CAPTIVES ON EARTH
Rex Burress
If you have ever seen a room full of caged canaries, you will know that caged birds sing, even though you might not know why they sing. You will also know that a bird in a cage is a captive.
The canary example is an echo from the time when my Grandma Oletta raised canaries to sell on the farm in Missouri. The great crescendo of song from a couple hundred canaries makes a lasting impression. Even though there were also wild canaries (Goldfinch) in the fields, the yellow type in confinement were the most jubilant, in spite of being captives in a cage. Even if released to the wild, the domestic canary would not survive, as they are accustomed to daily care, just as zoo animals become locked in their artificial habitat which usually makes rehabilitation difficult, especially if they are handicapped.
Controlled animals are usually not all that unhappy, especially livestock on a farm. Fences are the cages that define their territory, and even though the free rambling of cattle, sheep, hogs, and other farm residents is limited, like a farmer with a garden patch on their 80 acres, or a city property owner with a fenced backyard, adjustments are made to manage in that space.
We are all captives of something. Most definitely people are captives in their house, motor
home, or tent, apprehensive about stepping out into the night where stranger or storm may be lurking. Seniors in the city are especially wary of venturing beyond their room, relying on door locks and security systems to keep the intruder out. I have known several seniors beaten and robbed on the city streets. For the frail, an apartment in the metropolis is similar to a prison cell even though they have a key to freedom, whatever you consider freedom to be.
Astronauts at the Space Station certainly know that they are captives of steel cage conditions when they look out and see the distant Earth but have no means of returning without a shuttle, oxygen, and space suits. They cannot open the door and step out into the “great outdoors.”
In a large sense, living things on Earth are captives of Earth, anchored by gravity and atmosphere, while leaving the planet is forbidding and troublesome for air-breathing and flora/fauna-eating beings evolved in a particular niche of the Universe, whether by chance or purpose.
People are captives of habit, and even captives of passion for hobbies and daily rituals, just as wild animals are captives of their particular habitats. They are also captives of a compulsion to reproduce. There might be another name for it, but wild animals must obey that instinct for mating, digging dens, building nests, and even the demand for migration in some species. We well know that indication when the snow geese come drifting out of the north to spend the winter in Californian marshes. We will know that the flocks have been propelled into flight by the necessity of finding food as well as finding a refuge home.
Consider fish in an aquarium. They are captives in that limited amount of water, dependent on people to provide the necessities of living. Even fish in the river are captives there, unable to travel over land to find other sources of water when drought depletes their environment.
I saw the drought condition once in a small stream called Crooked Creek on my Grandpa's farm in Missouri. Yes, the Midwest is sometimes susceptible to drought in that thunderstorm country, and only a few puddles were left late in the 1945 summer. The aquatic life was desperate with fish sucking the surface for air in the muddy water and preyed upon by herons and snapping turtles during the daytime and raccoons at night. Only the “crawdaddies” could escape by crawling to a damp spot to dig a confining hole to water . Sometimes there is comfort in captivity!
“If the universe has an end, it means we are captive fishes in an aquarium! If it has no end, we are lost sheep in the eternal darkness.” --Meh Ildan
“I have become a captive of my own ambitions.” --Patsy Cline