Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (29 page)

To learn about the effort to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, I interviewed many of the people involved and slogged through many legal documents, including the original petition filed by Kassie Siegel and Brendan Cumming, “Petition to List the Polar Bear (
Ursus maritimus
)
as a Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act.” Kassie, in particular, was a patient and fair-minded explainer of the ins and outs of the case. I also benefited from conversations with Holly Doremus at the UC Berkeley School of Law, both about the polar bear case and the listing process in general.

The 2008 documentary
Polar Bear Fever
, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, gives a good overview of the swelling of public interest in polar bears during that time. The 2007 UN report I refer to is “The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment,” and its lead author, Richard B. Alley, was quoted in the
February 2, 2007,
New York Times
article “Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change.” Terry Macko at WWF discussed the
Golden Compass
campaign with me.

In researching the history of the Endangered Species Act and the candidate list, I read a number of good books, including Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer,
Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species
(New York: Knopf, 1995); Dale D. Goble, J. Michael Scott, and Frank W. Davis, eds.,
The Endangered Species Act at Thirty, Vol. 1
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005); and two well-researched reports by the Center for Biological Diversity: 2004’s “Extinction and the Endangered Species Act,” by Kierán F. Suckling, Rhiwena Slack, and Brian Nowicki and 2005’s “Progress or Extinction?: A Systematic Review of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species Act Listing Program 1974–2004,” by D. Noah Greenwald and Kierán F. Suckling. Two other important sources were John G. Sidle, “Arbitrary and Capricious Species Conservation,”
Conservation Biology
12 (1998) and Shannon Petersen, “Congress and Charismatic Megafauna: A Legislative History of the Endangered Species Act,”
Environmental Law
29 (1999). It’s Petersen who notes that major newspapers devoted only one sentence to the passage of the law and who describes Congress as regarding it as “a largely symbolic effort.” Brendan Cummings delivers his “Yes I voted to kill the polar bear” zinger in
Polar Bear Fever.

Yale University’s
Stephen R. Kellert is considered a godfather of the emerging field of human-animal studies, and I relied on both conversations with him and a very large pile of his writings from the last forty-plus years to understand that research. The opinion poll about mountain lions and lousewarts, for example, comes from Kellert’s “A Study of American Attitudes Toward Animals: A Report to the Fish and Wildlife Service of the United States Service of the United States Department of the Interior,” published in 1967. My discussion of phylogenetic relatedness relies, in part, on his “Public Perceptions of Predators, Particularly the Wolf and the Coyote,”
Biological Conservation
31 (1985). And his book
The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996) summarizes and elaborates on some of his most interesting findings. Michael J. Manfredo, at Colorado State University, was another good guide into this field. The study in which a particular animal is said to have been kicked “like a football” is “Human-to-Animal Similarity and Participant Mood Influence Punishment Recommendations for Animal Abusers,” by Michael W. Allen et al.,
Society and Animals
10 (2002).

Findings mentioned in the footnote come from William Siemer et al.,
“Factors that Influence Concern About Human–Black Bear Interactions in Residential Settings,”
Human Dimensions of Wildlife
14 (2009); George Feldhamer, “Charismatic Mammalian Megafauna: Public Empathy and Marketing Strategy,”
Journal of Popular Culture
36 (2003); Lingling Xiang, “Animal Use in Award-Winning TV Commercials in China Versus the U.S.” (masters thesis, University of Florida, 2008); Susan Clayton, John Fraser, and Carol Saunders, “Zoo Experiences: Conversations, Connections, and Concern for Animals,”
Zoo Biology
28 (2008); E. Paul Ashley, Amanda Kosloski, and Scott A. Petrie, “Incidence of Intentional Vehicle-Reptile Collisions,”
Human Dimensions
of Wildlife
12 (2007); Jennifer Wolch and Jin Zhang, “Siren Songs: Gendered Discourse of Concern for Sea Creatures,” in
A
Companion to Feminist Geography
, eds. L. Nelson and J. Seager (London: Blackwell, 2005); R. J. Hoage,
Perceptions of Animals in American
Culture
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and Janis Wiley Driscoll, “Attitudes Toward Animals: Species Ratings,”
Society and Animals
3 (1995). John Fraser, a researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society, told me about his discovery that people are more likely to presume a given tiger is female. This was in the course of his telling me many other, more important things.

I drew details about Roosevelt’s bear-hunting trip from its coverage in the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
and from Douglas Brinkley,
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the
Crusade for America
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 431–45. My history of the teddy bear is rooted in a number of sources, all frustratingly incomplete. These include the Brinkley book; the Steiff company’s Web site; Donna Varga,
“
Babes in the Woods: Wilderness Aesthetics in Children’s Stories and Toys, 1830–1915,”
Society and
Animals
17 (2009); and Gary Cross,
Kids’ Stuff: Toys and
the Changing World of American Childhood
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 92–97. Cross describes earlier depictions of bears as “apparently designed to upset young children.”

America’s extermination of predators in the early 1900s is covered well in Barrow’s
Nature’s Ghosts
and in Lisa Mighetto’s
Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). I read about the
Ladies’ Home Journal
story about Balser in Varga’s “Babe in the Woods.” The bureau biologist who claims predators “no longer have a place in our advancing civilization” is quoted in Stephen R. Kellert et al., “Human Culture and Large Carnivore Conservation in North America,”
Conservation Biology
10 (1996): 979.

I read, and actually kind of enjoyed, Seton’s
The Biography
of a Grizzly
(New York: Century Co., 1900) and parts of his books
Wild Animals I Have Known: Being the Personal
Histories of Lobo, Silverspot, Rappylup, Bingo, The Springfield Fox, The
Pacing Mustang, Wully and Redruff
(New York: Scribners, 1900) and
Animal Heroes: Being the Histories of a Cat, a Dog,
a Pigeon, a Lynx, Two Wolves & a Reindeer and
in Elucidation of the Same, Over 200 Drawings
(New York: Gosset & Dunlap, 1905). Seton’s description of “shy” and “inoffensive” bears is quoted in “The Bear” by Daniel J. Gelo, in
American Wildlife in Symbol and Story
, eds. Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 151. It was probably Gelo’s essay that led me to consider Seton and teddy bears together.

Mighetto’s
Wild Animals and American
Environmental Ethics
puts the nature fakers in historical context, as does Ralph H. Lutts,
The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and
Sentiment
(Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2001). William Long’s description of polite wolves appears in “The Sociology of a Wolf Pack,”
Independent
66 (1909). U.S. Census Bureau data tracks the urbanization of America during this time. The anguished zoo director I mention is William Temple Hornaday, quoted in Gregory J. Dehler, “An American Crusader: William Temple Hornaday and Wildlife Protection, 1840–1940” (PhD diss., Lehigh University, 2001): 151.

The cougar study I summarize is “Changing Attitudes Toward California Cougars,” by Jennifer R. Wolch et al.,
Society and Animals
5 (1997). Montana governor Brian Schweitzer trash-talked wolves in a February 17, 2011, Reuters article. The study about New Jersey black bears is “The Black Bear Hunt in New Jersey: A Constructionist Analysis of an Intractable Conflict,” by Dave Harker and Diane C. Bates,
Society and Animals
15 (2007). I read only the parts of James Oliver Curwood’s
The Grizzly King: A Romance of
the Wild
(New York: Doubleday, 1916) that I absolutely had to.

I learned about the teddy bear’s runaway popularity and the Billy Possum’s rise and fall by reading many bizarre news articles of the time in the
Washington Post
,
Los Angeles Times
,
New York Times
,
Chicago Tribune,
and
San Francisco Chronicle,
among other papers. (I read, for example, that in 1909, a Mrs. John Rossman started breeding live opossums in her Brooklyn apartment and insisted to the
Washington Post
that the fact that fashionable women on the street were not yet carrying these Billy Possums around as accessories “is due entirely to the cold weather.”) The “Christmas goose” line comes from Margaret Warner Morley,
The Carolina Mountains
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 77. The Amazon.com review was posted by “Unusualfinds” on July 6, 2010. The reviewer goes on to say that she removed the toy opossum’s hideous tail, took out some of the stuffing, shortened it, and sewed it back on: “Easy to do and made it much more toy-like looking, and less realistic.”

My speculation about why the story of Roosevelt’s bear hunt resonated with the public owes a lot to a conversation I had with Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. We were discussing the more recent mass affection for polar bears but his thoughts on bears and humans in general stuck with me and resurfaced here.

The Obama administration’s argument that the polar bear is a threatened, and not endangered, species is laid out most clearly—albeit not so clearly at all—in the memorandum “Supplemental Explanation for the Legal Basis of the Department’s May 14, 2008 Determination of Threatened Status for Polar Bears,” dated December 22, 2010. The federal judge’s questioning of Kassie Siegel is quoted in “Judge Skeptical About Remanding Polar Bear Case to Obama Administration,” by Lawrence Hurly of
Greenwire,
published by the
New York Times
on February 23, 2011.

4. T
HE
C
ONNECTION

I’m indebted to Brian Ladoon for his time and insights, and for protecting me from polar bears while I was at Mile 5. The
Canadian Geographic
article I mention is “Dangerous Liaisons,” by Pauline Comeau, September–October 1997.

I learned to see Churchill from the perspective of wildlife photographers by talking with Daniel J. Cox, Mike Macri, and Norbert Rosing. Chris Palmer’s
Shooting in the Wild
exposes the trickery going on in wildlife filmmaking. Also helpful was Gregg Mitman,
Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

The radio show whose Web site revived Norbert Rosing’s photographs of the bear and dog was called
Speaking of Faith
and is now called
On Being
. Stuart Brown, who assembled the package “Animals at Play” in the December 1994 issue of
National Geographic
,
which included Rosing’s photos, helped me reconstruct the chronology of events.

Margie Carroll’s books,
Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish
and
A Busy Spring for Grandella the Gray Fox
, are published by the Margie Carroll Press: margiecarrollpress.com.

Thanks to the winners of 2010’s Project Polar Bear contest for letting me and my family crash their grand-prize buggy ride, and a special thanks to Sam Leist for e-mailing me his video of the female yearling standoff so that I could better describe it.

5. T
HE
L
IFT

Daniel J. Cox’s video of the starving cubs is, as of this writing, still posted on his Web site, naturalexposures.com. It is worth watching. Thanks to him for sharing the video with me and for discussing such a sensitive subject.

Information about Manitoba’s Polar Bear Alert Program comes from Bob Windsor and Daryll Hedman at Conservation Manitoba and a video about the program produced by Polar Bears International.

The “Cold” episode of
The Martha Stewart Show
aired on the Hallmark Channel on December 6, 2010. It was quite good. The show is no longer on the air.

PART TWO: BUTTERFLIES

6. T
HE
M
IDDLE OF A
H
AIRCUT

While learning about the Lange’s metalmark, and butterflies more generally, I was lucky to find a number of preternaturally patient teachers. I was also lucky that these men and women usually happened to be a lot of fun to spend time with. I’m especially grateful to Jana Johnson, Louis Terrazas, Jerry Powell, Richard Arnold, Travis Longcore, and Liam O’Brien. Liam’s influence in particular extended far beyond the butterfly portion of the book, shaping my ideas about all conservation. His motto—“I just want to be part of a generation that tries”—may as well be the motto of this book.

Piecing together the history of Antioch Dunes, in this chapter and those later on, was not easy. Jerry Powell and Richard Arnold were incredibly helpful, in addition to being authorities on the Lange’s itself, and both looked over sections of the manuscript, pointing out mistakes and pushing me toward more precise descriptions. I also benefited from conversations with the late Alice Howard, a champion for native plants throughout California, who worked at the dunes alongside Arnold, and Chris Nagano and David Kelly at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Secondary sources I consulted include several revisions of Fish and Wildlife’s recovery plan for the Lange’s; the agency’s most recent “5-Year Review: Summary and Evaluation” for the three endangered species at the dunes, dated June 2008; “Taking Refuge,” by Matthew Bettelheim in the January 2005 issue of
Bay Nature Magazine
; Richard Arnold and Alice Howard, “The Antioch Dunes—Safe at Last?”
Fremontia
8 (1980); Jerry Powell’s unpublished study, “Changes in the Insect Fauna of a Deteriorating Riverine Sand Dune Community During 50 Years of Human Exploitation”;
Antioch
by the Antioch Historical Society (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005);
Looking Back: Tales of Old Antioch and Other Places
by Earl Hohlmayer (Visalia: Jostens Printing and Publishing Division, 1991); and J. B. Roof, “In Memoriam: The Antioch Dunes,”
The Four Seasons
, December 3 (1969).