I grew up in New York City and had relatively little interaction with wild and domesticated animals. My cousins had a dog that I would sometimes pet, and that was as far as it got. Additionally, with the exception of a few squirrels and pigeons, all the animals I saw served as pets. Yet in moving to India, I was exposed to a different relationship between humans and animals.
This is of course the relationship between the farmers and their animals. While the animals relied on their owners for food, the farmers also relied on the animals for their livelihoods. The night I arrived in my village, my neighbor’s buffalo’s calf had just died. The next morning my 15-year-old neighbor and I went to see the buffalo. He mentioned to the mother, “She is sad and we are sad too”. What could be seen as an economic relationship was much deeper, it was a deep bond between a human and an animal. My neighbors were small farmers, keeping three buffalo and nine goats. I was struck with the tenderness that this boy treated his animals with. He would often hug and kiss his buffalo, and the nine goats all had names. When the butcher came to buy two of his goats, he was stoic. I asked him afterwards if he was upset, he paused, I wanted to cry but I knew better, if I had, they would have mocked me. He encouraged me to sit on the buffalo, and when I tried, the buffalo bucked and he laughed saying “she doesn’t know you yet”.
I was struck by the way all the children in the village seamlessly interacted with animals, be it herding goats, chasing away cows, or fighting monkeys, they had a closeness with the animal kingdom that I was impressed by.
At times in the disability employment space there can be a tendency to focus on technology, this is important. Technological literacy is important. However, humans do not exist in vacuums. We must learn to interact with others, and animals are a wonderful way for all people to develop these skills. One program in the United States is 4-H, where children raise animals and take them to local fairs. Caring for animals teaches proper nutrition and hygiene practices and allows for beneficiaries to further develop empathy. The great gift of animals is that they do not hold the prejudices that many humans hold.
There is of course no one size fits all approach to tackling the marginalization of people with disabilities and this of course is just one tool in the toolkit but I believe it bears mentioning.
