Why I Love Kim

Why I Love Kim

Kim and I are sitting here in our living room watching TV. That’s not an unusual evening for us, we pretty much do the same thing every night, and especially so in these days of Lockdown. Just now Rob Lowe was on the screen as a spokesperson for the ASPCA reviewing why, in this time of great need all over the world, we cannot forget about our animal friends and all the help they need to avoid the cruelty of some ill-intended humans. Stop and think about that. We are undergoing a massive pandemic the likes of which the world has not seen for over a century.

Back in those bad old days of 1918, the Spanish Flu cost the world 50-100 million lives. That was between 2.8% – 5.6% of the population of the world. The Black Plague took place in a time when record keeping was not a strength of the world, but it is estimated that 50 of the world’s 440 million people in the world died. That was over 11% of the population. World population is now about 7.8 billion and they say about half of those people, 3.9 billion are likely to get infected. They say that the mortality rate is 3.4%, but let’s just go with .5% on the assumption that we will get better at treating the virus with modern medicine and science. That would mean only 20 million people across the world would die. That pales by comparison to WWII (70 million) or WWI (40 million), but I think its fair to suggest that 20 million is a big deal in something that could be moderated by social distancing and getting locked down.

This Coronavirus pandemic only afflicts human beings. It does not infect dogs and cats or other animals. It comes from animals and in this case it either came from a bat or a pangolin or maybe, like SARS, from civets. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the Coronavirus is harmful to animals. So why is Rob Lowe punching us in the gut to help animals when humans are on the firing line? I think it is exactly that thinking combined with the fact that things will get back to normal sooner or later and with more or less human deaths and humans will have focused so much on themselves as a species (for good reason), that care for poor and beleaguered pets like neglected or abused dogs and cats will fall way down on the list of priorities.

I have always been a person who favored humans to pets. That sounds silly to say, but I feel I have always thought that giving charity needs to begin at home in terms of our species. Let’s take care of kids with cancer or starving people in Darfur and let the pets fend for themselves if we are talking about limited resources. By that logic, we should abandon all financial support of the arts until all diseases and poverty are cured. Why does that not sound right just like it doesn’t sound right to ignore caring for abused or neglected pets? I think the reason is that we as humans recognize that with 100% of our resources we cannot likely fix the world in terms of any and every thing that can do harm to humans. We can dedicate the lion’s share of resources to human suffering, but we also need to pay attention to the advancement of humanity in terms of the arts and our kindness to other species.

Kim is behind me right now crying about the ASPCA advertisement. She usually insists that I turn the TV off. Her sensibilities cannot take watching the suffering of poor animals. She loves animals. She loves anything that cannot take care of itself and needs help. She cares no less than anyone for the children with cancer or the starving people of Darfur. In fact, her empathy is such that she probably cares and cries more for those suffering kids and starving people than most people in the world. When I told her she shouldn’t go with me on a CARE board trip to West Africa, she chose to disagree. She headed right over to Benin with me. Benin is considered one of the ten poorest countries in the world. It makes Nigeria to the East and Togo to the West look like garden spots. But she did not flinch. Kim, the same person who cannot watch an ASPCA ad, can and did go into the villages of Benin with us and saw the difficult conditions that people there live in.

I spent my early life traipsing behind a mother who worked in international development in some of the poorer parts of the world. This awareness of suffering has made me a more empathetic and liberal-minded person even though I chose not to work in international development (even though I studied to do just that). But Kim grew up in lovely and bucolic Wabash Indiana. Her dreams of youth were to go to New York to sing and dance (which she did for thirty years in one form or another). But Kim is FAR more empathetic than I am, despite the absence of this being a natural part of what she saw her family around her doing. That’s not to say they were unkind people, I’m sure the opposite was true. But they were mostly farmers. An aunt was a chicken farmer. An uncle was a pig farmer. They were undoubtedly farm-strong and very pragmatic people who didn’t worry about how little chicks or piglets were being treated with kindness. But that’s not Kim.

Somewhere, somehow, Kim got an overdose of empathy and an extraordinary dose of that towards animals. I have known many people in my life and many who were pet people. But I have never met a person who cares more at an animal-by-animal level for these simple creatures that, as Rob Lowe reminds us, cannot stand up for themselves. This requires a boundless capacity for love.

That, my friends, is why I love Kim so very much. She will lie on the floor and talk to Cecil about how he cannot lick his recent knee surgery wound or she will have to put the circus cone around his neck. She will hand feed him his medication. She will give him a treat when he can barely see it well enough to pick it up. If he is tired in the living room, she will carry him to his bed in the bedroom. If he needs to be carried to his bed in the kitchen in the morning, she will do that too.

Very few things in life are limitless, but I know that Kim’s capacity for love of all living things knows no bounds. That’s hard not to love in a life partner.