10th January 2025

‘And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name’ (Genesis 1:25). So does the man, Adam, know all about these animals? Pondering the Christmas letters received from friends far and wide, I read of an amazing variety of dealings with non-human animals: from bee-keeping in New Zealand, to training a hearing-aid dog in Durham, to tending a hyperactive tortoise in a garden near Cambridge. Why are pets and other animals we deal with so important to us? Yes, we have various uses for them: mousing cats, shepherding dogs, and so on, and of course there is the sense of companionship they provide, though this is variable: ‘Dogs have owners, cats have staff!’ Not sure what, if anything, tortoises think about us. Still less bees. Can we even begin to imagine what any animal, even a pet, actually  ‘thinks’ about us – or anything?

We may live in the same physical space but we inhabit very different thought-worlds, seen and experienced differently. Many of our preoccupations just don’t exist for them, whether our shopping bills, church meeting agendas or the FA Cup third round. That of course could be the whole point of living alongside animals, at home or in the wild, to teach us that our human experience of the world is not the only one. Even if we are in some kind of personal relationship with them, they are so different. No matter. Just by being who they are, they remind us that there is another world to the one we humans take for granted. As such they are gifts from God to us, for lessons in humility.

Keith Clements