Back in the first days of Ebola hysteria, before the Ebola teacher and Ebola nurse, there was the Ebola dog.

To refresh your memory: A dog that may or may not have been exposed to Ebola was to be quarantined, though some were advocating that it be killed, though there was no evidence dogs could even contract Ebola.

A co-worker, during a discussion about the Ebola dog, remarked that people cared more about the dog than they do about people.

That’s a response we hear a lot when there’s debate over compassion for animals. One maybe people toss off and don’t think about too much.

But think about it. Really? If people were advocating that a person be executed because they may or may not have been exposed to Ebola there wouldn’t be an outcry?

That belief — if it were a person, people wouldn’t care as much — is as ingrained in many people as the belief we animal lovers have that most who hunt just don’t care about animals at all.

Of all the divides that Tuesday’s election clarified for Mainers, animal lover versus “those who aren’t” was one of the ugliest.

I won’t weigh in on the whole bear hunting issue here — Mainers decided to keep the status quo and everyone’s heard enough.

But over the last few weeks I’ve tried to understand what the issue is really about. Philosophically, not biologically or culturally.

And most people, even animal lovers, understand the question wasn’t that simple.

But while the question isn’t that simple, for animal lovers the feeling behind it was.

I am undisputedly an animal lover. I am down to one cat and one dog, but at one time I had two dogs and three cats and my mother frequently made reference to her fear I was “overdoing it.” In other words, her daughter was a crazy animal hoarder.

Last summer I chased a butterfly around my screened porch for nearly half an hour trying to get it to fly out because I was afraid it would be trapped there and would die.

Despite a fairly robust in-house mouse problem, I won’t put out traps or poison because I don’t want to kill the mice. (My cat, however, doesn’t have the same issue and is happily “helping.”)

A couple years ago, I drove nearly four hours during the wee hours of the morning, interrupting a weekend away, because my headstrong dog had gotten away from the neighbors who were so generously watching her. I knew she was around and would come home, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of her spending the night out in the November cold, wondering where I was and why I’d let her down. After arriving home, I didn’t have to look far. She showed up on the front steps before I had time to turn on the lights. The next morning, I drove back to my weekend away.

It’s hard to see those posters people put up for missing dogs and cats without wanting to stop everything and go looking for them.

Several years ago the same headstrong dog became lost in woods in New Hampshire. OK, she wasn’t lost. My friend and I were lost. Then Emma, the dog, disappeared as we fumbled around the woods, looking for something familiar. Very unlike her. She’s a herder and usually very concerned about keeping people in line.

We found her, finally, near the parking lot, waiting for us to show up and oblivious to the heartbreak that I’d felt in the 45 minutes we’d spent looking for her.

I’d envisioned, before we found her, spending day and night in those New Hampshire woods looking for her, trying to figure out what I’d tell my boss about missing work, because I couldn’t imagine going home and leaving her there.

So yeah, I come down on the side of animal lover to an extent that some may find a little sad.

It’s no secret why we love animals. Our pets give us unconditional friendship. They truly love us for no other reason than we exist and love them back. If only human interaction were that simple. We feel we owe them the same in return.

It’s easy to extrapolate that to the entire animal kingdom.

Those of us who seem obsessive about our love for animals find it hard to understand why others have little compunction about killing them or treating them in ways we think are cruel — even wild ones that could potentially kill us (though they rarely have seemed inclined to here in Maine). It’s not that we care more about animals than people; it’s just that we feel an obligation to creatures who are more at our mercy than the two-legged ones around us.

The bear hunting referendum was about a lot of things — the economy, biology, culture — but it came down for many people to looking at that little dog or cat curled up asleep on the couch and wondering how someone could be so mean.

I recently had a discussion about the referendum with a coworker who hunts. He’s certainly not short on compassion, and he’s an animal lover. But he also had some pragmatic, common-sense reasons for being against the ban.

It clarified something I knew all along — that it wasn’t as simple as how I feel about my dog or cat, or even butterflies or the rampaging mice in my kitchen.

Bear hunting is staying the same in Maine. It’s not going to have any more impact on me than it had before Tuesday.

On the other hand, those of us who love animals should keep on loving them. There’s never a downside to channeling compassion into action, and one outcome of the debate over the bear issue may be that all of us put more thought into how we deal with the beings we share the world with. The fluffy ones and the human ones.

Maureen Milliken is news editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. Email her at mmilliken@centralmaine.com. Twitter: @mmilliken47. Kennebec Tales is published the first and third Thursday of the month.

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