Once you’ve understood that your bedroom door will stay unlocked for ever, that your childish games have had their day, that you will never be off with the reindeer after Christmas, that the cinema is a temporary release, that you love your mother too much, that no other human being can find favour in your eyes, that you cannot talk to anyone, that your family is protecting you, that you don’t want it to protect you but you want to be protected, that you’d like to lock your bedroom door but aren’t able to, you view the world with a degree of sorrow.
Now and then they get sulky, even if you enjoy looking after them they can take against you, they think of you as their jailer, with the big monkeys it’s dreadful, they scream, they hit out in all directions, as they can’t actually reach you, they’ve learnt how to spit on you.
Every response is natural. The animal cannot speak but it responds, there’s an animal kind of response. Most of the time you don’t respond, you develop and refine your use of silence. You await your moment.
We’ve just succeeded in breeding two northern tiger cats in captivity. It’s been extremely difficult because they’re solitary animals, they don’t like to couple up at all, in the wild they mate and then separate immediately. We had to calculate when the females would be in heat practically to the hour, otherwise, when we tried putting a female in the cage with a male, he would kill her and in the morning all we’d have was a corpse. We had to find another solution. We brought up two little ones together, a male and a female, they got used to each other and when they were full-grown we left them together in the cage and they reproduced. They’re the first cohabiting tiger cat couple on record, the first to raise their young together.
Naturally, I have to wonder if these two little cats brought up together mightn’t be from the same litter. And I hark back to the good old days when the male used to devour the female.
You don’t know if your imprinting is a relief or a burden. You swing between resisting and going with it, you develop reflexes, you avoid excessively strong reactions, you are imprinted.
Recently, we’ve had to split our monkey collection in two because of aggression between the males. Knowing that there’ll be roughly a 10 per cent turnover in a given year, we have to be ready to manage the population. As there’s no more space, we’ve decided to sterilise them. We inject the males with hormone implants which should kick in over the next few days, the only risk is that this modifies the behaviour of the dominant male, that a sub-adult will usurp him and the hierarchy of the whole group will be turned upside down.
Human intervention could eliminate the role of dominant male altogether. One wonders why implants are not more systematically used for human contraception.
Once, you tried to belong to someone who wasn’t your mother.
The reintroduction into the wild of wild species raised in captivity was envisaged for the purpose of species conservation, but it can also benefit commerce and the leisure industry. By releasing into a natural environment specimens that have only known captivity, we can for example benefit hunting, by increasing hunters’ safety and their chances of success. Hunters know precisely the area where their prey has been released and this area can sometimes be enclosed in order to prevent the animals’ escape. To further increase the hunters’ chances of success, we sometimes medicate their prey prior to release. In any case, their life in captivity has enabled imprinting and their familiarisation with a human presence, such that the moment the rifle-toting marksman emerges from his hide, these former predators are without the fight-or-flight reflex. Thus, the marksman can experience the joy of the hunt without the usual concomitant inconveniences.
To find the person you’d like to take into your bedroom, you will have to get about a bit, learn patience, cunning, methods of approach, capture and grip. You are a novice in this domain.
Researchers have succeeded in perfecting artificial insemination techniques for some wild animals. This avoids their having to take specimens out of their natural habitats for the trials and studies they hope to realise. There are, for example, vast farms of bustards, a bird that has all but died out in Europe. Mostly located in Morocco, these farms produce around 100,000 specimens a year. Once they’ve hatched, the young bustards are taken to temperate regions where, over a precise and strictly regulated period, they become the highlight of the hunting season. Thanks to science, the hunt is no longer endangered.
Your first attempt to escape your mother lasts exactly eighteen months. During this time, you assiduously frequent a young man of the same age who was adopted at twelve and is unlikely to see his biological parents ever again.
By definition, wild animals belong to no one. Nonetheless, they can be acquired, under particular circumstances. For instance, it is possible, with special authorisation, to keep, to transport and to make use of birds of prey for hawking parties. For each bird, authorisation takes the form of a card that’s reauthorised annually and that, in addition to the beneficiary’s identity, provides data identifying the bird concerned.
A human has a right to an identity, a bird to an identification. The legal terms mark the distinction between humans and animals.
The young man you’re seeing does not speak very good French and he’s forgotten his mother tongue. When he receives letters from his mother, he can’t decipher what she’s written and he doesn’t dare ask for help to translate them. You aren’t any use to him, you can’t translate the letters, you don’t speak his mother’s language. On the other hand, you speak your own very well and use it with a consistency and regularity that are unshakeable.
Banned throughout the territory: the mutilation, destruction, capture, removal or naturalisation of the common hamster, wolves, European lynx and bears; likewise their transport, resale, indeed any sale or purchase, whether living or deceased.
Every law is bound to recall the principles of separation and distinction at the origin of creation, to attenuate their implicit violence, to delimit precisely our gestures of defence, fury and control, to rebuild the barriers between species by situating beneficiaries on one side and violators on the other.
Your affection for the young man is growing, soon you’ll invite him into your bedroom and face the risk of seeing your door open the moment that your body touches his. Concentrating so hard on that moment and that risk, you forget that this coming together is above all meant to bring you pleasure.
Imports are banned under all customs regimes, except for direct cross-border transits where there has been no change of authority or of the regime overseeing active progress, also the resale, advertisement for sale, sale or purchase of all non-domestic species of birds considered as game and the hunting of which is permitted. These regulations are applicable equally to the products arising from these species, notably to pâtés and preserves, as well as to their nests and their eggs. With temporary effect, the importation under all customs regimes of the common blackbird (Turdus merula) and thrush (Turdus pilaris) is permitted either fresh or frozen.
The young man with whom you’d like to lock yourself in your bedroom doesn’t get on with his adoptive family. While he’s losing touch with his native country’s language, he finds that two of his cousins have moved to live near Paris, he calls them, sees them increasingly often and relearns to read his mother’s letters. You continue to express yourself in French but your words sound like a foreign language to him.
We trap animals less and less, so it’s harder to learn how to do it. It used to be twice a week for the monkeys, now it’s twice a year, my expert touch has got a bit rusty. Netting them up is still OK but getting them to stay put is another kettle of fish. We have to hold them down, we’re no cowboys, though there’s still a buzz when we’re prepping for some up-close and personal, we’re jumpier than we used to be.
You try to belong to the young man you love but instead of being ruled by him as you’d hoped, you start ordering him around. You continue not locking yourself in your room and now you hate yourself
.
You carefully conceal the existence of this young man you love from your parents, you conceal his origins and your connection to him. You have an idea that silence is your only place of freedom.
In the Pyrenees, cattle farmers do not practise trapping, they hunt and shoot wolves – in spite of the ban; when they land one, they hang him up in full view on an outcrop and if the other wolves want to go on tucking into goats and sheep, the farmers repeat the operation until they triumph through intimidation.
We don’t know if wolves understand examples the way we do, but one thing’s clear: picturing our own dead body swinging in the moonlight on the end of a rope is guaranteed to put us in a cold sweat, us humans at least.
You would like to be someone else but you don’t know how to go about it. As for being yourself, that’s an undertaking that feels beyond your powers.
It’s illegal to keep a stun gun at home, it’s a sixth-category weapon, so in the beginning we teach ourselves by practising on straw bales and polystyrene boxes. As we’re shooting syringes, even though it’s just compressed air, it’s best not to miss the target, and that’s not easy because the trajectory is parabolic and the animal we’re aiming at is usually right in the middle of the troupe.
You try to contain yourself, to show as little as possible, to be perfectly smooth, to offer no holds. It’s the first time in your life that you really love someone who isn’t your mother.
Before, we didn’t know how to anaesthetise animals, we didn’t know the doses. If we wanted to look after the lion we had to force it into a trap, a kind of box, and as it wouldn’t want to go in, we had to trick it, we’d frighten it, put some treats at the back, and as soon as it went in, bam, we’d close the trap behind it, the boxes had movable sides, we’d slide them in little by little until it couldn’t move a whisker, then we’d inject it through the bars, it wasn’t nice, it was completely terrified.
The young man you’re seeing leaves his adoptive family without warning. You go several days without news of him. Your anxiety grows and betrays you. You love him. You explain your feelings to your mother, who is less than thrilled about your falling for such an exotic boy. You must choose between her and him.
Restraint and capture are the most delicate moments. If it’s a python, a five-metre monster of 80 kilos, we have to be extra careful, we wallop him on the back of the head, he’ll try to coil up straight away and if we let him he could well crush our bones or suffocate one of us, so we go in there four- or five-strong and we hold him a man per metre so he’s got no chance of squishing us.
The young man you love moves into a room above a restaurant by himself. He does not give you his new address, and he’s cleaning dishes instead of finishing school. It takes you some time to track him down and when you do, you realise he was trying to escape you.
If it’s a crane, we take it manu militari and wear goggles, because when we pick them up they go for the eyes. For birds of prey and other birds, we use landing nets, there are five or six options depending on the size and weight of the creature, we get the bird in there and swipe it to the ground.
The young man you’re now sure you love is avoiding you. You try everything to get back with him. You are not persuasive enough and besides, you’re being watched.
We also used to practise containment by netting for the monkeys. But since they’ve been shown to carry diseases extremely similar to human ones, broadly since HIV, we don’t go near them without gloves, we avoid net-trapping and use systematic stunning instead.
Thanks to the handler, you discover that identifying with a giant gorilla is not a biological nonsense. You feel ready to watch King Kong again with the young man you love, you suggest it to him, but he prefers new cinema to old.
Avian flu forced us to vaccinate all the birds in our aviaries. Three hundred and sixty birds representing over eighty species had to be captured several times over. Blood tests, the vaccine proper and booster shots were delivered in record time. We split into two teams and we went for the vultures, the birds of prey and the flamingos by hand. We became capture experts once again but there were a few glitches in the beginning. We caught our flock of forty flamingos, they had big webbed feet, we had to hold them by the necks while keeping their wings down, I must have held one of mine too tightly at one point, I heard a crack, it was a wing going. I’d bust one of my own birds’ wings. When a flamingo has a broken wing, there’s nothing you can do, you have to euthanise. I took three days to get over it.
Your relationship with the young man is close to an end. You aren’t able to free yourself. You are fragile, vulnerable, unable to live in harmony with your fellow humans outside the family circle. Your imprinting has had irreversible effects.
You know there’s little chance of your parents coming into your bedroom at night. Even while not locking your door for fear of having to explain why, you have time to think how life might be if your parents were dead. You think about your parents’ deaths. You imagine the feelings you’d experience, the maze of steps to take, gestures to make, new things you’d have to learn. You don’t know if you are despondent at the very idea of these deaths, their unavoidable nature, or if your despondency comes more from feeling that you’re not ready, at your age, to handle the dizzying consequences. You aren’t yet ready for your parents to die.
At the menagerie, we have a tortoise who’s about 140, she must be the oldest tortoise in the world now, she weighs 250 kilos. She has huge scientific and sentimental value, and when she dies, hopefully a long time away still, they’ll put in The Guinness Book of Records that a tortoise can live that long, more than 140 years, would you believe it.
You struggle with yourself and try to put your best foot forward. But when the young man you love suggests spending a little time in his bedroom, above the restaurant where he washes dishes, you come up with a thousand reasons not to go. As he persists, you give in, you go to his place, you exchange awkward caresses with your lover, you are self-conscious, you have no intuition, no flow, you have no sense of physical love. You are imprinted.
One of the primary ethical criteria for choosing a method of euthanasia (a key element for a good death) is the early-stage suppression of the central nervous system, which ensures immediate insensibility to pain and must be followed by cardiac and respiratory arrest. This is why we often recommend pharmaceutical methods. However, the use of pharmaceutical products demands guaranteed efficient disposal of the contaminated carcass.
Once again, the young man you love slips away from you. You can’t sleep, you can’t read, you’ve stopped eating, you avoid the TV programmes you used to watch for their anaesthetic properties, you blame your parents, you miss the time when you could imagine escaping with the reindeer after Christmas. You can’t think of any way to escape. You are imprinted.
The acceptability of this or that method of euthanasia comes down to both the effective functioning of the equipment used and the competence of the person in charge. Cervical dislocation is acceptable in small rodents. It avoids chemical contamination of the tissues, requires no special equipment and leads to very rapid loss of consciousness in the subject.
In June, the young man you love hangs himself. You find out from one of your classmates. For several weeks, you say nothing to your parents. You don’t want to see relief in their faces.
The most powerful image that’s stayed with me is of the elephant’s death, in 1976, a year and a half after I got here. I looked after him, I accompanied him and we helped him to die because he was suffering appallingly, he couldn’t walk any more. One evening, we gave him a stun shot to put him to sleep, then we injected a drug with the syringe, we had to give him a litre of it. When we came back the next day to take him away, before the place opened, it was still dark, there he was, sitting up, leaning on the bars, like when they get up on stools in the circus, he’d died sitting up, I’ll never get that image out of my mind, it’s etched in there and will stay with
me for ever.
When you tell your mother the bad news, she takes you in her arms, hoping to console you. You reject her embrace.
We have farms of rabbits, mice, guinea pigs and insects here. We breed them, and when we need them for our animals, we kill them. It never bothered me at all to feed live prey to the predators we keep here but it’s not done like that any more. We have to kill them. We have a kind of gas chamber. We wouldn’t call it that because it’s nothing really, just a box we put the rats in and when it’s ready we connect the tube, turn on the gas, count to fifteen, wait, when they’re not moving any more they’re done, we take them out.
Little by little, you get back in the habit of going to the cinema with your mother. You let her choose the film, the day, the time and the theatre, you express no opinion, you’re not thrilled, nor needled, nor moved, you don’t comment, it’s your way of taking revenge. You aren’t really there.
Carbon monoxide (CO) is a colourless, odourless gas and difficult to detect. Prominent in the waste gases produced by combustion motors, it contains impurities and can be harmful to animals and humans exposed to it. Although the animals to whom we administer it don’t appear distressed, we prefer to use carbon dioxide (CO2), which is non-explosive and easily sourced. Nonetheless, the concentration needs to be precisely controlled to ensure its anaesthetic effect. In fact, at low concentrations, carbon dioxide gas increases the breathing rate and causes respiratory distress. At 40 per cent concentration, it induces a slow-manifesting anaesthesia with a degree of agitation. It does not suit species that hold their breath (diving animals) or those with low respiration rates (amphibians and reptiles). Nor it is recommended for newborns that have survived pre-birth circumstances involving low oxygen concentrations. For this reason, newborn animals must be left in carbon dioxide units for at least half an hour after all movement has ceased.
To Leave with the Reindeer Page 6