Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (7 page)

Part of the answer seems to be that we are attracted to animals that resemble us physically, a principle called “phylogenetic relatedness.” Monkeys are more likable than otters; and otters—with their recognizable facial structures, little mustaches, and shrunken hands—are more likable than lizards. We may be especially sympathetic to phylogenetically related animals because we assume that a creature that looks vaguely like us will have similarly high capacities for thought, pain, and feeling. (In one study, researchers told interviewees that a small mob had just cornered and kicked an animal “like a football” until it was bloodied, unconscious, or dead. The more similar that animal was to humans, the stiffer the fine or the more jail time interviewees recommended for the abusers.)

We are also evolutionarily programmed to empathize with species that resemble human babies—with large, forward-facing eyes; floppy limbs; circular faces; and a roly-poly shape. This helps explain, for example, why polar bear cubs wind up on so many cutesy wall calendars, and why cartoon fish, like Pixar’s Nemo, are never drawn realistically, with eyes on either side of their heads. The Yale social ecologist Stephen Kellert has summed it up this way: “People generally prefer large attractive animals with an erect bearing, animals that walk, run, or fly rather than crawl, slither, or live underground. A good candidate for the average human nightmare might be a creature that is small, ugly, predatory, likely to inflict injury or property damage, lacking in intelligence or feeling, and a denizen of dark, damp places, inclined to crawl and slither about.” In other words, we like the polar bear, not the Glacier Bay wolf spider.

Still, physicality explains only so much, and what it does explain can feel obvious. There is a purely cultural dimension to the way we think about wild animals; their meanings can shift and float in and out of fashion over time. As the softening of the polar bear’s image suggests, the stories we tell about animals depend on the times and places in which we tell them. This was proved more than a century ago, during an inadvertent nationwide popularity contest of bear versus opossum.

It began in November 1902, when President Theodore Roosevelt took a train to Mississippi, to escape the White House for four days of roughing it and black bear hunting outside the town of Smedes. On the second morning of the hunt, the dogs caught the scent of a bear and chased it into the swampy thickets outside of camp. After a chase, Roosevelt turned back for lunch. But his hunting guide—a yarn-spinning ex-slave named Holt Collier, well-known in the Delta
for having killed three thousand bears—eventually managed to corner the animal near a watering hole late that afternoon. The bear snatched one of the hounds by the neck and mashed its spine, killing it. After it injured a second dog, Collier leapt off his horse and cracked the bear on the head so hard that he bent back the butt of his rifle. Then he roped the animal to a tree and tooted away on his bugle, calling in the president for the honor of the kill.

The bear was a 235-pound female—semiconscious, injured, mangy-looking by some accounts, and, Collier judged, shrunken to about half its normal weight by Mississippi’s drought. When Roosevelt saw the pitiful animal lashed to the tree, he refused to fire at it, or to have anyone else shoot it, either; he felt it went against his code as a sportsman. Instead, he asked a hunting companion to put the bear out of its misery with a knife. But that detail of the story would quickly get lost. A few days later, a political cartoonist in Washington, Clifford Berryman, memorialized the moment when Roosevelt declined to fire his weapon as an almost saintly scene. He called the cartoon “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.” Roosevelt was shown with his rifle down and his hand outstretched to spare the bear, while the animal sat on its hind legs like a baying puppy, with frightened wide eyes and two ears pricked up on the top of its head. It looked as helpless as an infant, as if it needed to be reassured or swept into someone’s arms. It wouldn’t have registered as familiar at the time, but, looking at the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: it’s a teddy bear.

Essentially, the bear from the cartoon was turned into a plush toy and named after the president. There are competing legends about who made the first teddy bears: it was either Rose Michtom, the wife of a Brooklyn toy-shop owner, or a German seamstress named Margarete Steiff, whose family owned the felt manufacturing company Steiff, still the world’s most prominent teddy bear producer. We do know that Steiff had been selling a line of stuffed animal toys, including a bear, for several years before Roosevelt’s hunt. But Steiff’s original bear was a much more realistic animal, less cuddly and infantile, with the humping, brutish back of a wild one. Also, the bear was chained through its nose to a peg.

Bears, after all, were considered monsters. For so long, the animal had been a shorthand for the unruliness and danger that Americans were encountering on the western frontier. Bears rarely turned up in toy catalogs and books, one historian notes, and “when they did they looked mean and were apparently designed to upset young children.” Two years before Roosevelt’s trip,
Ladies’ Home Journal
published a kids’ adventure story about a fourteen-year-old named Balser, described as “the happiest boy in Indiana” because he owned a rifle, “ten pounds of powder, and lead enough to kill every living creature within a radius of five miles.” In the story, Balser winds up killing a bear, but gets bitten in the process. So, in the story’s feel-good conclusion, the boy and his father track down the bear’s mate and shoot her, too, in revenge.

For bears—real bears, out on the land, with pulses and appetites—turn-of-the-century America was a painful and inhospitable place. All kinds of large carnivores were being systematically exterminated, from east to west, to keep from complicating the lives of humans. Wolves, cougars, and coyotes especially were demonized as Americans’ competitors: “brutal murderers” that killed and ate “harmless, beautiful animals”—namely, the livestock that people were raising to eat themselves. In 1906, an arm of the federal government, the Bureau of Biological Survey, began killing tens of thousands of wolves and coyotes every year, with traps and poisoned meat. The government also offered bounties, roping ordinary citizens into the work. One bureau biologist would justify the war on wolves by insisting, “Large predatory mammals, destructive of livestock and game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.”

This is to say, the teddy bear was born in the middle of a great spasm of extermination that would go on for decades. (Even the Audubon Society began eradicating predatory birds, like hawks and eagles, from their bird sanctuaries.) It was a natural escalation of the mind-set formed a century earlier, in Thomas Jefferson’s time, when Americans told themselves that the gruesome Incognitum had been driven extinct to wipe the continent clean for their use. Now the country was finishing off all these smaller, less imposing Incognitums—buffing out the land’s last scratches of wildness so that all we could see in its surface was our own reflection.

The teddy bear was only one sign that some people, deep down, had started to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated and feared the bear. But all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a hug.

—

T
HIS AFFECTION
was already starting to percolate when Roosevelt went to Mississippi. Two years earlier, in 1900, the bestselling author Ernest Thompson Seton published
The Biography of a Grizzly,
a book that tenderized the reputation of the bear in the same way the teddy bear would. The story begins with a mother grizzly and her cubs “living the quiet life that all bears prefer.” But when a rancher opens fire, only one cub survives—a morose little guy named Wahb who must find his way in a shrinking wilderness riddled with steel traps and tainted by the “horrible odor” of man. Yes, Seton argued, grizzlies were once ferocious. But the barbarity of men with rifles and traps had put them in their place. Now was the time to show the bear some mercy: “The giant has become inoffensive now,” he later wrote. “He is shy, indeed, and seeks only to be let mind his own business.”

By the time Seton wrote
The
Biography of a Grizzly,
he was a controversial figure at the vanguard of a new literary genre called realistic wild animal stories. These stories claimed to be credible natural histories of wildlife. But they dramatized the lives of animals as though they were the anthropomorphic heroes of fiction. (Jack London’s
White Fang
may be the realistic wild animal story that’s best remembered today.) Seton insisted that his stories were steeped in a nuanced and accurate knowledge of animal behavior, gained from his years in the field. And yet he endowed his animals with a cleverness and morality that sometimes border on the ridiculous. He wrote, for example, of a mother fox that feeds her trapped offspring poisoned meat so that the pup won’t have to suffer the indignity of being chained up. Then she nobly commits suicide herself.

Seton was not the most unrealistic realistic wild animal story author. Some almost completely sanitized nature of its violence or trauma. (The writer William Long described a scene of wolves ripping apart a deer as being “peaceable as a breakfast table.”) Still, Seton was one of the most successful authors, and he became a target for the backlash against the genre by other naturalists. One critic derided realistic wild animal stories as the “yellow journalism of the woods.” Theodore Roosevelt was one of the authors’ most vicious enemies, dubbing them “nature fakers,” which is the name by which they’re remembered today. The fear was that these writers were misleading readers about the way nature worked. Children would be especially vulnerable to their lies.

The country was urbanizing. By 1910, a majority of Americans would live in cities. Instead of spending time in nature, children relied on secondhand descriptions of wildlife now, and naturalists worried that, without much firsthand experience of animals, kids might accept even these sappy bedtime stories as fact. Teachers around the country were starting to use another of Seton’s books,
Wild Animals I Have Known,
as a textbook. “All of this would be highly amusing,” one zoo director wrote, “if it were not so pitifully serious to the children of the public schools.”

But some of the nature fakers’ motivations were more poignant than their critics understood. Seton especially was responding to America’s war on predators. His most dignified, sympathetic protagonists were usually the same animals that were being exterminated in the West, like grizzlies and wolves. He was trying to create public empathy for these species—to save them. Like Robert Buchanan with his polar bears more than a hundred years later, Seton knew that regurgitating dry, scientific descriptions wasn’t enough to generate a true emotional response. Seton’s aim instead, he wrote, was to capture the “personality” of an individual animal “and his view of life.” “Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing only in degree from our own, they surely have their rights.”

The nature fakers may be mostly forgotten, but this sentimental compassion lives on in nearly every children’s book about animals I’ve read to my daughter—books that, like everything adults give to little children, are echoes of our own beliefs. And it was evident, too, in so many of the letters about polar bears that schoolchildren wrote to the Department of the Interior in 2007. “I really think it is not fair to the polar bears,” wrote the fourth-grader in Oakland, Juan Piedra. “Also, they could drown and die off and what if they were you?”

Nature can seem this pure and honorable only once we’re no longer afraid of it. We seem to be forever oscillating between demonizing and eradicating certain animals, and then, having beaten those creatures back, empathizing with them as underdogs and wanting to show them compassion. We exert our power, but are then unsettled by how powerful we are.

Large predators—those able to rip us apart—have understandably commanded a huge share of humans’ psychic attention for as long as there have been humans. (Some of the earliest cave paintings are of bears and lions.) But as we’ve insulated ourselves from nature, and diffused the danger of those animals, we’ve started to give them new meanings. That basin of anxious, imaginative energy can get rechanneled into a deep aesthetic appreciation. In the bear especially, Yale’s Stephen Kellert argues, we see a creature a lot like us: it can walk upright, snores when it sleeps, and is roughly our size and shape. But it’s also omnivorous, agile, clever, self-possessed—all the admirable dimensions of ourselves that have been “diminished in modern culture.” For many of us today, who spend our days slumped over spreadsheets or quarreling with our banks over hidden fees, bears look like the composed and competent survivors we wish we still were.

No single piece of research demonstrates this cycle of fear and reverence more clearly than a study, led by the geographer Jennifer Wolch, that examined how cougars were written about in the
Los Angeles Times
between 1985 and 1995. In the early 1970s, the cougar population in California had been ground down to as low as twenty-four hundred animals. But by 1990, a ban on hunting had allowed the species to come back; the cougar had become an icon of conservation in Southern California. It was described in the newspaper as “majestic” and “innocent,” an embodiment of nature’s grace, and a “symbol of our dwindling wilderness heritage.” But soon cougars started encroaching into the populated areas around Los Angeles. There were two fatal attacks. More people still died in America because of bee stings and black widow spider bites, Wolch writes, but “as reports of cougar-human interaction rose and public fears were fanned by episodic attacks, the images of cougars as charismatic and proud wild animals at home in nature were replaced by terms conjuring danger, death, and criminal intent.” It was as if a switch had flipped. Before 1990, the predominant image in the newspaper was of an “elusive and fascinating wild creature.” After 1990, cougars were “efficient four-legged killers” and baby-snatchers, “roaming like phantoms” in the nearby hills.