People often comment about bonsai being "like children". The idea, of course, is that bonsai require a lot of care and bonsai owners become genuinely attached to their little trees and make many accommodations for them. The analogy is off the mark, however, insofar as bonsai are plants and children are people, and specifically your children are people with whom you are biologically tied — kin of the closest kind.

A better analogy is found in the human relationship with non-human creatures we regard as pets. The most common pets are dogs and cats, which are mammals and thereby similar to some degree with humans. Many other creatures in the class Mammalia, such as guinea pigs, monkeys, horses and ferrets, are also kept as human pets. These animals all have eyes, mouths, ears and legs just as we do, and although they are easily recognized as different than us they are similar enough that we have no problem identifying with them. Humans also sometimes make pets out of non-mammalian creatures, such as birds, reptiles and fish. Although these creatures are more substantially different than humans, they still all have eyes and mouths and other recognizable bits of anatomy, and they can sometimes be seen moving about and engaging in various easy to identify activities, such as eating.

Given the great number of other living beings that humans keep as pets, and the diverse types of creatures employed for this purpose, it is natural enough to wonder why we do it. What is the purpose of a pet? The answer that comes immediately to my mind is companionship — we keep pets for their company. With dogs and cats, the original relationship was a practical one, where the animal performed a service for us and in return we provided shelter and food. Dogs proved useful for many services, from security and protection to herding livestock and tracking game, while cats earned their keep by hunting undesirable rodents. Along the way, these animals and their human owners developed relationships that grew naturally out of keeping close company. Those relationships were eventually recognized as being more important than the services provided by the animals, as evinced by the fact that relatively few dogs and cats kept as pets today can be rightly categorized as "working animals".

In the case of other pets, such as birds, reptiles, fish and even bugs, there is less reason to think the original impulse in keeping company with these creatures had anything to do with practicality. At the same time, it might be difficult to make a case for some of these alternative types of pets as providing companionship, either. A person who keeps a pet boa constrictor, for example, will likely claim they have a relationship with the snake that provides companionship, and they may seek to prove it by walking around with the snake draped over their neck and shoulders. This sort of relationship, however, does not measure up particularly well with the devotional personal attention of a dog wagging its tail and retrieving a thrown ball or the highly selective solicitude of a cat purring as it's being stroked by its human. Companionship does not seem to be the primary motivation in keeping a snake, and even less so in the case of making a pet out of a fish or a bug. Sometimes the primary motivation for keeping a certain creature as a pet is the novelty in doing so. There is a certain coolness achieved by calmly walking about with a big snake wrapped around you, or a parrot on your shoulder, or a tarantula sitting in the palm of your hand. Still, the companionship element might legitimately arise in a secondary way, simply from spending regular time together with whatever is being kept as a pet.

It should be understood that none of this is being offered by way of judgement. The salient point is that people have an attraction to keeping company with various other living, non-human entities, and the reasons for doing so may have no obvious connection to practical utility.

Here is a thought I've had on this topic: Might a deeper motivation for having a pet be basic human curiosity about other forms of life? Whatever creature one might choose to keep nearby, the human involved will spend a good deal of time looking at the thing, thinking about it and interacting with it. The hoped-for response is that the creature will look back at us and think of us, so that human and non-human creature have a shared experience. This behavior will result in a heightened awareness of the kept creature as both a representative of its kind and as an individual. The owner of the boa constrictor, for example, will almost certainly have a more fully informed understanding of snakes in general and boa constrictors in particular. They might even insist they could pick out their boa from a tank full of other boas, and it wouldn't be so surprising if they could. Regular proximity to another living thing, especially if that creature is dependent upon your care, will result in some degree of identification with that other life form. Once we identify with something we tend to personalize it. Once we personalize something we grant it status as a unique entity, one of many, but separate and worthy of its own recognition in the greater scheme of life.

There is a darker component underlying this construct and it has to do with power. To make a pet out of any other living being is to assume authority over its life, to assume superiority and thereby the right to keep the creature in a sort of bondage. Pet owners bridle at this framing of the pet/owner relationship. Pet owners will point out how much they love their pets and what a good life they provide for them, frequently challenging the whole concept of who owns whom, but the fact is that pets exist because humans desire them. The traditional human view of existence places human beings at the center, with all other forms of life at our disposal. That thing over there is dangerous, or a nuisance, so it's okay to kill it. That thing over there is pleasant, or benign, so it can remain. This thing here is appealing to me, so I think I'll take it in and keep it.

I feel the need now to let the reader know that I've kept pets my whole life. I've had dogs and cats, but also various birds, fish, snakes, salamanders, turtles, snails, crickets, grasshoppers and ants. Some of these creatures were born in captivity and some came from the wild, but in every case I was attracted to them and wanted to have them close by. I did my best to provide the right accommodations and treat these pets well, but in every instance the relationship began with my desire to keep these other life forms close to me, and short of escaping they had no choice in the matter. I'm not judging the practice of pet ownership or the human tendency to place ourselves in the center because if there is any fault in these behaviors I share in it completely.

The question that prompted this rumination is whether people might form similar relationships with plants as they do with other life forms. Specifically, is having a bonsai like having a pet? I think it is. At the very least, bonsai are more like pets than they are like children because bonsai are not human beings. But bonsai are not mammals, birds, reptiles, fish or bugs, either. Bonsai are plants and in the taxonomic system plants are far, far removed from any of the other organisms we typically consider as potential pets. To understand the human relationship with bonsai requires that we first consider how human beings relate to the entire plant kingdom.

To be continued...

Garden Update

A new bonsai was added to the garden display this week. The bonsai itself isn’t new; it was previously featured in the Journal here.

Last week’s entry featured two photos of the River of Dreams landscape planting, showing swelling flower buds on the azaleas. This is what the azaleas are up to now:

Think of a Tree - Part 2, On the Nature of Pets