotted a group of birds wading in the shallows, their deep pink feathers bright against the blue water and green mangroves. Long white necks dipped and swayed as they swept their bills side to side through the water.

“How beautiful! Those aren’t flamingos, though, May-Bee. Why don’t you help me figure out what they are?” She pulled the preserve brochure from her purse and opened it as Mabel peered over.

“There!” Mabel’s finger landed on a photo showing the same pink-and-white birds.

“Roseate Spoonbill,” Ashley whispered.

“Rose ate spoon bill,” Mabel echoed.

“It’s Rose-ee-it...” Ashley began, then stopped herself. Close enough, she thought, embracing her daughter’s mispronunciation with the same warmth she’d once received for “vetamarian.”

“Rose Ate Spoon Bill!” Mabel giggled quietly, delighted by the silly name and the wondrous creatures before them. “I love them!”

They watched in hushed wonder as the birds swept their spoon-shaped bills through the water, heads down, completely absorbed in their work. One lifted its head, something wriggling in its bill, and swallowed. Another waded deeper, at ease in this place.

Mabel squeezed Ashley’s hand tighter.

Ashley looked down at their joined hands. At Mabel’s face, open with wonder. At the grasses and trees and animals that lived and rested here without anyone’s permission or interference.

“Mama?”

“Yeah, sweetheart.”

“I like it here.”

Ashley’s eyes moistened. “Me too, May-Bee Baby. Me too.”

This was everything. This was touching the wild.

They stayed until the midday sun was high overhead. On the walk back to the car, Mabel skipped ahead, then stopped to crouch beside a tiny green lizard sunning itself on the boardwalk planks.

“Don’t touch,” Ashley said gently.

“I know, Mama. I’m just looking.”

Mabel stepped back, then sprawled on her belly, tucking her hands beneath her chin on the sun-warmed planks. She watched the rise and fall of the lizard’s breath as they studied each other for a long moment. Then it scurried away into the palms, and Mabel stood, satisfied.

“I saw him,” she said simply.

“You did, baby. You really did.”

As they drove home from Mangrove Marsh, Mabel began to drift off to sleep again when suddenly her whispered voice broke through the quiet. “Mama, is Cameron gonna feel better soon?”

Ashley’s throat tightened. “I don’t know, honey. But you did so good, even when it was hard, to make sure we didn’t make him sadder. Mama is very proud of you.”

Back at home, Mabel raced into her room grabbing crayons and carefully selected pieces of construction paper, then flopped down at the kitchen table as Ashley let Abbott and Costello out the sliding door, and into the yard where they tore around the perimeter. Costello chasing Abbott full speed until Abbott spun on his haunches, reversing direction. Abbott chasing Costello. Ears were flying, tongues lolling, and they pawed and tackled one another in fits of pure ecstasy.

Ashley had watched this a thousand times. But this time, as Mabel colored intently beside her, and the dogs played just beyond, she really looked. Nobody made them do this. They were playing because they wanted to, stopping when they were done.

She thought of Cameron’s chains. Of the bolts holding him to concrete. Of the laughter and selfies and soapy brushes on skin that didn’t consent.

Then she looked back at Abbott and Costello, who had collapsed in the grass now, panting and content, and felt the difference in her bones.

Looking down at Mabel, and her drawing in front of her, Ashley saw the large grey circle in the midst of many pinks and blues and greens.

“What did you draw, May-Bee?”

“It’s Cameron! He can go to the park, too. Then he can take his bath with the rose spoons, Mama.”

Ashley enfolded her arms around her daughter’s shoulders and buried her face into Mabel’s hair, kissing the top of her head. “It’s beautiful, sweetheart.”

“I’m going to be a vetamarian.” The memory came rushing in to Ashley’s mind, and for the first time in years, she thought that maybe it wasn’t so far in the past as she had come to believe. That little girl who’d loved animals…she was still here. Inside of her, and in her daughter, too. A young girl who had taken what she had seen and was finding solutions, rendered in crayon and innocence.

Ashley kissed Mabel again and pulled out her phone. Her fingers hovered over the search bar. She looked at Mabel’s drawing. At Cameron free among the spoonbills and her daughter’s bent head, crayon still moving. She looked at Abbott and Costello collapsed in the grass.

She could still protect and save animals. She and Mabel could do it together. They could experience more days like this one: witnessing together, holding hands, touching the wild.

Her fingers touched the screen and she began typing.

I saw you, Cam, she thought. I really did.

I didn’t plan for animals to take over my life.

But they charged in, swept me up, and now they are everywhere.

No, I’m not a hoarder. And this wasn’t a hostile takeover.

Still, not a day goes by now that I am not surrounded. Dogs and cats, yes. But also, macaques and blue mini rex rabbits, whales and dolphins, owls and llamas. That was last year. This year, more are coming. Rhinos and elephants. Lions and giraffes. Others I can’t yet see, but know are there. From where I stand, in the middle of the herd, I know there are so many others moving about that I haven’t met yet. I hear them coming. I hear them calling.

Deeper into the pack I go.

The process of being consumed by the stampede was much quieter than you would expect. It was an almost imperceptible thing.

Where did it all begin?

It must have been the mouse. That was the beginning.

He showed up in a session with a client who shared about her time in research during her graduate program. She described her relationship with him like a lab technique, which I suppose it was. Many relationships end, but not all like this: grab his tail, wind up, downward strike. One complete motion. She had ended the relationship, but became a serial dater with his friends. Hundreds of relationships throughout the duration of the study, all ending the same way. Cervical dislocation by blunt force trauma. That’s what the protocol called it.

My breath held and my expression froze to maintain my “therapist face.” A forced intentional gesture, rather than an honest one. I did feel something, yes. But I was training to be professional and while flickers of wrongness were common in those days, they were feelings I kept concealed, even from myself. I was still numbing my own trauma back then, and those survival skills, unhealthy as they were, kept me alive, though the cost was living half-present. In a world where all I knew was unfair and brutal truths, whatever I felt inside wasn’t enough to break through. It was just an undetectable flinch in response to the taking of many small lives. Had a more healed version of me been in that room, I would have honored my client’s life, and the life of that mouse, more fully.

But the animals hadn’t spoken to me yet, or rather, I had never been listening.

The mouse was the beginning.

Fifteen years later I cry for him in a way I wasn’t capable of then. Fifteen years later and now, parts of me have been awakened I never thought possible, arousing experiences that feel transcendent. I’ve learned what I didn’t know, or more accurately, remembered what we have collectively forgotten. My nervous system evolved alongside other species, my mental health depends on sunlight and soil and the sounds of birds. On a cellular level, separation from the natural world is a kind of death. The early-career version of me was living that kind of death, present but not fully alive.

I know now the expansion we are capable of as human animals.

Perhaps, in some way that extends beyond our limited logic and reason, the mouse was the first, sent as recon. Scouting out where the animals would be safe to go. I wasn’t quite ready, but there was something in me that would end up being a space where they could come. The spirit of the mouse was wandering, trying to find where he, and those not yet sacrificed could migrate to safer lands. There was potential in me, and maybe the mouse sent the others to nurture it so that I could be where I am now. So that I could become part of the herd. Protecting them and being protected in return.

The mouse was the beginning.

The dog came next. My client described darkness and depravity with such clarity that I understood what those words really meant. What her husband forced her to. How he forced physical intimacy not only between them, but between her and her canine companion who also had no escape. The bruises and injuries visible on their bodies were nothing compared to what was inflicted on their souls. I’m not sure how I held it together until my client left my office, but as soon as I knew she was out of earshot, my body released. The pressure, intense and hot, exploded as my body fell to the ground and wept in convulsions unbefitting a professional. All the book knowledge in graduate school had not prepared me for the real lived experience of domestic violence and what a perpetrator forces their wife to do with and to animals in the home. It was only a first peek at the link between human and animal violence.

Behind the mouse and the dog, others followed. Slowly at first. The bunny that saved my suicidal client. The horse used in therapy. The cat living with her family in a car because they’d rather be homeless than be without her.

Then it came quickly.

A whole team of content moderators viewing animal abuse content for their jobs, and my job to support their mental health and well-being as they did it. Puppy mills. Factory farms. Crush videos. Exotic wildlife trafficking. Torture.

What had been quiet became rumbles. The stampede was closing in.

At first, the entire view looked like it would destroy me. Everything I saw was pain.

I was seeing through the lens our culture taught me. Disconnected. I was looking at them rather than with them, a view rooted in power over rather than linkage to. Just as our society intended. As the herd overtook me, the rhythm I had been hearing at a distance, made contact. Hooves on earth, breath meeting breath, the vibration of bodies in motion together. I was now in the middle of the pack, becoming one of them. The moment I stopped standing outside their suffering and started moving with it, everything transformed. From inside the herd, looking out through their eyes instead of at them, I could finally see.

What I see now is awe and wonder and joy.

Colors are more vivid. Movement happens with meaning. Noises have become song. Stories smell of kinship. And here where what I can touch extends beyond my hands, I can savor all that is sweet. Everything is more fully alive within the herd.

I had to travel through their pain to get inside.

I wasn’t getting trampled. I was being carried. Adopted into the great migration. I belong here. I am an animal, too.

The herd is now my home.

If you listen closely, you might hear the almost imperceptible rumble. We are the quiet stampede, and we are calling to you.