Animal Afterlife

I once stood at the top of our stairway, ready to descend, when our female Siamese cat scurried past me. She was in a hurry, but what floored me was the very clear message I got from her as she ran. It was:

"I've stolen the chicken from the kitchen counter and I'm going under your bed to eat it."

I was stunned for two reasons: one, Chibi Chan was a small cat and it would be an enormous feat for her to drag a whole fryer up the stairs and under my bed; two, I'd never gotten a telepathic message from a cat before.

I knew my mother had left two chickens on the kitchen counter, in a pan, to defrost for dinner. I followed Chibi to my room, looked under the bed, and there was the raw chicken (still mostly in its plastic bag, thank god!). Chibi growled at me as I dragged the carcass away.

"If you didn't want me to know, you shouldn't have told me," was my response.

There wasn't any logical reason why I'd suspect Chibi of chicken stealing. We left chickens to thaw on the counter all the time, and the cats had never bothered them. They weren't even counter jumpers like some opportunistic cats I've known. So, even though I knew the chickens were out, there was no reason for me to link that fact to Chibi's crime. She told me herself, loud and clear.

I consider myself a pretty good judge of animal behavior, at least in the species I typically encounter. I've had cats and dogs my entire life, and the usual fish, guinea pigs, turtles that kids go through. As a child, I searched out bird nests in the spring and watched them grow into adults; I've owned a parrot and raised canaries. When I was 11, I saved up my allowance for raw peanuts to feed the local squirrels (who ate from my hands), and I'm still putting out food to help wildlife get by in Wisconsin's frigid winters.

In my experience, messages from animals are usually more ephemeral and emotional; they're coupled with body language that makes them easier to decipher. "Love you." "I'm hungry." "I'm afraid and may bite." "Come play with me, I'm bored." "That feels good, do it some more." Chibi's message was an anomaly I've never experienced again. I don't know why.

That was a pretty unusual house we were living in when it happened. It was also the height of my exploration into the paranormal with my mother, living in Virginia Beach, surrounded by a cadre of New Age friends and within striking distance of Edgar Cayce's A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment, which continues today). Were these factors? Was it because I was sensitized to the paranormal, living with the hairs on my neck half-raised most of the time, listening and watching and wondering?

Animal spirits showed up in my mother's readings all the time. She'd describe a cat sitting on someone's lap or a favorite mule or a happy dog. Were these truly the spirits of the animals she perceived—or where they translations of memories from the human she was counseling? She'd see our own pets after they died, greeting other pets, running through meadows, playing. (FYI, none of us had ever read The Rainbow Bridge, that anonymously-written viral poem about happy pets living in an animal heaven, waiting to be reunited with their owners.)

The Bible tells us that we have dominion over the earth and all its creatures. We've taken that as license to destroy anything that stands in the way of our material desires. For centuries, Mankind's mainstream attitude toward animals has been that we are superior to them even after death. That we are the only beings with an afterlife of any kind.

Since I loved animals, I was distressed by this attitude and eventually discarded it as heresy. When I was young, it was because I believed animals had as much right to heaven, or whatever afterlife there was, as we did. When I grew older, it was because I believe that life and death are biological processes shared by every creature on this planet. We die, they die. We'd love to believe that we deserve a place to go afterwards, but if we do, so do they.

"Experts" tell us that the difference is our self-awareness of Mortality. We know we're going to die and animals don't. I wonder if you took a child and raised it without ever mentioning that she was mortal and bound to die, if she never saw roadkill or squashed a bug, if she lived a life isolated from death...would she have any more consciousness of Mortality than a dog? Or is it really an innate knowing woven into our brains? How do we know for sure that animals don't perceive their own mortality? Because they live in the Now? Because they can't write poetry about it? Animals in the wild encounter death all the time. Maybe they just shrug their shoulders, say they can't do anything about the inevitable, and get on with living. Maybe they're the smart ones and we humans need to stop struggling against the inevitable.

In another post, I mention the way I sometimes feel an animal leap onto my bed at night. I search the bed or flick on the light but there's no one there (I have cats, so I expect it to be one of them). My explanation is that it's Baldrick or Ollie, my two best-loved cats, who have passed on. But who knows?

I've sensed people around me after their deaths. I've done the same for my pets. My mom saw animals in her readings and was convinced they "go on." I hope they do, I really hope they do. And not just pets but every creature. They deserve the best possible afterlife, given the shitty lives we've imposed on many of them. Except maybe mosquitoes and fleas and ticks, though I can at least make a case for mosquitoes as a food source for birds and bats. Fleas and ticks, however....

An afterlife where animals exist, where all life exists...what would that look like? Some people believe we will all be these energies, maybe all the same energy, melding like drops of water into the greater Ocean of Being. All one. Some people believe we continue to learn and grow and evolve even as spirits until we reach Perfection, before joining into One. For some, that includes reincarnation back to the physical plane (Earth or elsewhere) to "get it right."

I do know that I've had a pet or two in my time that was so incredibly similar to an earlier pet, I would have sworn it was the same one reincarnated! Something beyond species familiarity.

Well, who knows what's to come? Not me. But there better be animals there.