Even the squirrels, those creeps, have personalities.
God loves endless variety, even if we see no purpose for it.
During the Great Squirrel Wars of 2017, 2020, 2021, et al. I learned many things in battle.
Mostly, you can’t win against squirrel—especially if your neighbor has a black walnut tree—and that we ought to junk the AI battle tech and just put armor on squirrels and send them in.
But I also learned that every wild squirrel has its own personality.
Some were mockers, some were jackwagons, some were both mockers and jackwagons—but whatever kind of thieving destructive little creep they were, they had their own unique personality. Their antics and responses were unique from each other.
My parents have about 42,000 wild cats at their house, no doubt a growing number because they feed them a bit, and I am always startled at how those feral cats also have their own personalities.
Why did God give animals personalities, even the animals that aren’t ever going to be around actual human persons?
Bear with me when I say that God seems like a wasteful creator, because I don’t mean that in a negative way. As I’ve said previously, our human limitations make God’s limitlessness so incomprehensible that it almost seems reckless.
Why give personalities to wild animals when they’re just going to function out in the wild being born, eating, dying, and no one will even know?
Why does my cat have a very distinct personality? He’s just a cat, one of billions. Yet he reacts differently than other cats I’ve had.
We have hyper-creative human beings who pay such careful attention to detail that it flies in the face of the Hollywood set mentality we generally take, but that’s generally not the rule. A typical approach is to make something that works or looks lovely as much as it needs to, but there’s no need to over-build out every last detail if we’re only going to see the front, in other words.
For whatever reason, somewhere out in the Colorado Rockies is a chipmunk with a distinct personality, and a bear with its own personality that will eat it. We humans will never see this nor benefit from it, but there it is.
As the Creator, God not only poured endlessly into his creation in variety—5,000 known frog species instead of just a few, anyone?—but into each individual creation he went further and created additional variety. There’s so much differentiation I don’t think we understand it. Yet it apparently brings God joy and that is how he made his creation.
Our limitations and desire to pretend we understand the world around us cause us to create categories to better reduce the variety. Demographics, stereotypes, identities, humans fit for a sound bite. The world is always, when experienced by and through humans, a reduction.
So we have squirrels as a category.
But there are shy squirrels. Mean squirrels. Squirrels that get in between two fighting squirrels and put up a paw. Sneaky squirrels. Bold squirrels. Brown squirrels, red squirrels, flying squirrels, backyard bastard squirrels ruining everything.
“That’s a squirrel,” is the best we can do.
I don’t have a lot of wrap-up for you on this other than the Squirrel Wars will never end, and God’s love for variety to the point of individual personality and behavior that exceeds the required biological needs of a critter boggles the mind.
God creates for a reason, even when we see no purpose for what he has created.
Look! A squirrel!