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Animals don’t set out to teach us anything at all – but we all have a lot to learn from our interactions with them nevertheless.
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Imagine that we come back from work unusually late.
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It’s been a tricky day: a threatened resignation, an enraged supplier, a lost document, two delayed trains.
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But none of the mayhem is of any concern to one friend waiting by the door uncomplicatedly pleased to see us.
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Pippi, a two-year-old Border Terrier with a continuous appetite for catching a deflated football in her jaws.
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She wants to play in the usual way, even if it’s past nine o’clock now,
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with us in the chair and her sliding around the kitchen, and, unexpectedly, so do we.
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We’re not offended by her lack of overall interest in us.
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It’s at the root of our delight.
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Here, at last, is someone wholly indifferent to almost everything about us except for our dexterity at ball-throwing,
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someone who doesn’t care about the Brussels meeting,
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who forgive us for not warning the finance department in time about the tax rebates and someone for whom the Lisbon conference is beyond imagining.
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One of the most consoling aspects of animals – it might be a dog, a sheep, a lizard or a beetle
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– is that their priorities have nothing whatsoever to do with our own perilous and tortured agendas.
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They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want.
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They implicitly mock our self-importance and absorption and so return us to a fairer, more modest sense of our role on the planet.
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A sheep doesn’t know about our feelings of jealousy,
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it has no interest in our humiliation and bitterness around a colleague; it has never emailed.
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On a walk in the hills, it simply ambles towards the path we’re on and looks curiously at us,
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then takes a lazy mouthful of grass, chewing from the side of his mouth as though it were gum.
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Ducks nibble at the weeds, waddle down to the water and paddle about in circles without any interest in which century it happens to be from a human point of view;
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they’ve never heard of the economy; they don’t know what country they live in;
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they don’t have new ideas or regret what happened yesterday.
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They don’t care about the career hurdles or relationship status of the person who sprinkling a few bread crumbs near them.
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Time around animals invite us into a world in which most of the things that obsess us have no significance
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– which corrects our characteristic over-investment in matters which make only a limited contribution to the essential task of existence, which is to be kind,
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to make the most of our talents, to love and to appreciate.
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