Entitlement

(Apologies for this being so late. Sadface.)

Technically I was supposed to have written this before the holiday weekend, but since I didn't and am writing it now on this dark Saturday night, I'll go ahead and talk about a walk I took while off campus for the weekend in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

For those not in the know (like me, before this lovely little trip south), Gloucester is a port city. Which means when I woke up from sleeping on the floor in my friend's parents' addition Saturday morning, I immediately felt the need to go for a walk along the coast.

Having grown up in San Diego, barely a 20 minute drive from the coast, being in Farmington is always a little torturous. I love the ocean. Things don't quite feel right when I can't jump in my car and drive to the beach on a whim. So going on this walk last week was quite a treat. Here was this ocean, different from the one I was accustomed to, the one I claimed as my own, my rightful habitat. But it would do.

This got me thinking about entitlement and how... human that feeling/emotion/state of being is. And in reading Leopold, when he humanizes and personifies animals to make them more relatable, this feeling of entitlement is inescapable, especially in the opening essay: "The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack to stack: supply, demand, and transport all neatly organized" (4). Here, Leopold talks about the mouse as a sort of straight-laced business man, intently focused on the supply and demand aspects of his life and the collection of grass. Why else would the grass grow? To the mouse, this fact is the most natural thing in the world, nearly akin to instinct--the difference being that the mouse knows these things, and they are not gained from intuition. It's a fact, one known and learned but taken for granted, and it becomes a sense of entitlement.

The same holds true for the hawk in the next paragraph: "The rough-leg has no opinion why grass grows, but he is well aware that snow melts in order that hawks may again catch mice" (4). While less involved than the example of personification of the mouse, the hawk shares the same entitlement. Of course it thaws so hawks might catch mice to eat! Why else would it?

This is an interesting and insightful move on Leopold's part. Entitlement is one of the earliest and oldest of human sensibilities. From a young age we expect things will happen; that our parents will feed us, clothe us, love us. It's natural, a given fact, and as we grow older it only seems to grow more entrenched and cover a wider variety of things. Rarely do we as 21st century Americans question where food, clothing, education, and even technology comes from. These are merely facts, taken for granted; of course we are entitled to these things. And I think it interesting that Leopold chooses to highlight this among the animal world as well so early in his book. He is upfront about it while drawing subtle attention to our own human ability to take things for granted. And it is only through a sudden disruption or an absence of these things that we begin to pay more attention to them--whether it be a mouse and his snow, or a SoCal girl and her ocean.