to how judgment causes pain. During this time, my stomach hurt when I worried about my patients. My lower back ached as I anxiously raced to make appointments and get to emergencies quickly. I suffered in empathy for my clients and their animals as I wrote sympathy cards, agonizing over each death. Eventually, my mental, physical, and emotional health improved because of what I learned and share in this book.
The physical strain of ambulatory equine practice — floating horse’s teeth, carving out sole abscesses, and castrating unruly two-year-old colts — took a toll on my body. Exhaustion followed long hours. I often came home late from an emergency too tired to cook. Dinner consisted of a glass of sauvignon blanc and dark chocolate. My dreams were shattered by images of steaming bowls of pus and memories of desperate, dying eyes looking up at me. A recurring nightmare plagued me in which my truck would not stop. My foot pressed the brake to the floor and the truck kept on rolling, always in different scenes, through intersections or down steep muddy roads with sharp turns. I was always unable to stop it.
Some puritanical work ethic drove me; I whipped myself like a self-flagellating penitent. I related to Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran religion, whose life was discussed on audiotapes I played in my truck. The young Luther thought we had to work hard and suffer because we are evil, worthless sinners unworthy of forgiveness. My Lutheran upbringing and German heritage encouraged hard work. The fact that I was doing what used to be a man’s job also put added pressure on me to perform and prove my value.
In January 1995, I visited a psychologist, who told me she could not help me; she said I had to change my life. This was easy for her to say but hard for me to accomplish. I was heavily invested in my job. I loved veterinary medicine — I still do — and I was good at equine ambulatory work. I had no idea how to change. She suggested I take days off, but this was no help. When I did, several people became furious with me when I was unavailable for their emergencies. One woman hated me because I took a day off and her horse died. Another veterinarian attended that emergency, but in her mind, I was to blame.
That kind of judgment hurt, but my self-judgment was even more painful. This was emotional pain. On the outside, I looked like a strong, fit, confident, capable woman. On the inside, I ached. The irony was that I had begged for this job. I had wanted to be a veterinarian more than anything else in the world.
Other colleagues seemed to be struggling as well. One of my veterinary school classmates and friends killed herself by drinking euthanasia solution in her Diet Pepsi. Another died when he rolled his truck on a late-night emergency call. In the neighboring county, a horse doctor committed suicide by shooting himself.
A turning point came for me about ten years later, at the funeral of a veterinary friend who died of cancer in a nearby town. She and I had planned to work together so we could have more time off. At the funeral, her two young children cried, while one person after another stood to tell stories about how this woman had come out at midnight, or on Christmas Eve, or 10 PM on the fourth of July, or 5 AM on a Sunday morning with her children sleeping in the truck. My friend lived with the stress that a large-animal veterinarian works under day and night. She used all her energy to help other people and their animals, but this meant she didn’t have enough left to stay healthy herself. It hit me like a bullet. I was doing the same thing, killing myself by working nonstop. The challenge was to find a way to change.
My animals helped me find relief. At night when I tossed in bed, my cat would come nuzzle my cheek and snuggle into my armpit. Her nonjudgmental nature touched my soul and gave me peace. One of the most beautiful characteristics of animals is their nonjudgmental, forgive-and-forget nature, which offers us relief from the pain of constant human appraisal and self-loathing.
Opinions about right or wrong, good or evil, represent a dualistic belief system that involves moral judgment. Some animal behavioral scientists and religious scholars believe that animals do not develop moral opinions. I question this supposition and explore it more fully throughout this book. We have no way of knowing for certain what an animal thinks or feels. We have trouble trying to understand other humans. We do know that a dog learns human rules about right and wrong, but the animal may not share our human perspective. A dog will romp through the house with muddy paws wondering why their person is so upset, and moments later, the episode forgotten, the dog wants to play; tomorrow, the dog will have no remorse or qualms about spreading mud on the carpet again. At the same time, animals who live in social groups, such as wolves, appear to have rules that teach them right from wrong in the pack. They argue about these rules and they also forgive, which leads me to consider the idea that some level of morality exists among some animals.
Children, especially, come to appreciate an animal’s characteristic nonjudgmental, forgiving nature. As a youth, I found solace with my Shetland pony, Earl. He played with me and accepted me even if, in some human’s opinion, I was fat, stupid, ugly, or wrong. One man shared with me that he hid with his dog in the doghouse after hearing his father refer to him as “stupid.”
Even the great philosopher Socrates appreciated this quality in a dog. As Thomas Cleary wrote, “Socrates used to take shelter in a barrel with a little dog. Some of his students asked, ‘What are you doing with this dog?’ Socrates said, ‘The dog treats me better, since it protects me and doesn’t annoy me, whereas you desert me and yet annoy me, too.’ ”3
When our pets accept us without judgment, it feels like love. Unconditional love means being accepted under any conditions, right or wrong, smart or stupid, Buddhist, Baptist, Muslim, or Hebrew. As I explored religious beliefs about animals, I considered the issue of moral judgment for several reasons: First, nonjudgment is another core Truth in the spiritual teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, and many other religious leaders. Jesus said: “Judge not, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:1–5). The Buddha told followers not to set themselves up as a judge of others or make assumptions about their motives. You can destroy yourself by holding judgments about others.4 But also, I wanted to investigate what I could learn about whether animals differ from us in terms of a moral sensibility. Finally, spiritual teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh and Eckhart Tolle teach that pain results from judgment, and I needed to learn to free myself of negative judgments, self-judgment, shame, and pain.
According to Eckhart Tolle, “If you stop investing [the pain] with ‘selfness,’ the mind loses its compulsive quality, which basically is the compulsion to judge, and so to resist what is, which creates conflict, drama, and new pain. In fact, the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.”5
This idea of accepting rather than judging what is arose dramatically for me when I met Dana Xavier. On a Sunday in early December 1999, Dana called with an emergency — her stallion had lacerated his face — amid a blizzard of wet snow. Dana lived up a steep hill, on a mesa, and her driveway was gravel and clay with no guard railings. It was a tense drive, even though the four-wheel-drive Ford handled the slimy mud. As I sutured the horse’s wound, I asked the small woman what she did for a living.
She said, “I’m a clairvoyant.”
“You mean a ‘psychic’?”
She nodded. She had a curious way of communicating; she didn’t offer much, just giggled a lot.
About a year later, in March 2001, I made an appointment with her to discuss the spiritual nature of animals. During our talk, I told her how badly I felt if a patient did not heal, and she laughed. Then she laughed some more. She laughed until she cried and almost fell off her chair.
I felt insulted. “I’m
