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

by Sy Montgomery

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

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.

living in the wild, discovering the animals’ secrets.

She didn’t try to steal glimpses of her study animals. Instead, she offered her presence, humbly and openly, until the chimps felt comfortable with her.

I wished I could convey to them what they had given me: Peace as soothing as the calm they feel when they groom their feathers. Joy as spirited as their dance in the wind. Satisfaction as fulfilling as a bellyful of mistletoe.

To begin to understand the life of any animal demands not only curiosity, not only skill, and not only intellect. I saw that I would also need to summon the bond I had forged with Molly. I would need to open not only my mind, but also my heart.

He was a pig—and I loved him for it, just as I had loved Molly not despite her being a dog but because she was a dog.

“He was a great big Buddha master. He taught us how to love. How to love what life gives you. Even when life gives you slops.”

Here in the cloud forest, I found again the wildness that keeps us sane and whole, the wild, delicious hunger for life.

Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

“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.

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

Among the many truths that Thurber has taught me is this: You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next. It could be that something wonderful is right around the corner.

“Never let the facts get in the way of the truth,”