Small and snow-white, she stood out from the city pigeons like a gemstone in rock. Her legs were feathered down to the feet, and around one foot was a ring with something written. She was obviously not feral, but a lost pet dove.
Our pigeon friends weren’t being bullies, just more fervent and experienced foragers. They pushed her aside and snatched every seed we threw her way. Our attempts to feed the dove only alienated her more.
My partner Hanna is one of those people who don’t stop at pity – if an animal is in distress, she takes action. With grace and experience, she caught the dove in one hand and placed her in the cat cage I had retrieved from home.
Inez, as we named her, was only with us for twenty-four hours. Except when Hanna washed her, she stayed in the cage, defending it from our hands with feeble coos of warning. She didn’t trust us. I called the phone number on her foot ring and asked to meet with the owner, which we did the next afternoon. He thanked us kindly for rescuing the dove, whom he’d been missing for two weeks; shoved her into another cage, and drove off.
We haven’t stopped thinking about Inez. What if she didn’t want to return home? Even if she wouldn’t have survived the streets, would she have relished that short, liberated life? We’ll never be completely confident that we did the right thing.
It’s a heartbreaking human ability. We can think about other animals in all the ways they can’t think about us. The guilt of exploiting and displacing them, the grief of always outliving them, the anxiety of not knowing if we’ve truly helped them…those are our lonely sorrows.