Kindred Spirits — Anne Benvenuti

My new book Kindred Spirits: One Animal Family will be released on June 1. I conceived it five years and one month ago while walking northern England’s Coast to Coast path.

I had been trudging along on painful feet, through downpours that soaked through my technical rain jacket and kept me from being able to pull out a map, much less a phone or a GPS device, serious deficits on a path known for its challenges to orienteers. I stumbled along, rarely certain of where I was and feeling obligated to think about the book that I thought I should be preparing to write. Imagine my surprise when I finally stopped for a much needed rest at Kirkby Stephen and was immediately greeted by the town mascots, bright yellow, blue, and red macaws, while I drank my tea in a garden. The macaws, it turned out, were on their daily forage into town from the Eden Valley Center for Parrot Conservation, to whose open aviaries they return each night. First the birds caught my attention and without trying too hard, because of their unexpected tropical colors and also their cheerfully raucous behavior. Then I learned the inspiring story of John Strutt, one more beautiful human who had learned over the course of his life to love birds, to love all of nature, who had transitioned from hunter of animals to dedicated rescue and conservation worker. I had seen these same qualities in others who worked on behalf of nonhuman animals. Right then and there, I knew what book I needed to write, and it wasn’t the one I had had in mind. I needed to write about meeting humans who work to rescue and to care for other kinds of animals, and about meeting the rescued, conserved, and sanctuaried animals themselves.

A macaw alighting on a rooftop in Kirkby Stephen.

I got the book proposal to my agent, and I set off on fieldwork that would take me to the Baja lagoons on a repeat visit to the Pacific gray whales, to Camp Jabulani in the African bush to visit the elephants and cheetahs and rhinos and to talk with people involved in rescuing members of endangered species in Africa, to the suburbs of Chicago to meet feral cats and their people, to the wilds of western Yellowstone for a visit to the Earthfire Institute, and more. I felt unbelievably lucky, traveling around and meeting people and animals who were and are kindred spirits to me. The final chapter fell into place some time after I had moved to Italy, the summer after Kirkby Stephen. . . and after several twists and turns of life that deepened my awareness of the animal world. Bees, after all, are animals too.

In June 2017, I moved with my partner to a small—and at that time, long and thoroughly overgrown—organic farm in southern Italy. We wanted to walk our talk, to live closer to our lives, to grow food, to feel the dirt and the sun in equal measures. And indeed, we now live on a recovered farm that we manage with a 1965 Fiat tractor, both more and less romantic than it might sound. We live in a beautifully refurbished farmhouse with a new solar energy system, a small menagerie of rescued dogs and cats, and several very lively beehives. We renew the soil with strategic crops, we plant seeds in the greenhouse and later in the earth, we harvest our food from trees and vines and gardens that we have designed, planted, and tended. I have come to appreciate how much of the magic is in the plants themselves, even the weeds that are the bees’ flowery delight, and not in anything I do to them or for them.

We also harvest and process food all summer so that we can open jars of salsas, soups, fruits, and jams in the winter. We eat cherries and strawberries, artichokes and lettuces when they are in season, and not when they are not in season. We grow grapes, crush them, age them, and drink the surprisingly good wine. We shake olives from the trees, press them, and have brilliant green and spicy Puglian olive oil for the entire year, for our skin, for cooking, even for cleaning machinery.

And yet. . . yesterday I felt despair when I watched the frogs and lizards desperate to get out of the way of my tractor. And I felt despair as I cut down the fields of wildflowers that are making the bees so happy. But I had to cut, or risk being fined for fire and insect hazards. And over recent weeks, I’ve been doing the spring ritual of the beekeeper, every few days going out to open the hives to destroy the new queen cells that the bees make in preparation for a swarm, their annual holiday to go make new families elsewhere. They don’t appreciate this intrusive intervention and they sting readily to communicate that fact, given the chance. Who can blame them? I am forcing them to live out my agenda, not their own: I don’t want them to swarm but to stay and to store their honey in the box above their eggs and brood, so that they can “share” their honey with me. For my part, I feed them through the winter and treat them for their greatest health threats, ridding them of varroa mites and the providing them with rare pesticide-free flowers.

But I have come to see that at the bottom of my “back to the land” romantic well is the stubborn fact that we, us humans, we are interventionists through and through, and my farming satisfactions go only so far because they lead to a place further back down the line where we started to intervene, to dominate, to change everything for everyone. . . and by “everyone” I mean all the plants and animals and insects, the soils and rocks, the wind and rain, the courses of waters, the seasons of sun and moon. Human culture is old where I now live, five to ten thousand years old in nearby places, as evidenced by the almost complete lack of wild animals here, where humans have been for so long. We are intervenors who tend to take up all the space and use up all the “resources,” depriving others of their very existences and making ourselves dominant and lonely. We simply must become wise intervenors, or have nothing and no one left to play with.

To my dismay, I think that my farming dream is not much more pure or innocent than any life I have lived before it, though I live closer to my life now. Certainly there’s a stronger relationship between the food in my belly and my waking up and working each day, and this is immensely satisfying. My old life seems very strange, as in estranged. I always knew I should not be defined as a “consumer,” but did not realize how much that label fit, as it must in America. I can’t imagine any longer going to my favorite markets to buy food that is cut and washed and served up in plastic bags. I consume much less overall. Having initially been shocked by the reduction of choices in a dramatically new and often intensely challenging cultural context, I then crossed into a state of shock in seeing how thoroughly American culture is defined by consumption. I’ve learned to live in a culture that is defined by relationships. Overall I have to say that I would choose the world of relationships and intrinsically valuable things over the endless and destructive hamster wheel of production and consumption.

I finished writing Kindred Spirits just before the arrival of the pandemic that changed everything, the Covid-19 pandemic that swept away life as we knew it. That life, I think, is probably irretrievably gone, partly because we don’t want it back. The pandemic itself is the cry of other animals, those traded and sold in wet markets and in black markets, and those sold by the billions as meat in modern supermarkets and restaurants. We have been willing to accept that our markets cause them suffering. We have been willing to look the other way because we want what we want, because our appetites are what they are. Could it be that we might be less willing now to tolerate the circumstances that create pandemics that wipe out human populations, much less kill members of our own families, that could kill us? Can this stark reality of suffering and death that is upon us now, and not just upon the other animals, can this new reality limit our appetites for freedom to do whatever we please to satisfy our whims? It seems fundamental to me that we urgently need to wake up to the connection between our appetites and their effects on the rest of the world.

So even though my own life and the context of my life, the world of human culture and politics, have changed dramatically from the time when I conceived Kindred Spirits, the questions about human interactions with other kinds of animals are more central than ever. During the pandemic, people brought pets home, not to eat or to sell, not to use for clothes or shoes, but so that the pets might cuddle and snuggle them, keep their minds calm, their hearts open, their hopes alive.

I’ve found myself reflecting that it’s time to respect the simple fact that “the world” is not our property, but a huge community in which we either thrive or perish. It’s time to acknowledge the others as the necessary partners of life writ large that they are. Perhaps the easiest approach to this perception of life as a grand eco-community is to draw close to other animals, to let them teach us, even as they offer us comfort and belonging. It’s time to exploit less, to understand more, to intervene more wisely, to simply accept the love, acceptance, and belonging that so many other kinds of animals continue to offer us. Above all, it’s time to consume less, and to draw closer to the many particular lives that together create the one big life. For me, that means absorbing one of the primary lessons of Italian culture, that so much of the value of life is in the relationships themselves. This being centered in relationship is also less romantic than it might seem because it implies the reality of constantly navigating a complex weave of loyalties. And yet, like dirt in the hands, sun on the skin, real food in the belly, it is a way to live closer to reality.