It took about 200,000 years, from the first humans to grow the entire world population in 1974. Astonishingly in just an infinitesimal forty more years our planet’s population went from 4 to 8 billion people. I find it hard to believe that I have lived through such a cataclysmic change in just 40 years while barely taking notice! The acceleration of our human population is still going on even though it is at the expense of so many other living sentient creatures and our already strained natural resources.

Did you ever wonder how this could happen while life goes on as usual? Perhaps it takes a selective screening out of our awareness, a cultivated unconsciousness, a use of euphemisms to inure us, lubricating daily life so well that a devastating wipeout can happen with relatively little notice?

In an attempt to allay that lingering thought, I took a relaxing walk in the woods with my friend, Barbara Friend, and her two white standard poodles who are related to my poodles. After a while we and our roving dog family reached the fanciful home of a friend of ours who lived adventurously in the woods. As we approached we heard the unexpected sound of her usually calm little dog barking incessantly. Our three poodles, not wanting to miss anything, joined in the excitement, wildly woofing around a caged raccoon that had been captured in a euphemistically labeled “Have-a-Heart” trap. According to our friend, the renter of the cage, the prisoner was scheduled to be “inoculated” by the person from whom she rented the trap who was due to do the job over the weekend. She employed this extreme remedy because she had been repeatedly disturbed by the free-living raccoon’s nocturnal raids of her bucolic kitchen when she left the door ajar at night. Disregarding political correctness, I mentioned that the planned “inoculation” actually referred to the raccoon’s extermination which only ended life not disease.

I was immersed in the moment. The terror of the poor trapped raccoon; probably hungry and thirsty, kept from his nearby familiar natural habitat, from the fresh water of Lake Placid and the safe den where he or she may have slept, now trapped and unknowingly destined for death over the weekend, along with the mayhem of three dogs furiously barking around him played on my mind for the rest of the day and that night, too.

The next morning about 6, I took a walk back to the still-trapped raccoon, bearing a Honeycrisp apple. He was balled up, sleeping, wrapped in a splendid bushy tail. I bit off pieces of the apple and shoved them through the bars of the cage, careful to keep my fingers out of bite range.

Soon after, I called Barbara who had been simultaneously kept awake at her home in Saranac Lake by similar disturbing thoughts. Conspiratorially we met that morning to negotiate a raccoon release with the possessor of the captive. By this time there had been so much discussion and consciousness raising that this new release plan seemed right to all three of us.

We all convened at the woodsy cage site without dogs this time. Although the raccoon had at first seemed indifferent to my apple offering, he had eaten it by the time I returned. Barbara came equipped with gloves, carrying gear. We carted the caged raccoon on a long trek through the woods until we reached her hatchback car. From there we transported our raccoon to a remote spot miles away, deposited his cage on the ground and opened the door. Bright-eyed, he looked around for a few seconds, reassessing his new circumstances. I grabbed a phone shot in remembrance of the occasion (included here). Without further consideration our raccoon made a mad a dash from the cage to the Lake. He would now have to fend for himself in a new territory, but at least he had a shot.

Honestly, it felt like a caper of high calling. We were both smiling all day.