Thursday, April 24, 2008

Rescuing Madam Butterfly

I helped rescue a day-old butterfly today. A chap at work brought this beauty called the Common Rose into the office because he was doing a story on Rosalind Tay. She's an occupational therapist turned senior operations executive, who started a butterfly garden at Alexandra Hospital.
Her rationale was simple: Watching the butterflies, with their colourful and magical symmetries is an oddly soothing and affirming experience for those in recovery.
Anyway, the Common Rose rode into work in a box, to be photographed. Knowing nothing about the species, I resorted to google. It gets its name probably because it is abundantly found in South India and Sri Lanka, especially after the monsoons. Botanists call it an "excellent generalist" meaning it has adapted to a range of habitats from up to 8,000 feet in the Western Ghats and South Indian Hills and up to 5000 feet in the Himalayas. And somehow, our youngling of a Common Rose managed to fly out of her box in Singapore and made her way up onto one of the light fixtures in this gigantic office. Luckily, that particular light wasn't on.
The only reason I even knew was because I sit next to butterfly boy and some girls were shrieking, being girls and all. If we had just left her there, Madam Butterfly would have died. Maybe its a mister butterfly, but I just like the sound of madam. And I didn't want her to die in some cold air-conditioned office among journalists. If I were to die, I'd want to be in the flower garden hanging with my friends, talking. And then, mid-discussion, I would die happy, just after I'd made my point.
So, I found one of the cleaner ladies who suggested calling the cleaning department. The good folks at the cleaning department sent a man with a long stick and he also went and found a net. Then I went and found wildlife woman from our office. I knew she could help. We all watched as he very carefully coaxed Madam Butterfly into the net and brought her down from her high perch. We helped her back into her box and she seemed to sit still in there. She's on her way back to the Alexandra Hospital garden now, where they have the kind of flowers she likes to sit on and where some 101 other species of tropical butterflies gather.
Even if her life span is only a few days, I'm so happy that it will be spent among flowers and friends and not in an office. My day is so much better for having encountered the spectacular symmetry of her black, pink, red and grey hues. It also made me think of our general attitude to small insects and animals ...do we value their lives at all?
JM Coetzee is perhaps one of the few authors who discusses our cruelty and indifference to the animal world. In an interview after he received the Nobel prize, Coetzee said of animals: "There is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart. (You'll notice its exactly what I've done in my post)
There is also a temptation to seek in animals what is easiest for human beings to sympathise or empathise with, and consequently to favour those animal species which for one reason or another seem to us to be “almost human” in their mental and emotional processes. So dogs (for example) are treated as “almost human” whereas reptiles are treated as entirely alien." Coetzee says that the lives of animals remain unimportant existences of which people take notice only when their lives cross ours. And while he agrees that we may never know the inner lives of animals, the one thing we can do, he says, is respect their right to life.

2 comments:

shenanigans said...

i once called the fire department in bombay to report a crow that had its leg trapped in kite string and was hanging helplessly upside down. no one, including i have to say me, expected rescue. least of all one that was prompt.
in less than 15 minutes, the traditional red fire engine pulled up, the fireman stood on the extended ladder and reached up to cut the beleagured crow free.
i stood at the window of my high-rise apartment and joined the urchins in the street below as they applauded.
here's to that nameless fireman. and to all those who give a damn. about life, whether two or four-legged, with wings or scales.

Reportergirl said...

That's incredible. I'm glad you went and called the fire department, even if you did it disbelievingly. To the nameless fireman indeed!