What Elephants And People Both Know
I am not really that sappy of a person. Sure I tear up at the sad parts of movies, but generally not while watching commercials. Unlike my husband, I didn’t cry during the movie Zoolander! (To him, it was really sad when Derek had nobody to turn to except Hansel for protection from Mugatu and Hansel confessed that Derek was the person he admired most and the reason he became a male model. My hubby is a sucker for male emotional epiphanies, but I digress.)
This morning I watched a video clip of a friendship that looks beyond color, size, and even species to bring two sweet souls together in the lonesome environment of a sanctuary for unwanted animals down on their luck. And I lost it. Well, lost it for me. Actually I just welled-up a bit but a rush of emotion hit me like a Mack truck and sent my mind racing.
The story is about two unlikely female companions, a dog named Bella and an elephant called Tara who are inseparable at the sanctuary where they both live. I won’t go into detail; you should check it out for yourself.
Many things touched me about the tale of Tara and Bella. Of course there is the usual sad story of the lives of animals being at the mercy of their human “caretakers”, well, humans in general since we are the mammals that run this planet. Animals are always at our mercy and are often victims of our whims, beliefs, selfishness, and greed. They are often discarded when they outlive their use. This bothers me. Why were Tara and Bella at a sanctuary in the first place? We know why and it is despicable.
On the other hand, my heart was warmed by the thought that two social species, used to living communally by design, found themselves drawn to each other in spite of their (very obvious and extreme) differences and had overcome the challenges that those differences would bring into the relationship. This odd-couple's need for companionship overrode their other natural inclinations in order to overcome the great sting of social isolation.
Living together probably allows each of them to complete their instinctive social behaviors, albeit a bit awkwardly. Perhaps this means that for social animals social structure is more important that some other natural behaviors, I don’t know. But it is touching nonetheless.
I started to think about elephants in general and how they live in large family groups lead by a single matriarch, and how poor Tara was doing her best, making lemonade out of lemons by trying to form a family with Bella.
Then I thought about how long elephants live. I don’t know how old Tara is, probably kind of old since she is retired from whatever human service she was doing. But Bella doesn’t really look like a spring chicken either and under the best of circumstances dogs don’t live as long as elephants. What if Tara has to suffer the permanent loss of Bella someday? One of them is bound to outlive the other. Dogs are relatively adaptable, but elephants, they say, never forget.
That thought process (all in a period of seconds) brought me to the concept of love and loss and how the two emotions are also strange but inseparable bedfellows. It is rare to have one without the other, but to live without love for fear of experiencing loss is the greatest tragedy of all.
Most dog-lovers already know this truth and bravely accept it. Dogs don’t live as long as humans, but still we pour our hearts into our friendships with them because the alternative of life-without-dog is unthinkable. Eventual loss is a small price to pay for the riches of life with a canine companion.
Perhaps Tara somehow knows it too.
