16 I CHRONICLESnWHY SOULS FLY AWAY by Stephen J. Bodion”Some parrots are legale but why cage exoticnbirds at all?”n— Chris WiUe, NASnDon’t ask me, was my first thought. The last parrot Inowned was — I swear—killed 10 years ago by annex-friend who, with Joseph Krutch, believed that huntingnwas the ultimate evil. He left the bird loose in a room withnmy cats. Still, the larger implications of the editorialn”Wildlife Caught in Miami Vice” (in NAS, the “News-nJournal” of the National Audubon Society, April ’86)ncontinue to bother me.nOn the surface, the editorial looks like a conventionalnpiece of modern conservation wisdom. These days, the ideanthat you shouldn’t “use” endangered species seems selfevident.nOnce this is accepted as a given, the notion thatnyou probably shouldn’t own animals, in whole or in part,nbegins to make sense at least to the unreflective. But has thisnalways been so?nI am a member of several conservation groups. I writenabout animals, nature, and sport for my living. For nearly 20nyears I have given my time to many and varied unselfishnnature-oriented causes. As far as animals and wildlife andnsuch go, I’ve always considered myself one of the good guys,nas well as fairly normal, at least for somebody moreninterested in ecosystems and the identity of that sandpipernthat just flew by than in baseball.nLately, some of my allies in the conservation trenchesnStephen J. Bodio is associate editor of Gray’s SportingnJournal.nnnhave beert giving me funny looks, especially some of thenmore recent volunteers. The whole matter has got to thenpoint where I feel that not only hunters (already secondclassncitizens in some circles, despite their unarguablencontributions to conservation) but even naturalists of thentraditional kind are looked upon with the scorn previouslynreserved for those who build shopping malls in pristinenhabitats. There is something unhealthy going on here,nsomething so fundamental that a refusal to face it maynpermanently cripple conservation as we know it. A kind ofnPuritanism is abroad in the land that seems to reject anyninvolvement with nature more intimate than through thenTV set. For those of us who do not believe that “Nature isnmade possible by your local Public Television Station” (asnthey tell us here), this could bring on a disaster of the soul.nLet’s start with this matter of owning animals, if onlynbecause it’s such an obvious part of my life. My house isnalways full of inquilines. First, I have five dogs. Most peoplendon’t object to that — yet—at least since they stoppednputting mustangs in cans. Although, since I breed dogs, notnone is spayed or neutered, which is becoming a sin in somenquarters. Next: I, like Darwin, keep a loft of pigeons. Theynare neither friends, exactly, nor practical; I don’t need them.nThey are an at-home demo of natural selection, an additionnof diversity to my oikos. Like the dogs, they are domestic,nthough some are rare breeds of endangered gene pools fromnMoorish Spain, kept only by me and one other fancier innthe States. No huge problem here except—let me whispernit—that I have been known to eat individuals of thencommoner kinds. I don’t really like killing animals that Inknow personally; humans form kinship bonds with anythingn