Zoo in the head

Monday morning Penguin: When life gives you lemons...

First Penguin edition, 1963.

From the back cover:

Anything could happen on a frontier planet, and Pyrrus was a shining example. Every form of non-human life, flora and fauna, mutation upon mutation, had combined with the impossible weather, the earthquakes, and the volcanoes to become a deadly weapon ... for the extermination of man. The Pyrran settlers had developed superhuman strength and reactions and had imported the most modern aids to warfare, but the odds were too heavy against them. Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, had allowed and even helped himself to get sucked into the fray without realizing that to relax your guard for a split second was one split second too many. Appalled by the conditions, he fought a single-handed war, not only with the planet but against its murder-minded people, to stop the carnage and bring peace to the war-torn outpost. To say it was hard would be a galactic understatement.

What Jason discovers is that the planet's life-forms have all evolved psi powers: their hostility and aggression only reflect the feelings of the humans they meet.

Zoos: Feeling the love

 

Guy the Gorilla, photographed by Wolf Suschitzky. Almost certainly in breach of copyright.

BELOVED GIRAFFE AT ZOO ON THE MEND reads the headline on the Boston Globe website. (The subheading is only slightly less heartwarming: "Overcomes urinary obstruction, but risky surgery still possible". My invariable advice to young journalists is, Avoid urine in headlines.)

Leaving aside the details of his condition, let's think about Beau the giraffe's status: beloved. Zoo animals are quite often beloved — Knut the polar bear, Guy the gorilla, any number of pandas, and so on all the way back to Jumbo the elephant and Obaysch the hippo in Victoria's reign. What does that mean? That their names appear in the media, that children clamour to see them, or at any rate parents assume they're who the children want to see, that their photograph is taken often, and any health problem becomes a minor public drama. It is a shallow sort of love, devoid of intimacy, knowledge, real consideration. When Jumbo was sold to P. T. Barnum in 1882, the public was incensed (letters to the press, angry leading articles, a popular song) that he was being removed from his "little wife", Alice, though the pair had never even shared quarters.

Some zoo animals are regarded with benevolent indifference; they are never hated. Most entertainments have their villain: even among clowns at the circus there'll be one who is less likeable, or more dislikeable. But zoos are all about positive feeling. Nobody boos the tigers or the gibbons; at worst you'll experience a shudder at something invertebrate. The closest thing to a villain is us — or rather, not us, we're nice people, but them, those other people who are not so kind to animals: the people the signs are aimed at, who wake the animals in the nocturnal house, howl at the monkeys and chuck litter in the hippos' pool; and the people who do all that logging and poaching that endangers species. Last time I was at the Bronx Zoo, a display about the evils of tiger-poaching included a Land Rover bearing the logo "Evil Incorporated".

I've encountered similar attitudes outside zoos: the park ranger at Haggerston who, haranguing me after my dog killed a squirrel, said "I love everything in nature." (I didn't have the nerve to ask her if that included slugs, rats, and plague bacilli, but let's assume for the sake of argument that I did and she looked pretty foolish.) I'm not recommending that we hate animals; but that sort of worldview — where every species pleases, and only man is vile — is too simplistic to be healthy; it stops you knowing anything. Owning a dog has extinguished in me whatever there was of the dog-lover: I'm too aware now of dogs as individuals, some pleasant, some not.

It's not as if being beloved does animals any good. Knut, as I've mentioned before, was reportedly warped by adulation into a narcissistic psychopath with severe sexual dysfunction; he drowned in his pool, aged four, while suffering encephalitis. Jumbo suffered fits of insanity, which is why they sold him to Barnum. Loving something, or someone, is fine. It's not a substitute for thinking about them.

 

 

Zoo news: Woofs on the loose

The first in a long while, I know. Telegraph TV has the scoop:

So much to enjoy here: "three or four woofs", "I'm gonna say the word 'mature'", and "Wild animals that you see on TV" for starters.

youtube users have left some valuable comments. AMANDATHEAWESOMEone says "OH MY GOD, I STILL CAN'T GET OVER IT. ALL OF THOSE EXOTIC ANIMALS BEING SHOT. THEY DIDN'T CHOOSE TO BE THERE! THEY DON'T DESERVE THAT!!!"

leprokahn138 counters: "I live off of Mt. Perry Road.. 7 miles away from where this happened, Look, this is America, and RIGHT HERE, is hickville USA, ALL OF THOSE animals WILL BE KILLED, that is a FACT, Americans think of nothing else other than FEAR when it comes to things like these ... Dont wrap your emotions into something that wont turn out the way you want it to, Go on with your life, worry about yourself, it sucks, but its true... I WILL SHOOT TO KILL!!!!"

I believe you, leprokahn, I really do.

UPDATE: The story is far more grim than I realized - it is reported that Terry Thompson, owner of the Muskingum County Animal Farm, set his animals loose then killed himself. Forty-eight animals were shot dead, including 18 Bengal tigers (perspective: the Bengal is the most numerous of the six surviving subspecies of tiger; but the most optimistic estimate of the total wild tiger population is 6,000). The other animals shot were: 17 lions, six black bears, two grizzlies, a baboon, a wolf and three mountain lions. Six animals were captured alive: a grizzly bear, three leopards, and two monkeys. Another monkey was eaten by one of the big cats.

Hyenas: I forgot

The letterbox extrudes a new issue of the London Review of Books, which contains the following letter:

Much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s poem ‘Hyena’, I must point out that he has his hyenas crossed. The ‘giggle’ and pack behaviour referred to in the final stanza suggests the spotted (or ‘laughing’) hyena, but the first stanza (white mane, grey face, bat ears) describes the striped hyena, a solitary animal which does not ‘laugh’.

Mikita Brottman
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore

Which was the point that started me off on the poem, until I got distracted by falanoucs. Not much point doing zoology if you're not going to bother getting it right.

Penguin: Dogs in space

However commonplace the shapes in which it may become incarnate, health always has a strong, attractive influence on man. And the fact is, Niki's story is hardly more than a faithful account of her health. And we are now dealing with a period in Niki's life when the charm of youth reinforced that condition of health which, even by itself, is so seductive; a period, in short, when what pleases us is precisely that quality which is, in reality, still wanting, to wit the imminent perfection of body and mind. The awkward and exaggerated movements which sometimes miss their aim and make us smile; the avid curiosity which sends the nose questing into everything, but ready to be withdrawn with a sneeze of alarm; the awkwardness, clumsiness, excessive freedom sometimes manifest and all symbolic of the strength and suppleness to come - all these things compose a spectacle so reassuring that even experience and embittered age may well see in it a denial of its pessimistic prophesyings.

A thing I didn't expect when we got our dog was how much pleasure and pride I would take in his prowess - his strength and speed and nimbleness, not to mention the joy he radiates when showing them off (Blake: "Exuberance is beauty"); I'm like a dad at sports day. People talk a lot about a dog's mental or emotional qualities (gentleness, loyalty, obedience, or their contraries) but in the end it's mostly a physical thing. Dogs are unselfconscious about their movements, their bodies, to an inhuman degree; perhaps that make us more conscious of those things - filling the gap the dogs have left. In any case, we love them for it. Among people, physical affection - that is, affection for the body, as well as expressed with the body - so often gets muddled up with sex; our love of dogs can be purer than that (but some time we're going to have to talk about J. R. Ackerley).

At the heart of Niki is the most authentic fictional account that I've read of a dog's body, and the effect it has on humans. (The Call of the Wild is good on Buck's transformation from pampered housepet to überwolf, but necessarily over-dramatized.) The book is also a sharp political allegory. It was first published in Hungary in 1956, shortly before the revolution and Soviet intervention, and set a few years before, during the early days of Communist rule. Niki's owners, the Ancsas, are loyal party members, and Mr. Ancsa's enthusiasm for the new state, and for the role he plays as an engineer in its building, is explicitly compared to Niki's enthusiasm for life; the loving discipline they impose on her is contrasted with the harsher, more arbitrary role of the party in their lives:

The abuse of power, baleful vice of kings, leaders, dictators, directors, heads of departments, secretaries, shepherds, cowherds, and swineherds, heads of families, pedagogues, elder brothers, of old and young in what authority so-ever, this stench, this sickness, this source of infection, peculiar to man and unknown to any other carnivore, even the bloodiest, this curse and blasphemy, this war and cholera, was a thing unknown in the Ancsas' house. No pointless constraint was placed on Niki's freedom.

Mr. Ancsa vanishes - to prison, his wife eventually discovers. With his departure, Niki's abundant health begins to fade, her decline a commentary on the slow death of her masters' ideals, their hope, and perhaps more than a commentary: dogs take so much of their feeling from us; perhaps the death of hope is what kills Niki.

This is the 1961 Penguin edition (the only one I know of) - drawing by Barry Driscoll. For comparison, here is the cover of the current New York Review Books edition:

Wrong dog - Niki is supposed to be a pure white fox terrier with brown ears - but it gets the spirit rather better than Driscoll, whose drawing is in a tacky English tradition of comically pathetic dogs. Same translation as the Penguin, by Edward Hyams (a very interesting character - novelist, journalist, historian of wine, gardening, political assassination and terrorism, anti-nuclear campaigner, pioneering ecologist. He wrote several books on soil, in particular the failure of fertility: A Prophecy of Famine was co-written with H. J. Massingham, who I'll talk about some time). 

My Penguin copy set me back 99p plus p&p on eBay, which turns out to be a bargain: six or seven quid is usual, and there are sharks out there trying to pretend it's a rarity and charging £15 and up. The NYRB, with an introduction by the excellent George Szirtes, may be better value.

Post dedicated to Tim Dee, who introduced me to Niki, and who had a birthday last week. Many happy etc.

Wow. Just, wow.

Christopher Tayler offers 10 of the weirdest sentences in David Brooks's The Social Animal. The one with most relevance to this blog's areas of interest runs:

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellent.

But every one of them has something - fallacy, solecism, outright meaninglessness - to marvel at.

Sad saga of a rabbit

This is Pixie, our mini rex rabbit (though the "mini" part of the name is misleading: she is to my eyes a very imposing rabbit). Apologies to anybody who feels this blog is getting sidetracked - too many domestic pets, not enough zoos - but it's all part of the same problem, viz., how humans stand in relation to animals. Also, I'm looking for advice.

At the beginning of the summer Pixie developed a large blackish lump on her chest. A vet told us that it was a tumour, that in rabbits such tumours  grow aggressively, and that she likely had no more than a week or two weeks left to her. Our sadness was offset by relief: already we were worrying about reconciling the rabbit to a whippet; besides, we said, Pixie's quality of life in our tiny paved garden was not high, especially since the death of her sister Minnie (found stark cold and rigid in the hutch one morning 18 months earlier). So that was all settled.

But come the beginning of August, the whippet due and holidays imminent, she was flourishing. We decided to take her with us to the country, sure she wouldn't last the month. The first afternoon in Norfolk we let her loose to roam in the large garden, and that was that. Over the next four weeks we caught sight of her almost daily - hanging about with the local wild rabbits, grazing the lawn, sometimes poking her head inside her hutch to eat food we left there for her. But she wouldn't come back. Daily, I worried that I would stumble on her corpse, torn apart by a fox or a stoat; myxomatosis was a lurking possibility; and there was still the tumour. She seemed indestructible, though. I'm wary of words like "free" and "happy", which can easily be taken to imply degrees of selfconsciousness animals aren't capable of. Still, Pixie seemed happy to be free: she looked lean and fit and had a spring in her step, and she certainly wouldn't let us catch her, or even pet her. (Of course, the whippet's presence was a complicating factor: the sight of her flicked a switch in his brain that said "Chase".)

Come September we set off home without her, reasoning that the first cold weather would see her off, or make the local predators that bit hungrier. But reports kept coming back to us that she was doing well - had dug herself a burrow, was seen sunning herself on the lawn; and now the neighbours have complained that Pixie is laying waste to their carefully cultivated garden. I have promised to travel up to Norfolk to do something - fencing off the gardens effectively is impractical, so catching her and taking her to the vet to be done away with seems the only option. Here's where the advice comes in: how do I catch a large, fast-moving and manoeuvrable rabbit? Humanely for preference, but I'm not sure I can afford to be fussy.

The beautiful people

Apparently, our shabby street is now one of the coolest addresses in London - word has even spread to America - and the noisy pub on the corner is the place where the beautiful people go (I can think of a better word for them).

It seems that, willy-nilly, I am on my way to becoming one of these beautiful people. Further evidence arrives in the shape of Timmy - pictured above, on the landing outside my office: I thought I was buying into a world of flat-caps, racing pigeons and carefully nursed halves of mild, but it turns out that whippets are deeply fashionable, and I may as well have got myself a waxed moustache and a fixed-gear bike. Bugger. 

On the bright side, Timmy seems to make everybody in our house happier. As I write, he is curled up at my feet, darting occasional glances of love and hunger at me. Who would not melt?

They're barely visible in this photograph, but Timmy has some of the markings J. R. Ackerley describes on the face of his Alsatian bitch in My Dog Tulip:

"...Jet, too are the rims of her amber eyes, as though heavily mascara'd, and the tiny mobile eyebrow tufts that are set like accents above them. And in the midst of her forehead is a kind of Indian caste-mark, a black diamond suspended there, like the jewel on the brow of Pegasus in Mantegna's 'Parnassus', by a fine dark thread, no more than a pencilled line, which is drawn from it right over her poll midway between the tall ears. A shadow extends across her forehead from either side of this caste-mark, so that, in certain lights, the diamond looks like the body of a bird with its wings spread, a bird in flight."

His eyes remind me of Chaplin's, a resemblance that tells you more about Charlie than it does about Timmy. It hard to describe a dog's character without drifting into anthropomorphism, but I would say that Timmy is mostly gentle, often obedient, and surprisingly intelligent, so that it is easy to forget, at least for a few moments, how exclusively doggy his real interests are: other dogs' bottoms, other dogs' shit, chasing and killing small animals, eating anything that can be detached from the pavement. His personal habits are revolting, but their logic and simplicity are pleasing. The best thing is watching him sprint through the park, the muscles distinct under his fur; Michaelangelo would have enjoyed drawing him.

New creatures rape your face

A friend who knows of my interest in zoos sent me a link to this disturbing video:

The comments on youtube are variously horrified and gloating. One viewer says "The monkey takes the phrase 'I'M GONNA RAPE YOUR FACE' to a WHOLE new level." That's a phrase? Apparently it is: type it into Google and be amazed by the wealth of face-raping references that come up (including, prominently, the lyrics of the song "Hybrid Moment" by the horror-punk group The Misfits, which is where I found the headline for this post). More sensibly, another commenter says "This is how you get genital warts."

It's not a monkey, of course: a chimpanzee is an ape (and it does seem to be a chimp, not its - our - cousin, the bonobo); I haven't been able to identify the species of frog. The video was shot, according to the caption, at Honololulu Zoo on 11 November 2004, but has only recently gone viral. It raises a number of issues. One is a point that I've made before: zoos are not hermetically sealed; animals get out, other animals get in, scavengers, predators and - presumably the frog's case - passers by; a zoo is a small eco-system. The second issue is our notion that zoos are suitable entertainment for children. Yes, they love to see the giraffes and the elephants and the funny monkeys, but if you hang around a zoo for any length of time you're bound to see a fair amount of shitting and fucking, and even some dying (though that's one bit of business zoos mostly manage to keep offstage). I'm not worried about children watching animals mate - if they're going to know about the birds and the bees, they may as well get the lions and the baboons along the way. But there are other behaviours that aren't so obviously necessary to their education; face-raping frogs sits firmly in this category, and I'm mildly perturbed by the sound of children giggling at the spectacle.

A bigger question is, what do we make of the chimpanzee's behaviour? That's really two questions. First, is this normal behaviour for chimps or a zoo-bred pathology? Some animals, such as lions, tend to fuck neurotically in captivity, and it has been suggested that this may be part of what's going on with the  bonobos, who are famous for supposedly resolving conflict through sensuality rather than, as is the case with chimps, through violence (for an overview of the whole sexy bonobo/vicious chimp myth, see Ian Parker's 2007 New Yorker article "Swingers"). Then again, lots of animals masturbate; my guess is that a young male chimp will try anything with a hole in it. I'll try to find some literature on this some time. Second, why do we humans react the way we do? Many of the youtube commenters see the chimp as perverted or cruel, a rapist, which suggests that they are anthropomorphising too much. I don't say that you should never anthropomorphise. For instance, it's clear that the great apes, at least, are capable of a degree of empathy with suffering, which is the main prerequisite to cruelty; all the same, I doubt that this chimpanzee has any real sense that the frog is suffering. But "perverted", "rapist" - these are human terms, implying some buried assumption that animals should stick to human sexual norms.

You could concentrate on a slightly less worrying aspect of all this: the apparent indifference of young mammals to the usual barriers between species - in particular, their willingness to play with other species. Here's something to take the froggy taste away:

Wild in the city

Should have mentioned this a few days ago: I have some thoughts on urban nature posted over at the LRB blog. While you're there, read Christopher Tayler on his father's death, memory, film and Google Street View (read everything else, of course: but read that first).