Every other year, a vixen gives birth under my office shed. I can hear the cubs right now beneath the floor, moving around their den, whimpering, the odd squeaky yelp, but I won’t see them until on some sunny spring day they all emerge. One year, I saw a mother with her litter of three cubs: they were frolicking, play-biting, bursting with fresh life, but she lay quietly, just watching them. And a thought crossed my mind — silly maybe, anthropomorphic certainly — that this was the happiest moment in this fox’s life and I knew how she felt.
Humans, whatever our purported sophistication, our gift/burden of consciousness, are just animals, and nothing makes you more aware of that irreducible fact than motherhood. That fox
