The recent issue of Time magazine contains a story about the popular Animal Planet series, Meerkat Manor. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it is a nature show about a colony of meerkats, with all the drama of human life ("turf wars, sex, betrayal and cuddly pups"), minus the salaries of high paid actors.
The meerkats don't talk in Disney-esque voices (there is a running narrative), but they do have human names and lately, human tragedies. Two of the shows most popular meerkats, Flower and Mozart (Flower's daughter) recently died, the former of a snakebite while defending her pups, the later by an unknown predator.
Immediately, "grief stricken fans held on-line vigils, created Diana-style tributes, even suggested the deaths were faked. (Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance--they hit every stage)," reports Time. "On Animal Planet forums they mourned, eulogized and fantasized...On YouTube, they created dozens of video shrines, scored to power ballads."
Sound familiar? After Barbaro was injured, his fans staged similar vigils, complete with on-line candle lightings and shrines constructed along the entrance to New Bolton Center, where he was hospitalized. The gifts, cards, prayers came by the truck load and after the horse was euthanized the grief was palpable, through the cyberspace that linked the horse's fans around the world.
Animals' struggle for survival, regardless of the species, seems to strike a resilient chord deep in our hearts. Perhaps they put faces on our own suffering and the helplessness we all feel in the presence of circumstance beyond our control. Perhaps they remind us that we are all equally minute in the workings of a grander universe.
Or perhaps we just don't like to see anything die.
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