Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (8 page)

The same shift has been happening with wolves lately, especially since Republican legislators maneuvered via a last-minute budget amendment to take away the gray wolf’s federal protection in several states in 2011. (Conservationists defended the wolf as part of America’s natural majesty; Montana’s governor, meanwhile, told his constituents to forget the Endangered Species Act altogether and take matters into their own hands: “If there is a dang wolf in your corral attacking your pregnant cow, shoot that wolf. And if its pals are in the corral, shoot them, too,” he told Reuters.) And a decade after Wolch’s cougar study, similar research looked at newspaper editorials about a proposed black bear hunt in New Jersey and found almost exactly the same scenario: bears being cast both as “menacing threats” and as “God’s creatures” who would gladly “live in peace” if people just left them alone.

When Roosevelt refused to shoot that black bear in Mississippi in 1902, the species’ larger cousin, the grizzly, was being brutally eradicated around the country. And as it disappeared from the land, it found new prestige in our imaginations. Soon a novel by James Oliver Curwood, called
The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild,
would turn on a scene that is almost exactly the opposite of what happened on the president’s bear hunt. A grizzly named Thor stalks the hunter who has previously shot and wounded him. The bear creeps in behind the hunter, trapping him between a rock wall and a cliff, with nowhere to run—and unarmed. Thor towers over the man angrily, but then pauses, stunned by how “shrinking, harmless and terrified” the creature that had hurt him looked now. And so the animal slowly turns and disappears in the direction from which he’d come, leaving the hunter standing there—letting him live.

The bear was now the merciful one, with a code of honor he refused to break. The hunter was the senseless killer. As Seton once wrote, “No animal will give up its whole life seeking revenge; that kind of mind is found in man alone. The brute creation seeks for peace.” The bear was the bigger man.

—

I
T DIDN’T TAKE LONG
after Roosevelt’s bear hunt in 1902 for the teddy bear to become a full-blown craze. By the end of the decade, Steiff was producing close to a million teddy bears a year. Sets of teddy-bear clothes were sold separately, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
published patterns for making your own. Your teddy bear could wear pajamas or dress up like a sailor or a fireman. There were even special blankets and caps to keep the toys toasty in winter. That is, despite all its fur, the bear needed a winter coat. In the natural history of the teddy bear, this seems to be the point at which the teddy bear splintered into its own discrete species, when it completely broke away in our imaginations from its relative in the forest.

But the toy confused adults. Their children were trading in dainty baby dolls for beasts—it was troubling. “From all quarters of the globe,” wrote the
Washington Post,
“comes the demand for Teddy bears, with poor Miss Dolly gazing woefully out of her wide open eyes powerless to prevent the slipping away of her power.” The
New York Times
published a poem: “The Passing of the Doll.” The teddy bear seemed like a novelty—a fad—and everyone assumed it would be forgotten once Roosevelt left office. Mass-manufactured toys themselves were still fairly new, and so, as the inauguration of Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, approached in 1909, the toy industry was hungry to ramp up production of America’s next cuddly plaything—whatever it might be.

That January, President-elect Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta. The big news, for days in advance, was the menu. The Atlanta Chamber of Commerce was going to serve Taft possum and taters, a Southern specialty that one writer of the time described as “the Christmas goose of the epicurean negro.” An opossum, roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, was typically presented whole—head on, pale tail hanging off it like a meaty noodle—with a smaller potato crammed between the animal’s fifty tiny teeth. The one brought to Taft’s table weighed eighteen pounds.

After the meal, the orchestra started to play, and the guests suddenly broke into song while Taft, presumably caught off guard, was presented with a gift. It was a small stuffed opossum toy, beady-eyed and bald-eared. This brand-new creation was intended by a group of local boosters as the William Howard Taft presidency’s answer to the teddy bear. They called it the Billy Possum.

A company, the Georgia Billy Possum Co., was already being formed in Atlanta for large-scale manufacturing of these stuffed animals. According to one account, deals for Billy Possums were being brokered with toy distributors across the country within twenty-four hours of the banquet. (It seems that the company initially experimented with stuffing actual opossum skins, but wound up with something too fleshy-looking and repulsive—like a pale, limp rat.) The
Los Angeles Times
covered the unveiling of the new toy at the Chamber of Commerce banquet and announced, “The Teddy Bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with ‘Billy Possums.’”

A fit of opossum fever began. There were soon Billy Possum postcards, Billy Possum pins, and Billy Possum pitchers for cream at coffee time. There was even a new ragtime tune: “Possum: The Latest Craze.” Real opossums weren’t that common in cities. So a toy shop in Brooklyn ran an in-store promotion with a live, captive opossum, so that children could familiarize themselves with the animal that was primed to “rival the Teddy Bear in popularity.” (“Do not let it be said,” the store’s advertisement read, “that any man, woman or child in Brooklyn has not seen the cute little animal whose name is mentioned more perhaps in all parts of the world to-day than any other.”) At Taft’s inaugural parade, the Georgia delegation was given Billy Possums to wear clipped to their lapels. There were smaller Billy Possums–on-a-stick to wave like flags.

But, despite all this marketing, the life of the Billy Possum turned out to be demoralizingly brief. The toy was a flop, peaking and petering out within months of its introduction that January and almost entirely forgotten by the end of the year. That is, Billy Possum never even made it to Christmastime, a special sort of failure for a toy.

In retrospect, the failure of the Billy Possum can probably be explained two ways. The first is straightforward: opossums are ugly. But the Billy Possum’s backstory was all wrong, too, particularly compared with the teddy bear’s.

Through most of human’s evolutionary history, what has made the bear magnificent in our eyes is the animal’s independence from us—its parallel life as a menace and competitor. But by the time Roosevelt was hunting bears in Mississippi, with the country exterminating its predators from coast to coast, that stature was being crushed. That one black bear, tied to a tree outside Smedes, symbolized the predicament of all bears. The animals now lived or died according to our wants and whims. It said something ominous about the future of bears, but it also raised disquieting questions about who we’d become, if the survival of such a creature was now up to us. The legend of Roosevelt and the bear resonated as an allegory of the confusion that America was only beginning to face. The bear was a helpless victim roped to a tree. The president of the United States decided to show it some mercy.

Taft, on the other hand, ate his opossum for supper. He ate a lot of it, in fact—so much that, after his first several helpings, a doctor seated nearby actually passed him a note, suggesting it might be a good idea if he slowed down. “Well I like possum,” Taft told reporters the next day. “I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep.”

Today a small selection of stuffed opossums has found its way back onto the market. Judging from the reviews I found on Amazon, the toys seem to be mostly bought as gag gifts for people who have had creepy run-ins with actual opossums. One woman explains that the Fiesta Toys ten-inch plush opossum is so realistic-looking that her daughter screamed when she first took it out of the box. “We all love it now,” the woman goes on, “but opossums are not lovable in real life.”

—

A
CENTURY AFTER
R
OOSEVELT
drew the line in Mississippi, the trap that the Center for Biological Diversity was setting for the Bush administration hinged on one question: Was the polar bear a teddy bear or a Billy Possum? How lovable was it? Now that it had been proposed for endangered species status, would the animal whip up enough public sympathy to steer clear of the candidate list and force the administration’s hand, or could it be quietly shunted aside like the Kittlitz’s murrelet? In the end, the answer was more complicated than anyone imagined.

In 2008, the Bush administration did place the polar bear on the endangered species list. It classified the bear as “threatened,” a designation that gives the government more flexibility and doesn’t guarantee the same level of protection for the species that a fully “endangered” one receives. This allowed the administration to write what’s called a 4d rule for the polar bear, an amendment that adjusts how the law will apply to a particular species. The polar bear’s 4d rule was exceptionally dramatic. It asserted that regulating greenhouse gases was outside the bounds of the Endangered Species Act; in this one case, the Fish and Wildlife Service was exempt from addressing the primary threat to an imperiled species. In a press conference, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne explained that he wasn’t about to let a law about animals be “abused to make global warming policies.” The government, finding no way to wiggle out of the corner that the Center for Biological Diversity had backed it into, had looked the environmentalists right in the eye, kicked a ragged hole in the wall, and crawled through it.

An almost incomprehensible carnival of lawsuits kicked off. The Center for Biological Diversity and its partners ginned up several. The first, brought against the government, tried to get rid of the 4d rule by demanding that the bear be listed as endangered and not just threatened (4d rules can be applied only to threatened species). They presented rather embarrassing internal government documents showing that the decision had been politically manipulated, not solely based on the best available science. This, in turn, forced the government—it was the Obama administration by now—to defend the bear’s threatened classification. Surprisingly, at no point in the history of the Endangered Species Act had anyone had to parse the legal difference between “endangered” and “threatened,” and so the government now produced a richly perplexing document that tried to do just that, drawing ephemeral distinctions between phrases like “on the brink of extinction” and “the step just prior to the brink of extinction” that allowed it to define “threatened” in a way that applied perfectly to the polar bear’s situation. Of course, this semantic hair-splitting then had to be rebutted by the Center for Biological Diversity, which offered its own semantic hair-splitting.

By the time I visited Churchill, the whole legal fight had, to my mind, devolved into an existential debate about the nature of time. (If the government defined “endangered” as likely to go extinct, then “threatened” must mean likely to be likely to go extinct. But what does
that
mean? And so on.) As the litigation vanished deeper into this procedural rabbit warren, the media lost interest. It got hard even to remember the Center for Biological Diversity’s original goals: to get America thinking seriously about climate change; to get the Endangered Species Act and the entire national project of conservation that it enables to start addressing, or just acknowledging, climate change as the game-changing, environmental challenge of our time; to begin to imagine how it will undermine or downright shatter the work of conservationists who, having fought to keep imperiled species swaddled safely inside their native habitats, will now watch the habitats themselves change, or fall out from under the animals entirely, like the sea ice under the bears.

The polar bear, really, was just a prop to underscore the problem of climate change—a problem that, if left unaddressed, begs the question of whether addressing anything else is worthwhile. But now everyone had been yanked into a frothing, bottomless argument about the prop itself. Six years after she’d filed the original petition to list the bear, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kassie Siegel was in a federal court in Washington arguing the definitions of “endangered” and “threatened” again when, finally, the judge asked her: “What does all that mean in the real world?”

THE CONNECTION

O
ne afternoon, I rented a truck and drove outside town to see a dog breeder named Brian Ladoon. It was a bleak day, even for Churchill. Clouds lumped in the sky like smoke, and wind charged off the crumpling gray slate of the bay.

Ladoon was born in Churchill and has lived here most of his life. The previous week, he’d finished third out of three candidates in Churchill’s mayoral election. (His platform was to shut down the town every winter, charter a big jet, and fly everyone somewhere tropical. He got thirty-five votes.) He’s played a big role in reviving a rare breed of dog, called the Canadian Eskimo dog, and keeps his stock of about 140 animals on a sloping tract of coastline, far off the area’s one actual road, behind the old military radar domes. People call the area Mile 5. The dogs are chained to stakes down near the water, where a dirt trail empties into a wide bulb of rocky land. I could hear them baying and howling when I pulled up. Offshore, the rusted wreck of a ship called the
MV Ithaca,
which ran aground in 1960, tilted out of Hudson Bay. It was an austere scene, and as I took it in through the windshield of my truck, a school bus full of tourists suddenly pulled away and a preposterously big polar bear came into view behind it. The bear was walking alongside a blue hatchback, dwarfing it.

Every fall, a gang of male bears, said to be the largest in the population, hang out at Mile 5, attracted by the dog food. They roam the rocky spit while the dogs cluster together and bark and shriek to challenge them. Ladoon charges tourists who come to see the bears—sometimes $40 per hour per person, I heard; sometimes just a bottle of rum. During bear season, he’s here every day, patrolling the dirt trails in his black pickup, chain-smoking Marlboros, and doing his best to keep the animals from getting too close to the cars of his customers. In town, an acquaintance of Ladoon’s had told me, “He thinks he can talk to the bears. He thinks they understand him.”

Ladoon was expecting me. He got out to undo the chain he keeps slung between two posts as a gate. Then, motioning for me to stay put in my vehicle, he turned around, unzipped his pants, and took a piss. He is fifty-seven and was dressed all in black, with dark, narrow eyes, a white goatee, and long white-silver hair that was kept matted against his head by a black leather headband. Eventually, he cleared off his passenger seat and I got in.

The place is essentially a tumbledown, drive-through safari, and the disorderliness of it was only heightened by this imperturbable guy in the weird headband claiming to have everything under control. “I make sure the bears don’t molest the people, and the people don’t get themselves grabbed,” he told me as we resumed his rounds. Soon a bear rose up from the roadside and walked toward his side of the truck. “That’s a twelve-hundred-pounder right off the hoof, eh?” Ladoon said casually. He slapped his horn twice, but the bear kept coming. When it got within a few feet, Ladoon leaned out his window, revved his engine, and shouted at the animal. His stoner drawl exploded into a deep, low growl. He said, “No, you asshole!”

At that, the bear dropped its head. Instantly, all menace drained out of the animal. I watched it lope away, lie on its stomach, cross its paws into a cushion, and slump its head in them. The bear kept eyeing us, but it looked chastened, like a dog who’d been bad. It was amazing. “He knows,” Ladoon said softly. “He knows.” Often, he told me, all he has to do is pump the action on his shotgun and most bears will back up at the sound of it—he’s got them “trained.” Ladoon grinned at his weapon in between our two seats and the rounds of cracker shells and rubber bullets. “They know there could be anything coming after that,” he said. “You know what I mean? ‘Here comes the salad, boys! First course!’”

It was an open secret in town that Ladoon was also keeping the bears in check by feeding them, which is illegal. He adamantly denied it. But even friends of Ladoon’s, like Paul Ratson and Dennis Compayre, discussed this with me freely. (Ladoon also explained his bear-feeding regimen to
Canadian Geographic
magazine in 1997.) Biologists I met in Churchill tended to regard him as a low-life bear-baiter who uses his dogs as a front to keep collecting payments at his gate; they worry that he’s teaching the bears to associate humans and dogs with food, which will lead to more encounters and conflict. But many locals just see Ladoon as an eccentric, if unflattering, fact of small-town life. Churchill’s mayor, Mike Spence, suggested I bring my daughter, Isla, to Mile 5 when she and my wife got to town. “It’s like a Sunday drive through the park, so to speak,” Spence said. “She’ll be amazed at how big the bears are.”

As we drove, Ladoon explained that wildlife photographers and camera crews have been coming to photograph and film bears at his dog yard since the eighties. He bragged that some of the world’s most recognizable polar bear pictures, including several magazine and book covers, originated here, and began to explain why the particular access to polar bears he provides is so invaluable.

As photographers discovered Churchill in the eighties and nineties, they also discovered stock agencies and magazines with a large appetite for their polar bear pictures. But eventually, with the advent of digital photography, it no longer took skill to capture a white bear in a white landscape at the right exposure—anyone could do it. By now, one photographer told me, “Polar bears have been photographed to death.” So many photographers shot bears in Churchill that they’d nearly obliterated the demand for those pictures, just as hunters can shoot so many animals they obliterate the supply. More important, photo editors found that they could afford to be picky, and that so many of the pictures pouring out of the town looked identical and somehow wrong. They all peered down on polar bears from the high deck of a Tundra Buggy, minimizing the animal. And their backgrounds were laced with Tundra Buggy tire tracks and dirt roads, spoiling the image of polar bears as lonely rogues in a wide and desolate wilderness.

At Ladoon’s, though, the bears turned up just as reliably as in the viewing area where the buggies go, and could be photographed more intimately, at eye level, or even looking up into their harrowing faces. And the property looked pristine and varied. Ladoon is an artist himself—he used to devote a lot of time to painting. From his truck, he started pointing out to me the different backdrops that he offers to photographers: the shoreline, the frozen ponds, the bear trails that wind through the willows. He was the curator of all these real-life landscape paintings for the polar bears to wander in and out of. “There’s so many theaters,” he said, “so many dynamics that can happen in each theater.” What had looked to me a minute ago like bleak and formless nature now resembled a Hollywood back lot. Here photographers could capture polar bears exactly as the public expected to see them.

The more professional photographers I met in Churchill, the more I realized that a good wildlife photograph or film, or at least a marketable one, does just this: shows us an image of nature that’s already lodged in our heads.
*
However, our imaginative sense of an animal is so powerful that it can also change what we see in pictures.

The German photographer Norbert Rosing first met Brian Ladoon in 1988. He would spend virtually every bear season in Churchill for the next twenty years, often photographing the bears at Ladoon’s dog yard. (Rosing told me that he’s never seen Ladoon feed the bears intentionally but that the polar bears clearly swipe their share of the dogs’ food.) Late one afternoon in 1991, Rosing watched a bear slink hesitantly toward one of Ladoon’s dogs. Its posture went soft. It lofted its right paw in the air, toward the top of the dog’s head, like an old man patting a child. Gradually, the dog got comfortable and approached the bear. Soon the two animals were hugging—actually hugging—with the dog straining on its chain to nuzzle its neck against the bear’s, and the bear enclosing the dog with its fluffy forearm. Ladoon had told Rosing about this bear, which periodically turned up to “play” with the dogs. But Rosing hadn’t believed him. The animals carried on until, finally, the bear was sprawled on its back in the snow, peering up, gazing into the dog’s eyes.

In 1994, Rosing sold a series of photographs to
National Geographic
, documenting this entire play session. Immediately, he was besieged by angry faxes and phone calls. The public image of the polar bear was still what it had been a decade earlier, when National Geographic broadcast
Polar Bear Alert
:
a fierce killer that terrified mothers in the middle of the night and assaulted cameramen in cages. People assumed the dog had been chained up as bait for the white monster—clearly, the bear wasn’t playing, but springing a sinister trap; it must have gored the dog right after Rosing’s last shot. No one wanted to see the photos, Rosing told me. “People just couldn’t believe it.” After a while, he put the pictures away.

Thirteen years later, the pictures found their way onto the Web site of a public radio show in Minnesota. It was the summer of 2007 now—polar bear fever, brought on by the endangered species list petition, was peaking. The bear had been transformed in people’s minds. It was adorable now, defenseless—less like a marauder and more like a teddy bear, an animal that
would
be inclined to play. “Now people feel they can touch and pet bears,” Rosing told me, “because they’re just so nice, so cute, so curious.” And because the polar bear looked different, the pictures looked different, too. The same photos that had reviled people in 1994 now touched them. They rapidly racked up three million views on the radio show’s Web site, then spurted around the Internet, where they’ve cheerfully blossomed in all kinds of contexts since.

Recently, a friend forwarded me a chain e-mail he’d received from a woman he described as “literally a friend of a friend of a friend’s grandmother” in the Midwest. Inside the e-mail were Rosing’s photos of the bear and dog, cuddling in a corner of Ladoon’s dog yard. “It’s hard to believe this polar bear only needed to hug someone!” the e-mail read. “May you always have love to share, health to spare, and friends that care.”

—

I
T WAS A
T
HURSDAY
—Ladoon had forgotten—and that meant that his hired hands, two young guys named Caleb and Jeremy, had run into town to fetch the week’s dog food: thirty-three hundred pounds of frozen chicken necks and by-products. There were slabs of the stuff, each the size of a small tabletop, stacked in the back of the boys’ pickup. It needed to be transferred to Ladoon’s vehicle. They also had a dog to chain back up with the others.

It was a high-wire act. At one point, as Jeremy stepped out of the truck cradling the dog to his chest, a polar bear began galloping down the road, attracted to the smell of the food, probably, or of the dog. Or of Jeremy. Ladoon had to jerk our vehicle into reverse to intercept it. As he swung my side of the truck in front of the animal, I saw gelatinous ropes of slobber swinging from its mouth. The bear stopped short, groping for another angle. Ladoon only nodded disapprovingly and said, “He’s off the bear-ometer.”

When it was all done, we returned to the gate and found a blue SUV idling between Ladoon’s chain posts. The driver had slipped through without paying. The same animal that had made a go at Jeremy now stood a few feet away, perched with all four paws contracted under the fat jumble of its body, like a circus animal posing on a barrel. A white-haired woman in the passenger seat was taking pictures of it. I watched as she began to lean through the open window just slightly, extending her lens, then her face, through that last intangible boundary between her space and the bear’s.

“Who the hell are these guys?” Ladoon said. He was about to scold them when the polar bear straightened up and took a single, vaulting step toward the woman, instantly cutting the distance between them by half. The woman reacted late—very late. I watched her hands flub around under the window for whatever button or crank would shut it.

Now the bear skirted around to face the SUV head-on. It stood on its two back legs and raised its front paws. Then it leaned forward and fell, its paws thwacking into the hood. “That’s a rental vehicle,” Ladoon said. His voice was perfectly measured, as though he were thinking about only what a headache this would be for the woman who owned Churchill’s rental-car business. And yet Ladoon was simultaneously revving his engine, cranking his pickup into a shuddering W-shaped turn, and hammering his horn.

The road was so narrow that he had no room to maneuver and scare the animal away. So he gunned straight ahead and kept driving, slapping his hand against the outside of his door to lure the bear and clear the area. Turning quickly, I saw it and another polar bear clomping after us. Then I heard a thud and felt our truck bobble on its suspension.

One of the bears had hurled itself onto the back of our truck. It was going for the blocks of frozen chicken in the backseat. “He almost got it.” Jeremy laughed. “He got one tooth on it, but slipped!”

Ladoon fumed. He clearly wanted to do some hollering. But by the time he drove back to the gate to scold the people, the SUV was gone. “These bears aren’t cute,” he later explained. “Look how big these fuckers are! Everybody wants to get close to the bears. Well, there’s a time to get close to the bears and there’s a time to—you know—maybe stay
far away
from the bears.”

Eventually, I found out who the older woman in the SUV was: Margie Carroll, an ebullient, retired schoolteacher from Georgia who’d come to Churchill to sell copies of her self-published children’s book
Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish.
I met Carroll later, when I was invited to dinner at one of Polar Bear International’s rental houses in town; Carroll was a friend of the organization and was staying there. After dinner, she scurried upstairs and returned with another of her books,
A Busy Spring for Grandella the Gray Fox,
and read most of the book to our end of the table out loud, in her melodious Southern accent, rambling into extemporaneous asides when they occurred to her. On one page, for example, the father fox brings his children something to eat. The text reads, “Daddy is such a good hunter,” and all the characters peek hungrily down at the ground near the father’s feet. Carroll pointed out how she’d stopped short of showing the mangled prey; the characters only stare at blank space. “I wanted to show the family unit nurturing the children,” she explained, “but I didn’t want to have a bloody bunny saying, ‘Help me!’” She understood that nature is violent, but felt that violence worked at cross-purposes here. Kids need to see that animals’ lives are enriched by the same family values as their own, she said, and that wildlife therefore deserves our compassion. She was an heir to Ernest Thompson Seton, in short. “I wanted to show children to value nature. Don’t just go kill something! It’s part of a family,” Carroll said. Then she flipped to the next page.