I witnessed a baby seal playing in a tide pool. I was too close when it came to the surface from swimming in forward rolls. I backed away fast as I could. Mamma would be out fishing. A while back a woman refused to put her dog on leash. The dog chased a baby seal and I couldn’t stop it. There are federal laws protecting marine mammals from any direct or indirect interference —“including harassment, hunting, capturing, collecting, or killing”. “You’re too close if an animal starts to stare, fidget, or flee into the water. Even if you don’t see these reactions, keep yourself and your pets at least 50 yards away (1/2 a football field). Keep your dog on a leash around seals or sea lions to prevent bites to the dog and the seals or sea lions. And never feed or attempt to feed a seal or sea lion—it’s harmful and illegal.”

People stood on the surfline last winter, blocking the path of a doe out of the surf. They thought they were helping but succeeded in forcing the deer to stay in the water, called for local authorities, and in the end the doe was dragged from the water and survived. So that was a happy ending of a terrible story.

Tourists foolishly try to rescue young eagles too, and I am generally yelled at when I warn them off. It’s dangerous to everyone to mess with juvenile eagle when the parents bring them onto the shore. They do it every year and at first the youngsters seem not to understand how to lift off from the sand—I suspect that’s why the eagle pair bring them to the shore.

Little good comes from ordinary people “rescuing” wild animals. My first time at The Flight of the Mind, a woman bragged about an “abandoned” baby seal she drove from the Olympic Peninsula home to the city where she took the seal to an aquarium. She wrote her first essay about that experience. She was proud. But I have lived in the PNW all my life and my father worked with marine biologists. I was taught to leave everything just as I found it. I recognized the tragedy. The mother seal would have come back and searched everywhere for her baby, while that poor baby was likely doomed to a life in an enclosure. I knew this but resisted the impulse to tell her she’d done a terrible thing. I didn’t want to be rude. I’m over that.

Most often, my husband and I have allowed wild things to take care of themselves. It’s best. And even saying that, I must acknowledge that we successfully rescued an unfledged rhinoceros auklet, feeding it an expensive diet of fish until it began preening and the local bird rehab took it on. We used to carry exhausted storm-battered seabirds to shelter, but if they let you get that near them, they are already dying.

Hummingbirds are another matter. We stay out of their way, but hummers have become lost in our huge atrium often enough that we keep a huge net specifically to capture hummers. They zip right off once we carry them out to their open spaces.

Don’t even get me started on people who see a cute baby animals and immediately want one for a pet. Wild animals are not pets. Baby monkeys, as one example, were a popular pet when I was a girl. Adorable as infants, but then they reach sexual maturity, no longer behave as “children,” and become dangerous. What happened to all those pet monkeys back in the day? Nothing good, nothing you want to know too much about. When Gary worked as a volunteer at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, and later as an employee, he saw things he would not even tell me about.

Friends who board dogs in their home have told me that the most startling discovery they have made caring for other people’s dogs is that what the owners think their pets are thinking and feeling is often incorrect. Animals are not people. I’ll say it again: animals are not people and their body language and actions reflect a psyche that is not analogous to our own. What people think an animal is thinking, even their own dog or cat, is often far off base.

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I thought by now I must have shared this poem on my blog, but I can’t find it. It was originally published ten years ago in issue 12 of Stringtown. Like much poetry, it’s based on real experience, observation, and emotion. We routinely see dead seabirds on shore but it’s been a while since I’ve detoured around a deliberately killed marine mammal. A blessing, surely.

WHY I RUN NORTH

Dead seals roll onshore in autumn, shot in the head, 
and left to bleed. Seals and sea lions steal from nets, 
scavenge scraps, tangle lines, interfere with traps. 
Yesterday on my run, I passed a spotted seal

washed into the rocks. I didn’t detour for a closer 
look. I remembered other years: bodies shifting 
with each twice-day tide, the awful stink drifting
for months, until all that remained were scraps of hide. 

Today, the ocean has swept the spotted seal
closer to my home, dropped it in my path. It has no
eyes. Half its ribcage is exposed. Scavenger
birds can’t pierce seal skin. A stronger animal—

coyote, eagle?—has opened the belly, eaten liver, heart, 
the rich fat beneath the skin. Now, gulls tear scraps 
from bone. Ravens come. Crows. They will return 
each dawn, circling in their search, as the body roams. 

The story of the spotted seal ends at sea. After 
a long day of wet labor, the fisherman’s rest 
comes when he steps safely home. For gulls,
ravens, and crows there’s no story at all, only

starvation or food today. Is it easy to say 
who is the villain of my story? Who is saved? (Once,
I would have thought this simple.) Now all these 
years deliver consequences I carry on my miles. 

I point my small light ahead on the sand, my stride 
pushing past. I hope tonight’s incoming tide floats 
this seal far south. And under tomorrow’s weightless 
sky, I—who have no answers—I will run the other way.