Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (34 page)

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For example, a snow goose biologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Robert Rockwell, who has worked in Churchill for more than forty years, made a case in one paper that the town’s polar bears could actually survive on land by subsisting on goose eggs. Polar bear biologists rebutted his work, and thus began an esoteric back-and-forth involving population dynamic modeling and hypothetical calorie crunching. It was boring, but each new paper made headlines in the press, which has taken to covering polar bear science as though it were a boxing match between environmentalists and climate skeptics. Rockwell’s study was seized on as a damning counterfactual by skeptics, while environmentalists branded him a climate denier. (He’s not.)

This was only one of several dust-ups in the press around the time I visited Churchill. A polar bear scientist was investigated (and cleared) by the government for exaggerating reports of drowned polar bears in Alaska. A photo of a polar bear clinging to a small fragment of ice was exposed as an artful crop job. People seemed to believe that disproving any particular claim about polar bears and their vulnerability to climate change invalidates the reality of climate change altogether—even if, as in Rockwell’s scenario, the ice is still melting and the bears are merely skirting by on a goose-egg technicality. Rockwell, for his part, wound up feeling that most of the people who accused him of being a climate skeptic were “idiots” and that the scientists who lashed out to challenge his research, including a couple of big name polar bear biologists affiliated with Polar Bears International, have become so desperate to convince an unresponsive public about climate change that they’re behaving irresponsibly. They exaggerate the facts and are intolerant of any science that complicates their tidy storyline, Rockwell told me. They mean well but, they’re talking like “marketing guys” now, not scientists.

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Over the last twenty years, a new field of academic study has coalesced around similar questions, examining our attitudes toward animals and the sociological, psychological, and imaginative forces that influence them. The field is so new that its own researchers don’t always agree on a name for it—often it’s called Human-Animal Studies—and its findings are wide-ranging. My favorites include: The more television a person in upstate New York watches, the more fearful he or she is of being attacked by a black bear. Americans are more likely to assume that a given tiger is female than male. If the mammals depicted on beer bottle labels reflected the actual mammalian biodiversity of Earth, there would be far more rodents and bats on beer bottles, and far fewer mountain goats, bighorn sheep, and wooly mammoths. Only 13.7 percent of white women in Southern California won’t enter the ocean out of fear of jellyfish. American television commercials tend to depict solitary wild animals, whereas Chinese ads show herds, flocks, and gaggles. The average time a person spends in front of an animal enclosure at an American zoo is 99.31 seconds.

In a study in which a fake snake, a fake turtle, and a Styrofoam cup were placed on the side of a road, motorists hit the snake and turtle more often than the cup, and the snake more often than the turtle; nearly 3 percent of motorists who hit the fake animals appeared to hit them on purpose. Another study, looking at people’s reactions to being attacked by pumas, found that the “lowest likelihood of escaping injury occurred when individuals remained stationary.” Women are more likely than men to get “a magical feeling” when seeing dolphins in the surf. Sixty-eight percent of “mothers with high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem” identified with a dancing cat in a commercial for Purina.

Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons, but also more stupid. Turkeys are seen as slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and people believe dolphins to be smarter and more lovable than human beings. Pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs.

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It takes extreme amounts of time, money, patience, and luck to catch that sort of iconic material in the wild, and, understandably, some professionals cut corners. Chris Palmer, a veteran wildlife filmmaker who recently authored an exposé of the industry, explains how animals from game farms are routinely used as stand-ins for wild ones, or jelly beans are hidden inside deer carcasses so that trained bears will tear them apart. This kind of trickery has been going on forever. (In 1958, Disney wanted to show lemmings scrambling, en masse, off a cliff in the Arctic for its film
White Wilderness.
So the Disney crew paid Inuit kids to round up lemmings, forced the lemmings to run on a treadmill covered with snow, then picked up the lemmings with their hands and chucked them into the water. In reality, scientists later determined, lemmings don’t even run off cliffs. Americans still think they do in large part because
White Wilderness
popularized the idea.) But, Palmer argues, the explosion of nature programming on television, with dedicated twenty-four-hour networks like Animal Planet and Nat Geo Wild, has only made things worse. It’s created a demand for more, and more sensational, footage but shriveled filmmakers’ budgets and deadlines. Wildlife filmmakers, Palmer told me, are good people and often staunch conservationists, but the pressure on them is agonizing, and the ethical lines are blurry. “It’s not that you’re evil or malignant or malicious,” he said. “You’re just trying to get the damn shot so you can go home and have dinner with your family. So you put the monkey and the boa constrictor in the same enclosure.”

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The last passenger pigeon was named Martha. She lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. After she died, she was sent in a block of ice to the Smithsonian and stuffed. She enjoyed decades of celebrity. In 1966, Martha was sent to San Diego, on loan for a symposium about wildlife conservation; the organizers just wanted her there, as a mascot, as they plotted ways to save the earth. Fifty-two years after her death, Martha was flying again—on American Airlines. A dedicated stewardess held Martha on her lap the entire transcontinental flight. When she returned to the Smithsonian, Martha spent years as part of an exhibit of taxidermy of extinct birds, alongside a great auk, an ivory-billed woodpecker, and the world’s last heath hen, named Booming Ben. But then the museum built a new Hall of Mammals, and the birds had to come down to make room. When I visited, the collections manager, James Dean, told me that he’d like Martha to be put back on exhibit somewhere, but that his PR people tell him that no one wants to see a case of extinct birds. So Martha is now kept on a Styrofoam block in a metal cabinet labeled Z-11-C, in a vast climate-controlled warehouse full of metal cabinets, reminiscent of that last scene of
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“Poor Martha,” Dean said as he pulled her out to show me.

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In retrospect, it’s amazing how the idiosyncratic motivations of so many people aligned behind a single whale. For example, the lead boat for most of the rescue effort was a small fishing vessel called the
Sportfish I,
captained by a local fishing guide named Jack Findleton. As a teenager, Findleton had seen twelve months of combat in Vietnam. He was one of only 27 of the 144 men in his unit who came home alive, and he came home scarred. “This is my way of making up for what I did then,” he told one newspaper, an atonement for some apparently very terrible acts, which he would not go into. Trying to save Humphrey, Findleton said, “has shown me sensitive feelings that were buried for years.” Another man involved in the rescue mission, Bernie Krause, told me that, years later, a woman in Ohio explained to him that she and her family and everyone in their church had been praying for Humphrey. They believed the animal was Jesus Christ, returned in the form of a whale, swimming up the river to take a look around and judge us.

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For example, children have been shown to acquire fear of spiders and snakes more quickly than fear of guns and other human-manufactured dangers. In this case, there’s a logical, evolutionary basis for biophilia: if you are an immobile baby spending a lot of time on the ground, it pays to learn quickly to fear snakes, spiders, and rats. Fear of big predators, and the quick and erratic movements and sudden sounds they make, doesn’t kick in until after four years old, about when the first human kids would have begun roaming unaccompanied outside of their camps.

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Necedah’s wetlands were drained for agriculture a century ago. But, as a Fish and Wildlife Service history of the refuge puts it, “after a series of intense peat bog fires in the 1930s, many settlers abandoned their homesteads.” So, in 1939, the land was flooded again as a public works project and turned into a wildlife refuge. Its wetlands still need to be meticulously flooded and drawn down to maintain just the right habitat for birds. You’d never know by looking at it, but the refuge is an artificial landscape—a man-made terrarium with no walls or roof.

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Whooping cranes are not particularly nice. The politics inside the pen are like those inside prison, with dominant birds making their reputations by bullying ones that show weakness. One year, Operation Migration hired a short Eastern-European woman with an unassuming posture as an intern, and whenever she suited up and got in the pen, Joe told me, “the birds used to whale on her.” Once, after a whooping crane died in the pen, the other cranes pecked out its eyes.

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In 1999, Disney produced
Fly Away Home,
a family film loosely based on William Lishman’s memoir
Father Goose
. In it, a young girl, played by Anna Paquin, and her eccentric inventor father, played by Jeff Daniels, rescue a group of goslings and save a wetland from development by leading the geese on a migration behind an ultralight. (The plot is complicated.) The psychologist Gail Melson describes the film as part of a modern genre, like
Free Willy,
that shows children “as the true stewards of embattled nature,” and “as allies and often saviors of vulnerable animals against an unfeeling, cruel adult world.” In the film’s most transcendent scenes, where the little girl flies with the geese, it is actually Joe Duff in the cockpit, wearing a helmet with fake pigtails sticking out of it.

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The recordings, made in Bermuda and Hawaii by Roger Payne and Scott McVay, represented a step forward for science—few people, aside from top-secret navy engineers, knew that humpbacks vocalized. The American counterculture was also drawn to whale song as though it were nature’s lava lamp—a swirling psychedelic bath of sound to lose oneself in. Even the music critic for the
New York Times
suggested listening to
Songs of the Humpback Whale
in a dark room and getting “in touch with your mammalian past.”

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Taking a whooping crane to the vet on migration is not like taking a house cat to the vet. Someone first had to go ahead, Secret Service–like, to secure the clinic. Barking dogs were cleared out. Phones were silenced. The doctor was outfitted with a hood and white costume. Actual local headline: “Nashville Vet Dresses Like a Marshmallow to Save Whooping Crane.”