The appropriately-named ARF (Animal Rescue Foundation) dates its existence to the day a cat got onto a baseball field just as a major league baseball game was being played. The cat was captured and randomly handed over to Coach Tony La Russa. That opened his eyes to the plight of homeless animals and the result is ARF, located in  Walnut Creek, California (about an hour east of San Francisco). ARF rescues cats and dogs from county shelters and finds homes for them. Sound easy? You should see the place – it’s the Lexus of animal help. The cats and dogs live in small rooms furnished with toys, furniture, brushes, and more. People are carefully matched with the animal whose personality fits the humans’ lifestyle. Many happy adoptions have occurred, and animals saved from death.

Because ARF doesn’t know the history of most of the animals, they assume they might have been feral (wild) or abused – who knows what? So volunteers are asked to visit the animals. After a little training in technique (I passed my cat-patting test with my first A+ since high school), the “socializers” enter each little room, sit down, and offer simple human kindness — brushing, playing, talking. Shy animals are left alone, but we’re allowed to stay in the room with them just to show we’re harmless. What to do while looking harmless….. Someone came up with the idea of the bedtime story, so now there are books in each room. The socializer can simply pick up a book and read aloud in a soothing tone. Now here’s the fun part: Each socializer/reader is asked to mark where he or she left off, so the next visiting socializer can start at that place. I know, I couldn’t believe that either.

Your community has homeless animals and shelters needing volunteers. Try it!

To preserve the glorious diversity of life on earth, humans will have to change almost everything we do – what we eat, what we drive, how many children we have, where we travel – everything. Fortunately, there’s an amazing outpouring of creativity from people all around the world. Here are a few ideas I’d like to see catch on:

            The green goodbye. Traditional embalming and burial are shockingly destructive. Powerful chemicals embalm the body, hundreds of pounds of wood, fabric, metal, and cement enclose it, and herbicides and pesticides are dumped all over the grassy cemetery. Here are some statistics I got from wikipedia.

Each year, 22,500 cemeteries across the  United States bury approximately:

30 million board feet of hardwood (caskets)

90,272 tons of steel (caskets)

14,000 tons of steel (vaults)

  2,700 tons of copper and bronze (caskets)

1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete (vaults)

827,060 gallons of embalming fluid ( commonly includes formaldehyde) .

(Compiled from statistics by Casket and Funeral Association of America,                        Cremation Association of North America, Doric Inc., The Rainforest Action Network,               and Mary Woodsen,  Pre-Posthumous Society)

 How many hundreds of years will it take for land full of chemical-drenched bodies buried in caskets surrounded by cement containers to be restored? That’s anti-recycling with a vengeance! Cremation requires enormous amounts of energy to burn the remains. I don’t really want the last chapter of my body to contribute to killing the earth – do you? Happily, solutions are available.  There are actually green cemeteries. Even better is the no-funeral-at-all option. I plan to donate my body to a medical school or research facility – no chemical or fossil fuel abuse at all! There’s also Body Worlds, the traveling exhibit of real human bodies that have been dissected and displayed in astounding educational ways. Some people find the idea of this exhibit upsetting, but I’ve seen it and, like most visitors, come away with renewed admiration and respect for our magic biological bodies.

            You can also donate your organs, saving the lives or eyesight of numerous other people. Hmmmm, how can we make this help the earth? Answer: by donating organs with strings attached. It would work like this: you sign an organ donation card and tell the agency that serves as the intermediary that your organs may ONLY be given to someone who does one of the following:

            * Gives $10,000 to an environmental charity.

            * Gets a dozen friends together to collectively donate 500 hours to help the

                        earth or animals. There are plenty of organizations needing volunteers!

            * Makes some other creative contribution in exchange for the gift of life.

I wish someone (you?) would set up a foundation that did this. I’ll sign up right away.

            Ok, so these two could be seen as a bit gloomy. Other options are cheerier. You could teach your cat to use the toilet, saving hundreds of pounds of cat litter over its lifetime. Do this ONLY if your cat never goes outside – free-roaming animals can pick up toxoplasmosis from rodents they come into contact with. The oocysts (eggs) of this bacterium, once flushed down the toilet, can survive water treatment procedures. When the waste water reaches the oceans, otters can pick them up through the food chain. Why does this matter? Toxoplasmosis is deadly to sea otters. For the same reason, DON ’T flush cat litter down the toilet if your cat goes outside. 

            Like a lot of things, doing the right thing for the earth and for animals requires thinking through some complicated causal chains and weighing the tradeoffs.

            What can you think of to help the earth that hasn’t been invented yet?

Lindsay Wildlife Museum (Walnut Creek, California) is a five-minute drive from my home. Every year, thousands of injured or orphaned birds, raccoons, possums, deer, and even snakes are brought in by caring citizens. I volunteer in the wildlife hospital there three hours a week, doing mostly unglamorous tasks: cleaning cages, doing laundry, cutting up fruit. Occasionally I get to do more interesting things, such as holding a bird that is having blood drawn for a diagnostic test. The animals are treated and most of them are eventually released back into nature.

Taking care of mice. The mice are being raised as food for the raptors (mostly hawks) that we are rescuing. There’s no way to rescue carnivorous animals without giving them flesh to eat. One has to choose. So though I’m a vegetarian, I take part in a tiny meat industry, raising and feeding generations of little white mice. Once a day, mouse enclosures have to be cleaned out, supplied with new sawdust, and provided with fresh food and water.

Baby mice are called “pinkies” because they are pink and miniscule when first born, about half the size of your smallest finger. Their limbs are almost invisible. Their skin is almost transparent; after they’ve had their milk, you can see the brilliant white blob inside their stomachs. Today I noticed that you can also see through the skin on the tops of their heads – the skull bones are not fused and the fissures are plainly visible, like teensy pink boundary lines on a map.

By the time they are toddlers, mice have grown a fine coating of fur, and before long they’re as white as their parents and the other mice in their enclosures. I haven’t found out yet – do some adult mice forego parenthood in order to help the pack reproduce? This is what some canids and felids do in the wild. It baffled sociobiologists for a while, for it seemed to fly in the face of their “selfish gene” theory. Pregnant mice, in the later stages, seem to be as wide as they are long. No wonder – they’re carrying as many as a dozen babies inside.

We handle the mice to clean their cages. There’s something very endearing about the tiny feet clinging to one’s gloved hand, the white whiskers. I don’t participate in killing the mice. A painless dose of carbon dioxide knocks them out. Sadly, a few are chosen to be the prey that the young raptors (birds of prey) must practice killing before they can be released. This is one thing that churns my stomach about nature: though animals aren’t recreationally aggressive like humans, there is killing involved in feeding. The living feed on other living things, and predator mothers must teach their young how to kill in order to live. A cheetah will bring home a living warthog baby, for instance, and let her cubs chase it. I feel so sorry for the little creature that keeps trying to escape, and almost making it, and suffering in fear for so long before it is dispatched.

Birds. LWM receives thousands of birds every year. In the spring, the bird room is loud with the racket of chickadees, cedar waxwings, house finches, doves, and robins chirping and flapping. In mid-summer the bird room was fully occupied. Every cage, three shelves high, was tenanted by one or more birds, some of them tiny babies. We are kept busy feeding every bird with mash which we poked into their mouths from plastic syringes. Some birds flee from our hands as we reached into the cages to deliver the goods, but a few cocky ones get right in line for their lunch. Rarely one sits on your hand or the syringe itself. Reaching into the cage is usually easy, since a small flap of mesh hangs over the door. When one does manage to escape, the procedure is to call, “Bird out!” and turn out the lights. There are nets on handles to catch them. The bird room is small, so this is not usually difficult.

One day a bird escaped and fluttered about near the ceiling. The tallest of the volunteers simply reached up and with one hand caught the bird right out of the air. I was astounded; it was as if the laws of nature had been repealed. Pulling a bird out of the air! The following week another bird escaped and flew up to the ceiling, and the second tallest person in the room… reached up and caught it. Darn, I thought. I’ll never be able to do that. I’m too short. The week after that, I was standing on a stepstool to feed the youngest birds on the highest shelf of cages when, surprise, a bird escaped. I was ready… reached out… and caught it.

A wildlife hospital kitchen. In one refrigerator, there is meat for the rescues (our temporary guests) and for the “animal ambassadors” upstairs that are unreleasable (and therefore permanent residents). Imagine opening a fridge door and finding a vat full of dead rats, complete with tails. Or would you prefer half-rats? Moistened mashed dog food. Half carcasses of birds. Plastic packages with dozens of mice. The other fridge looks more familiar, with piles of fresh fruits and vegetables and cans of infant milk substitute. In the adjacent room are large vats on wheels, labeled “dove seed” “rodent block” and “crickets.” On the counter sit two bins full of sawdust in which mealworms crawl around.

The walk-in freezer scares me. I’ve heard of too many tales of people locked inside dungeon-like industrial facilities. Even the reassurance that there’s a knob inside doesn’t eliminate the fear of being caught up in a Hitchcock-like terror scene.

Speaking of volunteering, where are all the men when it’s time to save the earth? I have never been to an environmental or animal event where women didn’t outnumber men by about six to one. What do men do all night and weekend, when women are volunteering, organizing, doing local politics, educating their communities, saving animals, and making the world a better place? Ok, playing basketball with the boys is healthy exercise and anything that burns off the male hormones is good, but what about the rest of their non-work time? …………. I’m waiting for an answer.

One night I learned how to handle raptors (kestrels, owls, hawks). The hospital hopes to keep handling to a minimum since it’s stressful for the birds, but at admission they have to be weighed, given medical treatment, banded, and then put into a cage. Depending on how injured they are and how long their stay, they may also have to be brought out for more treatment or blood draws, and eventually (happy day) they are transferred to a portable carrier, taken to a release site, and let go. So along with twenty other volunteers, I watched a demonstration on how to catch, hold, and transfer the bird. Then the whole class got to practice. Fortunately, some sweet tame chickens were on hand. We put on heavy leather gloves, ascertained the position of the chicken in the carrier, opened the carrier while making sure the chicken could not escape, reached in and gently but firmly pinned the bird to the floor of the carrier, reached underneath to grasp the feet, and triumphantly lifted our prize. The primary skill, I think, is balancing caution and confidence (true in most areas of life).

Not having seen live chickens at the hospital in the year I’ve been volunteering, I asked whether these had been brought in for our edification. Yes, but…. they were also intended as food for the unreleasable mountain lion that lives upstairs. I looked sadly at these patient birds, who had let us clumsy beginners take them in and out of the carriers repeatedly for half an hour. Of course there’s no life without death, no carnivore without prey, no beautiful big cat without its food, but it’s still hard to know this feathered creature I’ve held is condemned to die in a few minutes. Quickly and painlessly, but still…. The Buddhist philosophy of acceptance and detachment (not the same as indifference) is admirable and profound, but I find it hard to remember when an animal dies.

Well, I’m an author with many half-gestated projects in my computer, not to mention embryos in my notebooks, ova scribbled in the margins of other people’s books…. you get the idea. The problem is that I keep getting new ideas before I can finish the old ones. New ideas are seductive because you haven’t hit the hard part yet. I used to think of the neglected half-written projects as moribund or dead, but one day I read about the kangaroo trick, whose scientific name is embryonic diapause.

[Since we're referring to a pause in the action, not a cessation or death, this word makes more sense than the similar word "menopause." That symptom-rich doorway to liberation should be called "menostop."]

I also started this blog. Some of the best entries come from the “previously dead” files. What a joy to resurrect them! It was like hunting for Easter eggs in my hard drive.

Here’s an even more amazing feat: Let’s say Mom Kangaroo finishes building her baby (the internal phase, that is). It moves to her pouch and begins nursing. If some time later a second kangaroo baby is born while the first is still nursing, the mother kangaroo can simultaneously produce two different formulas of milk, one to suit the needs of each offspring.

Now that’s what I call multi-tasking.

The writer in me rejoiced. There’s a precedent in nature. My staccato writing process is not a sign of failure, but DIAPAUSE! Like a good kangaroo (or armadillo, or badger, or roe deer*), I can time the births — pet my outlines, wrestle with almost-finished chapters, set one idea aside so I can pay attention to a newer one — knowing that all of them are alive and there’s enough time for them all!

* Believe it or not, about a hundred other mammal species can do the same thing–and some people have the nerve to call them “dumb animals”! If genetic engineering were up to me, we’d insert some Diapause DNA in our own genes.

There are even types of diapause. My favorite is obligate diapause (obligate means they have to do it). That’s the trick I’ve been describing – the creature can wait (or shop, if you prefer) for favorable environmental conditions. So when I’m dawdling and my husband wonders if I’m producing anything, I can always moan, “Geez! I’m having obligate diapause!”

If you have some half-developed projects partway down the authorial fallopian tube, halted in mid-gestation, welcome to the world of cosmickangaroo!