One of the hardest questions I've answered: "Did my bunny go to heaven?"
Not hard.
There just isn’t any evidence that pets exist beyond this life or that, if they did, Heaven would be their abode.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
It is sometimes difficult, when comforting children, to be completely forthright about disease, death, violence, etc… but IMO it never serves their best interest to prevaricate. There may well be ‘animals’ in heaven (as in heavenly ‘creatures’) but they won’t be Old Yeller or Black Beauty.
I wrote this for a family member, who can surprise me with his views
For me: No question about it
…..isn’t being asked about whether bunnies go to Heaven, but joking with my cousins about eating Flopsy, Mopsy, and Peter over a dinner of fried rabbit—to the irritation and horror of my mother, of course. Another time, when my aunt and my cousin came to visit, my brother, cousin, and I discovered a rabbit was in our basement while my mom and aunt had gone out for a drink. They wondered if they’d had way too much when they came home and asked my cousin what we were doing, and he happily shouted “we’re hunting the Easter Bunny!”.
(we caught him and released him—the bunny, not my cousin or brother— safely after he ran into a board we’d put in the doorway between the laundry room and the rest of the basement)
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
It’s not something I’d tell a kid just fresh out of losing a pet, but the truth is that there is often kind of weird (if you think about it) misdirection of affections going on with pets. What I’ve observed (in myself and others… though more in others!) is that we imagine and impute all sorts of emotions and affection to critters. Sometimes there is a little bit actually there, but not much really. I’ve seen people attached to a bird that does nothing but eat, defecate, blink and squawk… and a couple of other random things that don’t even acknowledge your presence. But they insisted all sorts of personal and social behavior was going on.
… so it seems that what we often do is project a humanity onto some critter then fall in love with the person we have invented and continue to imagine.
It’s very interesting and I’m not sure what it says about us. (And don’t even get me started on the whole “pets instead of kids” phenomenon)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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