How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals

by Sy Montgomery

What have animals taught me about life? How to be a good creature.

Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.

can tell you that teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

Many young girls worship their older sisters. I was no exception. But my older sister was a dog, and I—standing there helplessly in the frilly dress and lacy socks in which my mother had dressed me—wanted to be just like her: Fierce. Feral. Unstoppable.

I was never, my mother told me, a “normal” child.

Here was a taste of the dream I had cherished as a child: living in the wild, discovering the animals’ secrets.

As a young adult, I feared anger, because I thought it was in my blood. Though

“Oh, but you do feel them,” he said gently. “What you are feeling when you miss them is not their absence. It’s their presence.”

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

Yet clearly, this large, strong, smart marine invertebrate—one more different from a human than any creature I had ever met before—was as interested in me as I was in her. And that was why I was so intrigued.

But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.

Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy. And love is a living thing, even if Octavia’s eggs were not.

You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.

What have animals taught me about my life? I hadn’t been asked this before. But I answered Vicki almost immediately. “How to be a good creature.”