Marmaduke (left) and Isadora (right) in a postcopulatory moment
For forty-one years I have been intensely fond of her. Then one morning last week, I found her lying on the wood chips of her terrarium, frozen in mid crawl, her eyes closed tight and oddly withered into her leathery, beaky skull. Neither prodding nor cooing nor a soak in a dish of tepid water elicited the hoped for wriggle of the neck or the twitch of a scaly leg. Isadora at long last had died, though I can still scarcely believe it.
It was the spring of 1969 when I’d first got her, sending away for her from a mail order pets ad at the back of a comic book. I was a small boy living in suburban Toronto. I had wanted a friend for my box turtle Marmaduke, whom I had acquired two years before in the pet section of a brand new department store, in a new shopping plaza that had just superimposed itself onto the sleepy, Upper Canadian streetscape of my small town home. I still remember sealing my five American dollars into an envelope and dropping it into the red void of the corner mailbox.
As if by magic, a couple of weeks later, a package arrived, postmarked Hermosa Beach, California, an impossibly exotic sounding place at an impossibly exotic southerly latitude. I imagined a place full of Flintstones style houses and curly-fronded palm trees, (which was not far from the truth as I found out many years later) I carefully cut through the packing tape, lifted off the lid of the little carton and caught my first glimpse of her exquisite horn-colored shell. She’d sealed herself in, the way box turtles do, barricading her soft bits behind her hinged plastron to wait out the long, bumpy journey into uncertain future.
Of course turtles might not have a sense of the future. But they live so very long. Perhaps life for them is some kind of infinitely extended present. It took over an hour for her to relax just enough to give me a glimpse of her mottled head. For the longest time , even the smallest movement would cause her to pull it back into her shell with a hiss of expelled air as its horny scutes snapped closed again.
It was my mother who named her Isadora, though no one remembers why. Isadora remained shy throughout her life. She was already an adult when she arrived. No doubt she was traumatized, wrested perhaps from some peaceful forest glade by some gruff collector. I hadn’t thought about her provenance at that time, but to acquire a wild-caught turtle now would be unthinkably immoral, given the imperiled state of turtles world wide. After she’d settled down, she would range the perimeter of my bedroom during the day and nap in a corner or bask for awhile in a pool of ephemeral sunlight. In warm weather, I would take her (and the rather libidinous Marmaduke) into the yard to feast on earthworms and sun-softened fruit. The pair of them would spend the nights and cold spells sequestered in their terrarium, which, with the aid of a ramp, they could enter and leave at will.
And so it went on through the decades. I grew up fast and by seventeen left home, but I took my turtles with me almost everywhere, even mailing them to myself on occasions when I had to cross the continent. Over the years, they have shared the hovels, artist lofts, apartments and houses I have lived in, seeing me through the highs and lows of my with their somber reptilian eyes – Isadora’s a warm brown and Marmaduke’s flaming red. Despite their steadfast attempts at procreation, it makes me sad to think that I was never able to successfully incubate a single one of the leathery eggs Isadora laid. Somehow they always shriveled up on me, despite the elaborate contrivances I came up with to keep them warm.
I’m not sure how, or if, box turtles grieve. Right now, Marmaduke is methodically devouring a ramekin of organic dog food after which he will probably bask under his heat lamp for a while before retiring beneath the book shelf for a couple of days of napping. Meanwhile, the relentless Pacific rain pounds against the window of my room and the corpse of his mate of forty-one years lies buried under a hazel tree in the yard. Everything must end, I suppose, even the lives of a very old turtle, although exactly how old she was remains uncertain. She might have been as old as twenty when she came into my care all those many years ago. So goodbye Isadora, my shy and ancient friend. A long time ago, you crawled out of the soft earth somewhere as a little hatchling, packed in your own armored suitcase to make your way with in this world. Thank-you for spending so much of your time with me. May you have the sweetest turtle dreams. You will always be in my heart.
more biospheric automobile absorption – Cortes Island, BC
No matter how much destruction we wreak, there are processes of regeneration lying in wait that are quietly evolving around us, or biding their time until we turn our backs. It’s as if the earth has a sentient biological field that sucks up our poisons and smothers the detritus of our civilization so that life itself can go on. Though it’s quite likely that we will precipitate the extinction of our own species along with the countless others we have already wiped out, the bio-field will survive, as it must. It is the immune system of the planet and the signs of it are everywhere if you know where to look. Regular readers will know I’ve long been interested in ruderal ecologies, which evolve when we stop maintaining architectural landscapes and they gradually transform into habitat for a range of pioneering organisms such as ragweed, coyotes and Ailanthus trees. Lately though, I’ve been tracking the absorption of various mass produced objects into the bio-field, some long discarded, others still in daily use. The shiny, manufactured surfaces we so fetishize are little match for the relentless progression of slimes, films and crusts that soon moves in to obscure them. Yet there is something magnificent in these ancient, incremental processes. Life on earth has a future. And it’s far beyond us.
One of my earliest and most cherished childhood memories is of lying back on the rear seat of my parents’ thrumming Buick, never having known the restraint of a car seat or a safety belt and gazing up through the rear window as great leafy vaults of deciduous trees passed overhead, interspersed now and then by flashes of golden, late afternoon sunshine. I remember the sharp smell of the road dust and the orange glint of an oriole, clinging to its bag-like nest, high in an overhanging bough. For me, these childhood memories of shimmering tree tunnels are the archetype of summer; languid yet ephemeral and intensely poignant; all the more so knowing as I do that the trees and the bucolic dirt roads they overshadowed were obliterated by Toronto’s urban sprawl just a few years after I first experienced them. But even before the onslaught of cul de sacs and strip malls, the landscape of my childhood was changing. As I blissfully dozed on that vast bench seat, there were elm trees all around me getting silently infected by Dutch Elm disease. Within a decade or so their massive viridian canopies stood leafless and rattling against the Ontario sky like the withered tentacles of giant squids for whom the sea had suddenly drained away.
50 years before the great dying of the elms, an even more widespread and perhaps more consequential tree extirpation was underway. This was demise of the American Chestnut(Castanea dentata), once a key component of the hardwood forest zone that stretches from southern Ontario through the Appalachians into the American South. The American chestnut, which by some accounts comprised up to 25% of these predominantly deciduous forests, was almost completely extirpated by a fungal blight, mistakenly introduced to North America via the importation of a few Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima) trees to the Bronx. The disease spread virulently through the highly susceptible American species and within a few decades, millions had died, changing the character of the Eastern forests forever. Yet here and there a few clung to life, protected because they grew in places somehow inaccessible to the blight’s spores or because they had quirky genetics, which rendered them partial immune to the rampant epidemic. Since the peak of the blight, these genetically endowed survivors have been sought out by plant breeders who have been crossing them with Chinese chestnuts in the hopes of developing trees that combine the lofty growth of the American tree with the disease resistance of their compact Chinese parents. Progress has been slow but steady and the successful progeny of these breeding trials have been being planted in parks and arboretums for some years now, sponsered primarily by the American and Canadian Chestnut societies.
The loss of the American Chestnut was a colossal blow not only to the biodiversity of their habitat (their nuts were a key food source for the now extinct Passenger Pigeon) but to the human food supply as well. Chestnuts are similar in food value to grains and also contain significant quantities of Vitamin C yet they don’t need the intense inputs of energy and resources demanded every year by most cereal crops. Once trees are established, the only labor is to harvest nuts once a year and perhaps thin competing trees here and there to maintain the health of the grove. J. Russell Smith describes traditional European agroforestry systems base on chestnuts in his classic (1929) Tree Crops – A Permanent Agriculture; a book he wrote in response to the contemporaneous collapse of the American agriculture system at the start of the Great Depression. Smith extols the virtues of these perennial tree-based ‘permacultures’ and recounts a level of prosperity and leisure in the nut growing areas, unthinkable to the misery inflicted grain farmers of the Dust Bowl era. In addition to the market value of the nuts themselves, Smith describes the exceptional quality and desirability of the pork fattened on nuts left behind under the trees after the harvest. In this day and age, given the amount of arable land devoted to corn, which is in turn fed to cattle and pigs, it seems to make a lot sense to switch, at least partially, to animal food sourced from such sustainable, tree-based permacultures. This would also provide added benefits such as enhanced wildlife habitat, the protection of watersheds and carbon sequestration. A recent Purdue University study showed that the American Chestnut can store up to three times more carbon than other trees sharing its ecosystem, which against the backdrop of climate change gives us another compelling reason to reestablish chestnut over large areas.
European Chestnut, Carrington Bay.
Coastal British Columbia is far removed from the native range of the American Chestnut yet its European cousin (Castanea sativa) has been planted here occasionally and thrives, particularly in areas such as the Gulf Islands and the Lower Mainland, which have warmer summers. For years, I have been admiring a particularly stately tree that grows on the edge of my property in Whaletown on Cortes Island. I had always assumed it was a particularly large specimen of Castanea sativa yet there was something odd about the tree’s great height – over 60 feet. It seems to have no trouble completing for sun with the surrounding Douglas firs and Big-leaf maples and looks truly at home in its forest setting. The nuts it produces are tiny; less than 3/4 of an inch or so, which is much smaller than any commercially available eating chestnuts I have seen.
All of this made me wonder if I might all these years have been looking at an example of the elusive American chestnut – Castanea dentata. I figured the odds were pretty small, given that the European species is so prevalent in these parts but still my doubts persisted.
A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to keying out the tree, using this helpful on-line guide (chestnut ID) put out by the Massachusetts Chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation, as well as this web site (more ID), which provides detailed photos of the leaves, twigs and nuts of all the chestnut species, for easy comparison. Surprisingly, my tree shows a lot of the characteristics of the American variety, yet I’m still not exactly certain. Chestnuts seem maddeningly difficult to identify, especially since hybridization is always a possibility.
A good portion of the older fruit trees on Cortes Island trace their provenance to a man by the name of Hayes, a former employee of the genius plant breeder Luther Burbank, who moved to these parts in the early days 20th century, so it is possible that the chestnut was one of Burbank’s (crosses). The tree seems to be about the right age, just shy of a hundred, given its substantial girth and height. The leaves of the tree are papery thin and extremely long; the longest one I measured coming in at almost 11 inches. The leaf edges are serrated by curved teeth ending in a single bristle in accordance with the descriptions for Castanea dentata. The twigs are smooth and supple, which also points to the American Chestnut. The vast majority of the nuts when they drop from the tree, shrivel, un-pollinated inside their sea urchin-like casings, but every year a few of them germinate in the leaf litter until, inevitably, they get browsed down by hungry deer. This year though, I have 5 or 6 of the seedlings in pots and I plan to grow more in the hopes of getting a grove going and to be able to distribute the seedlings to other nut enthusiasts. It’d be great to see whole forests of these magnificent trees get established, in blight-free areas of the West Coast, especially on large tracts of logged over land, ravaged by the forest industry.
I’ve attached a link to a Flickr photo set of the whole tree, the nut casings and the leaves as well as the leaves of another chestnut variety I purchased around ten years ago as C. sativa, for the purposes of comparison. If anyone can help me identify this magnificent tree, I would be most appreciative. Please do so via the comment feature of this blog and I’ll get right back to you. Thanks so much!
Happier Days – A once plump Mittens napping on a sunny couch
I wanted to inform all of my cat-loving friends about the passing here on Good Friday of our dear and ancient friend Mittens. She’d been withering away for the past year or so, becoming progressively more matted and skeletal till finally, reduced to a dusty husk, she decided it was time to die. What had kept her going these past few months was her indomitable appetite. Deaf and nearly blind, with an arthritic spine and fur falling out by the handful, her tiny clotted heart still quickened enough for a hobble over to the dinner bowl if she caught the scent of an open can of “Fancy Feast”. Mittens lived for food and when she stopped eating a few days ago, it was clear what was to come. In the end, she stumped down the basement stair and curled up under the work bench to die. When we brought her a little heater, she dragged herself away and settled onto the concrete floor. Warmth was not what she wanted. Perhaps she had a fever. It was there that we found her the next morning, stiff and cold with her eyes still half open, like she was trying hard to pay attention. Goodbye old friend. We’ll miss you…
a single, giant cell
Newly hatched duckling
one day old duckling
10 day old duckling
But with ending comes new beginning and the three Khaki Campbell ducklings that hatched out in the incubator last month continue to grow apace.
When I ask myself, “What did I do in the past month?” I don’t come up with much. But a duck egg develops from a single, albeit giant cell, into a fully formed, walking, squawking, opinionated ball of fluff in just about the time between two credit card statements. A duck egg gets fertilized about 10 days before it is laid, and then takes 28 or so more to hatch. The math of cell division is astonishing. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations: It is commonly estimated there are about 10 to the power of 14 cells in an average human – which is 100 trillion, in non-geek terms. Assuming the average weight of a human to be, say 70,000 grams (70 kg), and a duckling weighing around 50 grams at the time of hatching, the duckling already has 7 trillion cells when it pecks its way out of the shell. Seven trillion cells that have divided, differentiated and self-assembled into a coherent constellation of throbbing, sentient life, made up of the same raw material that might have been my breakfast. And it happens in a month!
Though our technology might be enthralling, nothing we as a species have ever constructed comes even close to the amazingness of an egg. Not surprisingly, in many cultures the egg is seen as the foundation of the universe.
In the Kalevala or Finnish national epic, the world unfolds from a duck egg that is laid upon the knee of a goddess:
One egg’s lower half transformed,
And became the earth below,
And its upper half transmuted
And became the sky above;
From the yolk the sun was made,
Light of day to shine upon us;
From the white the moon was formed,
Light of night to gleam above us;
All the colored brighter bits
Rose to be the stars of heaven
And the darker crumbs changed into
Clouds and cloudlets in the sky.
Billowing from the tail pipes of cars on cold winter mornings. The way cream dissolves into a cup of coffee beneath the buzzing white lights of a donut shop. The seething gray clouds that come before a long-awaited spring. Turbulence. It’s order diffusing into chaos. Energy erupting through a system. Sometimes it’s violent. Sometimes it’s fertile. Plants too can show the effects of turbulence surging through their tissues. What we see is a kind of slow motion wake of distortion. The phenomenon, called fasciation, occurs fairly regularly, even within the sheltered confines of my own backyard. Sometimes the genes of the plant start to twist and spin in their chromosomes, leading to the most remarkable contortions at the macro level. Such is the case with the Japanese Fantailed willow (Salix sachalinensis ‘Sekka’) in which a mutation has caused normal pussy willow twigs to curl up like octopus tentacles, while at the same time compressing them into antler-esque straps of catkin-studded wood. The Cockscomb Cryptomeria (Cryptomeria japonica ‘Cristata’) is similarly affected, its sprigs of needles fusing together to form prickly, multi-lobed mittens.
Sometimes all it takes is a simple mechanical injury to trigger this botanical strangeness. Recently, a branch of Forsythia started to fasciate after getting knocked around for years by my garden gate. Why now? I wondered. Perhaps the disturbance needed to build up to some point of instability, before the turbulence could unleash itself through the system. Instead of being harmed, the flowing river of cells that comprises the Forsythia, simply accommodates the disruption by altering its form. Perhaps that is a lesson to us all.
It’s that time of year when the days are short and the color has been sucked from the world.
I woke up this morning to find an egg lying out in the snow. Even the air has changed somehow, stuffing my ear canals and sealing me into the blood-throbbing confines of my memories. I think of last spring and the redwood grove I saw, ancient and sighing, oblivious to the sliver of time in which I must be satisfied. Yet there among the swirling gloom had grown the child of their ghosts, its needles white as a tapeworms, glistening with formaldehyde. It tried to kill me, you see, and hurled a branch in my direction when I got too close. And now after all those months, the great gray quilt of sky has pulled down over me and breath itself seems difficult. But high above the ragged trees, the white wraith swans churn savage wings again toward the ends of time. With bleating songs of ice and metal. I thought they’d gone extinct. . .
With the record-breaking heat wave that is currently withering Southern BC, I am starting to wonder just how hot it’s going to get when climate change really starts kicking in. The temperatures we suffered through this week made it feel like we’re already well on our way. Some estimates indicate that our planet might be on its way toward a thermal maximum not seen since the Eocene era – some 55 million years ago. Back in those days, palm trees and alligators flourished as far north as Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. Much of what is now British Columbia was cloaked in a warm temperate forest, far more biologically diverse than what we have today.
Imagine groves of such exotic trees as Dawn redwood, Gingko and Cunninghamia growing natively over a vast swathe of Western Canada and down into Washington and Oregon. Their leaves, seeds and flowers are preserved in exquisite detail in the fossil deposits of various localities from Cache Creek to Kitsilano. Some of these trees still survive, albeit in much diminished ranges, in parts of China and the southeastern United States, but a long-term cooling trend extirpated them from our own forests long ago.
Metasequoia fossils from the Cache Creek Eocene
Yet if global warming is threatening to bring back Eocene temperatures, why not reintroduce the Eocene forest? Many of our native trees are already suffering under the newer, hotter conditions, as is evidenced by the plague of pine beetles ravaging the forests of the Interior in response to milder winters. We can only hope that the native trees will survive by retreating northward, but the pace of warming is predicted to be rapid so it will be hard for natural plant migration to keep up.
Over the past dozen or so years, I have been introducing into my yard some of the tree species that once comprised British Columbia’s Eocene forests and I’ve been tracking their progress. Metasequoias in particular have done spectacularly well and a couple of my ten year-old specimens have reached 8 metres in height. These are amazing trees, deciduous conifers long thought to have been extinct, that caused a sensation when they were found surviving in a remote part of China, back in 1944. Their fossil remains are distributed all over the Northern hemisphere, from mid latitudes right up to the High Arctic, where their deciduous needles might have conferred them an advantage during the long, dark winters. Other Eocene trees I have successfully grown include Tetracentron, Scadiopitys, Cunninghamia, Podocarpus, Sequoia and Trachycarpus palms, all of which have flourished without winter protection, despite frosts as low as minus 15C and frequent deep snow. Members of the Juglans family (hickory and walnut) have also adapted well to my locality and I am steadily introducing other Eocene species to see how well they do.
Last year, I embarked on a collaboration with the botanist Rupert Sheldrake to scale up my initial trials to a landscape level. I initiated the planting of entire groves of Metasequoia, Juglans, Gingko and Coast Redwood, arranging them in clines, or habitat gradients on Rupert’s property – a 60 acre clear cut on the east side of Cortes Island. Though the winter of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 have been exceptionally dry, a good portion of the plantings have so far survived without supplemental watering. The Juglans and Sequoia in particular have taken well, on what for the most part is a very exposed, site, heavily disturbed by industrial logging. Work on the “Climate Change Forest” is ongoing and our hope is that the successes and failures we have in establishing formerly native tree species will yield useful information on the future of forests under conditions of global warming. Perhaps some of the trees might have a kind of genetic memory and will once again flourish here as they did so many aeons ago. If so, our reintroduction of these Eocene survivors might prove part of a larger strategy to manage the climate cataclysm we have only just begun to experience.
Metasequoia – Cortes Island, BC approx 12 years old
I’m in my yard, stacking firewood beside the satellite dish. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a movement in the salal bush at the edge of the forest, about fifty feet away from me. A deer, I figure. The woods up here are full of black tail deer and they are perpetually making forays into the lumpy meadow behind my house to nibble on the grass or sample the ornamental shrubs and fruit trees. I carry on stacking my wood, unconcerned. Another movement and I look up again. This time I see a long, black, canine snout and a stiff pair of triangular ears. I am met by a gaze that is at once curious and calculating. It is sizing me up. I suck in my breath and the face melts away into a viridian quiver of leaves.
As timber wolves go, this wasn’t a particularly large one. Wolves are a normal part of the ecosystem on Cortes Island and in my experience, they had always kept to themselves. I considered myself lucky to have gotten this close. Yet the wolf had seemed a bit brash. Unnervingly so.
I asked around a bit and soon discovered there had been a rash of wolf sightings by neighbours and those farther afield. Wolves were being spotted all over the place, loping through people’s backyards in the middle of the day and lurking around houses and barns. Dogs were getting killed. A neighbour’s Schnauzer was snatched from beside a popular hiking trail, a few feet away from its owner. The local wolves seemed suddenly to have lost their fear of man. A sense of alarm crept though the usually quiet community. Some folks already talked about instituting a wolf cull.
I recoiled at the prospect. I was familiar with the stories from the 70’s, when pick-up loads of dead wolves got paraded around the island after a concerted eradication campaign. Back then, the local ranchers poisoned, trapped and shot every wolf on Cortes Island in the name of protecting their livestock, which in those days was allowed to range freely through the bush. With the wolves gone, the deer population escalated, swarming onto the farmers’ fields, and into clear cuts, where they browsed the alder scrub that came up after extensive industrial logging operations. With such a bonanza of prey available, it was just a matter of time before new wolves started swimming over from the nearby mainland to take advantage of it. In the mean time, it had become less fashionable to kill wolves and so the migrants prospered, slowly returning the ecosystem to a sort of balance. Though rarely seen, wolves could often be heard howling on moonlit nights, invoking a frisson of wilderness in the hearts of the New Age refugees and dope farmers, who themselves were spreading out across the island. Occasionally someone’s dog would go missing or rarer still, a calf might get killed, but mostly the wolves kept a low profile.
Over the past few years though, their attitude was beginning to change. The wolves no longer seemed to be avoiding interactions with human beings and in a few cases, they were actively seeking us out. Several people had been surrounded by wolves while out in the woods, and they reported that they had come in uncomfortably close. Amidst a growing sense of unease, Sabina Mense, a local naturalist, invited a couple of wolf experts to field our questions at a public meeting. Speaking before a packed hall of what I knew to be some of the island’s more wolf-friendly people, Bob Hansen, a wildlife management specialist with the Pacific Rim National Park and Ben York, a provincial Conservation Officer, quickly disabused us of some of our more romantic wildlife notions.
Despite what I thought I had known from years of watching television documentaries and reading Never Cry Wolf as a kid, wolves can and will, under certain circumstances, attack people. This had recently started happening elsewhere on the coast and was about to, warned Hansen and York, happen in our neck of the woods, if we didn’t take necessary precautions. The irony was that wolves have changed their behavior in part as a reaction to our increased admiration for them. York recounted a recent incident in which a wolf badly mauled a sleeping kayaker, who had been camped out on the Broken Group Islands— a popular eco-tourism destination, famous for its spectacular scenery and abundant wildlife. The area’s wolf population is a prime attraction, providing a great photo opportunity as they forage on the beaches. But the Broken Island wolves were becoming pugnacious, lurking around camp sites and snatching provisions, abandoning their traditional wariness of people. On several occasions, campers were literally driven off their tent sites by marauding wolves, and had to fend them off with paddles, while hastily breaking camp and pushing their boats back into the sea. The wolves remained aggressive and several had to be shot by conservation officers, who then closed the campsites in the interest of public safety.
So what did this mean? Are wolves now suddenly more inclined to eat us? Should we revert to our childhood fears of Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs? The problem, say York and Hansen, is habituation. The wolves had learned to associate sea-kayakers with food. In a perverse permutation of the observer effect, the same nature lovers who had traveled so far and paid so much to view the wolves in their wilderness habitat, were changing the animals’ behaviour and getting them shot. To counter habituation, eco-tourism operators are now being asked to let clients view wolves only from a distance.
On Cortes Island, the situation proved somewhat different. What brings wolves into contact with people here is not so much the prospect of being fed hot dogs by tourists but rather the black tail deer and delicious, easily-killed house pets that thrive in our lushly horticulturalized landscape of rural sprawl. Nevertheless we were advised to aggressively haze any wolf that approached populated areas and to take serious precautions with domestic animals and compost heaps. The wolves on Cortes are just at the point of getting dangerous, advised Hansen and York and we need to turn back the clock.
Mike Davis in his Ecology of Fear details an analogous situation with cougars (a.k.a. ‘mountain lions’) who are recolonizing the affluent fringes of Los Angeles. Despite being persecuted since the early days of European colonization, the cougars there are making a comeback – paradoxically by hiding out in the canyons and foothills adjacent to suburbia, from which they emerge to stalk the lawn-fattened deer, wayward lap dogs, and sometimes the occasional human. Davis estimates there are now more cougars in the hills around Los Angeles than in the entirety of Yellowstone National Park – a place that for many Americans, epitomizes large carnivore habitat. As rural exurbs continue to ooze further into the hinterland, the real back country has become much less hospitable to the wolves and cougars that once belonged there.
On Vancouver Island, this is largely due to the delayed effects of industrial, clear-cut logging. Bob Hansen recounted the phenomenon of ‘ungulate barrens’ now surrounding Pacific Rim National Park. From the satellite photographs he showed, it was easy to see how the original stands of old-growth rain forest have been obliterated from outside the reserve’s boundary. For a while, the removal of forest cover actually increases deer and elk habitat, due to an initial flush of deciduous browse, but the landscape soon becomes useless to them as it grows up into an even-aged plantation of tightly spaced, coniferous trees, with very little of the underbrush on which they need to feed. The ungulates die off and the starving predators abandon the depauperate tree farms and head for the park. Hansen described a rash of incidents where emaciated cougars crawled out of the forest to die on the beach in front of horrified tourists. They were literally starving to death. Others, terminally weakened yet still able to move, stalked hikers along the park’s busy trails, until they too got shot, in the name of animal control.
The wild is perhaps the very possibility of being eaten by a mountain lion. The risk, even if vanishingly remote, is a trigger toward heightened evolutionary awareness and enjoyment of an environment shared with large animals
It’s hard to know what such a sentiment even means now. In this topsy turvy world, the best habitat for some of our most emblematic carnivores turns out to be the interstitial landscape outside our cul-de-sacs and sliding patio doors. Though timber wolves aren’t likely to invade big cities any time soon, their little cousins the coyotes are thriving in our urban environs. An image that will stay with me forever is that of a coyote I once saw, scampering along Vancouver’s heavily industrialized Clark Drive, at three in the morning. In the insalubrious glow of the sodium lamps, I could just make out a house cat hanging limply in its jaws – the fat, as it were, of the asphalt land. For its own part, the coyote looked proud and alert. The lord of its realm. It was here to stay.
I am standing on a slippery rock next to a two thousand pound mountain of leathery blubber. Steam is coming out of her nostrils and she is turning her head toward me, wanting to get her whiskers rubbed. I’m a little freaked out but I oblige, and before I know it, I’ve fallen in love. Welcome to the walrus enclosure at the New York Aquarium. I recently spent the day there, looking behind the scenes, with a friend who has worked with the walruses, seals and sea lions there for years, training them and tending to their needs. Most of these creatures arrive at the aquarium as foundlings – in the case of the walruses, orphaned pups, whose mothers were killed in a subsistence hunt off the Alaskan coast. It didn’t take long for me to notice how mutually affectionate the relationships were between these animals and their caregivers – relationships that were so full of nuance and tenderness that it was obvious I was dealing with some pretty special creatures. Pinnipeds, as the members of the seal and walrus family are called, are easily as smart as dogs, maybe more so although it is hard to judge these thing precisely. They have complicated social hierarchies, can learn to respond to complex commands and like to play. They are the kind of animals we should feel a great fondness for but our species’ interactions with them have been violent throughout history. Perhaps it is because pinnipeds carry out the most graceful parts of their lives submerged in water, invisible and unknowable, that we have always felt compelled to set upon them as soon as they haul themselves out into our more solid environs. On some level, we must have always wondered what it might be like to be one of them, transiting at will between the world of land and air and the alien depths of the sea. Maybe we were even a bit jealous. But are the minds of animals really so unknowable? What is this separation between us and them? Is it all in our perception?
The eyes of an animal when they consider man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look.
There is, as Berger points out a built-in asymmetry in our regard for other creatures. Yi-Fu Tuan, in his (1984) ‘Dominance and Affection,’ makes the case that our affection for animals is essentially inseparable from our desire to dominate them. This seems especially apropos to Western culture. Über-naturalist David Attenborough concurs, specifically blaming Genesis 1:28 :
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
The exhortation to dominate other creatures has wreaked havoc on the planet ever since Attenborough points out. As God’s favored species, we stopped wanting to see the world through the other animals’ eyes and we soon found ourselves looking over at them from one side of an un-crossable gulf. The Industrial Revolution didn’t help either. Abandoning what vestiges of mystical attachment we might still have had for our fellow creatures, we used our new-found science of economics to reduce them to conglomerations of commodities – meat, fur and oil – to be commandeered, processed and sold to the highest bidder. Donna Haraway argues that an emerging science fetish exacerbated the disconnect between nature and culture, enshrining narratives of dominance into the Western world view, whereby it became axiomatic that nature had been put in place exclusively for our use. With nature reduced to something external, the industrialized killing of animals proceeded apace. Enter the golden age of whaling and the extermination of the bison. Our faith in the ‘naturalness’ of our dominance put an end to our qualms Devastation ensued, but the attitude continued.
So who cares? Whether by accident or divine right, our species made it to the top of the shit pile. For those of us living in the (as yet) affluent West, animal products such as meat and leather are cheap and readily available. Surely we can tolerate a bit of cruelty to afford us the things we, after all, deserve. So what if we wiped out a few species along the way? We have been ingenious. It didn’t take long for us to invent substitutes for whale oil and buffalo skins. Yet many of us have pangs.
Consider the pinnipeds. Their lot is still a difficult one. As I watched the seals and walruses cavorting against the backdrop of the Aquarium’s artificial sea cliffs, I found it hard not to think of the plight of many of their wild brethren. Every spring, between two and three hundred thousand harp seals are bludgeoned and/or shot to death off the east coast of Canada – the largest annual kill of marine mammals on the planet. A war of rhetoric has raged for years between the proponents of the hunt, staunchly backed by the Canadian government and a well-funded animal rights lobby, who have effectively leveraged outraged celebrities as spokespeople for their side. The government touts the economic benefits of the hunt and has sponsored a veterinary study that concludes the clubbing of seals with a spiked implement called a hackapik can be acceptably humane, if carried out correctly. But in a hunt of this magnitude, there are inevitable lapses, where the seals aren’t cleanly killed and visibly suffer. Some escape, mortally wounded, only to die later. The animal rights people have documented several of these disturbing cases, posting them on the internet to great effect. The veterinary report, though comprehensive in what it focusses on, deals primarily with the effectiveness of the actual killing technique – that is the effectiveness with which the seals’ skulls are crushed and cerebral hematoma ensues, after which the sensation of pain is said to stop. The data by and large corroborates the government’s view that the majority of the seals taken suffer little pain before dying. But these are the best case scenarios, carried out in the presence of inspectors. The science of suffering is a complicated thing. To understand it more fully, one need
s to look beyond the mere
instant of a seal’s death and consider the agitation it experiences before being killed. We face the same old problem again. We need to get inside the animal’s mind.
Temple Grandin has explored the terrain of fear and agitation in her groundbreaking studies of cattle on their way to be slaughtered. Her genius was to rethink the entire killing process from the cow’s point of view and to then to modify slaughterhouse accordingly, to minimize the animal’s stress at every stage up to and including the moment it dies. Grandin’s work even garnered her a PETA award for its contribution to the reduction of animal suffering – an amazing feat given the organization’s general antipathy toward the meat industry.
By this sort of standard, taking the animal’s psychology into account, the humaneness of the commercial seal hunt leaves a lot to be desired. The shifting North Atlantic ice is a far less controlled environment than a slaughterhouse and corners inevitably get cut. These intelligent and social animals are often killed within sight of each other or are chased across the ice floes, bullet-riddled and bleeding, before being finished off with the spiked clubs. Not surprisingly, this isn’t exactly soothing for the seals and though this kind of brutality occurs in the recreational and subsistence hunting of other species, the sheer scale of the seal hunt – the huge number of animals involved and the commercial pressures which the sealers are under to meet quota – put it in a class by itself. Industrial hunting is a recipe for animal suffering, even though we might intend otherwise.
But does it matter? This is after all a moral question. Temple Grandin entreats us to understand that “animals are not things.” Surely then we should accorded them some basic dignity. If, like Grandin, we were able to imagine ourselves in the animals’ place, maybe we’d start to treat them better. Inhabiting the animal mind though, isn’t really as easy as it sounds, especially if one lacks Grandin’s unique cognitive gifts. They are like us and not like us, according to John Berger. To think of animals merely as fuzzier, more primitive versions of ourselves does them as great a disservice as turning them into commodities. Since we can’t easily teleport an animal’s mind, how then can we even begin to appreciate its needs?
An intriguing way to think about this was proposed, way back in 1934, by the biosemiotician, Jakob von Uexküll. In his ‘Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,’ Von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt, which he defined as an animal’s entire subjective, spatio-temporal world. This Umwelt is populated by a series of ‘marks’ or carriers of significance, which constitutes the entire universe of things a given animal cares about. This might include: others of its own species, predators and prey, or certain features of its habitat. Von Uexküll maps out the Umwelten of an assortment of creatures including sea urchins, honey bees and jackdaws. Sea urchins seem most concerned about the locations of shadows in their habitat, whereas jackdaws pay attention to their social networks and the dispositions of neighbourhood cats. Their Umwelt also includes internalized maps of the highly ritualized flight paths they follow around rooftops and trees. For a jackdaw, it is important not just to fly, but to fly in the right way.
Seen from the point of view of a seal’s Umwelt, the commercial hunt must be a horrific experience. There is, I think, a clear case to made for revisiting the standards under which the hunt is conducted and to focus on the agitation experienced by the animals prior to being killed. This hunt is a commercial enterprise and is allowed to continue primarily because of its contribution to the regional economy. But the cost to Canada’s reputation as a humane and progressive state should also have a place on the balance sheet. This debit has been building for years and is now accrued to the point where it might be too high.
