Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America
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The Endangered Species Act lays out a program for the conservation of imperiled plant and animal species. It makes it possible to devote money and government workers to their recovery and to set aside and protect land they live on. It bans killing, harassing, or shipping those species across state lines or overseas, and forces government agencies to make sure that their activities—everything from building a new fence to testing bombs—don’t endanger them further.
The government’s decisions about which animals deserve to be on the endangered species list must be based solely on the “best available science”—whatever studies have been conducted that speak to the severity of the threat of their extinction. It wasn’t clear how far listing the polar bear could go toward actually saving the species; some significant steps could be taken under the Endangered Species Act, but it seemed unlikely that any administration would upend America’s entire carbon-based economy to fulfill its technical obligations to the polar bear under the law. But petitioning the Bush administration to rule on whether the polar bear qualified for protection would at least confront the government, and the public, with the climate science it had so far managed to duck—a first step to any eventual progress. It was a way to put the government on the spot; the polar bear and the entire Endangered Species Act were being played like pawns in a higher-stakes chess match. In fact, Siegel and Cummings had come up with the strategy several years earlier and had already auditioned other species for the role of climate change victim.
The science of climate change was well understood at the time, but there still weren’t many published studies showing how specific species would be affected—and, for the environmentalists’ strategy to work, the “best available science” the Bush administration was going to be cornered with needed to be ironclad. Siegel and Cummings were left scraping the bottom of the taxonomic barrel. They considered using the Glacier Bay wolf spider, a spider in Alaska. But there was uncertainty as to whether the wolf spider was a distinct species, and whether it therefore qualified for protection. Also, the Glacier Bay wolf spider sounded icky, a public relations nonstarter, unlikely to focus the American public, and not just the courts, on climate change as the case picked up steam.
In 2001, Siegel and Cummings petitioned the government on behalf of the one truly solid case they could find: the Kittlitz’s murrelet, a little-known speckled Alaskan seabird that frequently nests near shrinking glacial ice sheets, and whose population—estimated in the low tens of thousands of birds—may have declined more than 85 percent since 1991. The outcome of the Kittlitz’s murrelet petition was discouraging. The Bush administration didn’t exactly deny the bird endangered status, but it didn’t protect it, either. The Kittlitz’s was deemed “warranted but precluded.” It was shoved through a curious loophole in the law onto a backlog known as “the candidate list.”
The candidate list has a complicated history. The modern Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, by an overwhelming majority of senators and congressmen. It announced itself as a counterforce to the “consequences of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern.” And, although this may sound radical—the United States government pledging to temper the country’s growth—it was treated as feel-good, softball stuff at the time. A law to save animals was a relief from Watergate and Vietnam. Its passage was hardly noted—the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times each devoted exactly one sentence to it—and President Nixon signed it into law in the doldrums between Christmas and New Year’s.
One historian writes that most in Congress believed the Endangered Species Act was “a largely symbolic effort” to protect only the kinds of species environmentalists call “charismatic megafauna”—grizzlies, whales, bald eagles, and other large, beautiful species that people tend to feel an easy connection with. But the act had been quietly beefed up by idealistic staffers, and was much further-reaching and more powerful than most congressmen took the time to understand. After its passage, there was instantly a lot of buyer’s remorse. (In a famous example, a small fish called the snail darter quickly complicated a dam-building project in Tennessee.) Meanwhile, protection was being sought for obscure birds and skinny little snakes that none of these legislators had ever heard of. Within two years, some twenty-three thousand species had been proposed for endangered status. The Smithsonian pulled together a list of 3,187 plants it considered worthy of protection. The paperwork alone was staggering. The agencies responsible for ruling on those petitions, primarily the Fish and Wildlife Service, soon found ways of brushing them off their desks.
Congress reformed the law several times to make the listing process more functional and fair. It required the government to rule on petitions according to strict timelines, but also set up the candidate list so that, if a particular species needed protection in a hurry, Fish and Wildlife would have the flexibility to deal with that crisis. Designating a species “warranted but precluded” would put it in a temporary holding pen, pausing the clock on its petition deadline, while the agency made progress on its more pressing work. But the workload involved in staving off extinction and managing all of America’s endangered species only grows, and in our new era of conservation reliance, it appears to be open-ended. Especially since the 1990s, the government has used the warranted but precluded category as an indefinite dumping ground.
In 2005, the Center for Biological Diversity found that many candidate species had been waiting around on the list for an average of seventeen years, some of them holdovers from that original list of imperiled plants drawn up by the Smithsonian. Recently, the center and other groups sued the federal government to spring those species from their bureaucratic purgatory and give them full protection. The government settled and will now be slowly reassessing each one’s case. But the settlement didn’t close the warranted-but-precluded loophole. It’s likely only a matter of time before the candidate list starts filling up again.
Around the time I visited Churchill, there were nearly three hundred species on the candidate list. I found a copy of the list and noticed that virtually all the species on it have one thing in common: I’ve never heard of them. There’s the Neosho mucket mussel and the Slabside pearlymussel, the band-rumped storm petrel, spotless crake, relict leopard frog, smalleye shiner, and least chub. The Roy Prairie pocket gopher is one of nine pocket gophers on the list. There are several bats, five kinds of salamanders, nine snails, and four shrimps. There’s the Sonoyta mud turtle and Miami blue butterfly; the Clifton Cave beetle, the Coleman Cave beetle, the Fowler’s Cave beetle, the Indian Grave Point Cave beetle, the Icebox Cave beetle, the Inquirer Cave beetle, the Louisville Cave beetle, the Nobletts Cave beetle, and the Tatum Cave beetle. Also, Stephan’s Riffle beetle. And there are plants, like Hirst’s panic grass and Short’s bladderpod. A Hawaiian plant called the Alani spent fifteen years on the candidate list before it was finally bumped up to endangered status in 1994. Unfortunately, the plant appeared to have gone extinct two years earlier.
At least twenty-four species seem to have gone extinct while waiting around on the candidate list, and I’ve never heard of them, either. They include a fish called the shortnose cisco and lots and lots of species of mussels, including one called the lined pocketbook. In 1982, something called the Valdina Farms salamander, which lived in a single cave in Texas, was deemed warranted but precluded. Five years later, a water agency diverted a river and flooded the cave, wiping it out.
This was the real value of the polar bear, then: its magnetism. It could inspire enough public gushing to make it politically impossible for the Bush administration to dump it quietly onto the candidate list and bury the issue of climate change yet again. The public-relations strategy was also a legal strategy. As the Center for Biological Diversity’s Brendan Cummings put it at the time, “No politician wants to tell their kids, tell their constituency, ‘Yes, I voted to kill the polar bear.’” The Endangered Species Act may say that we, as a nation, are devoted to preventing the extinction of an
y more species. But we also know that we can’t realistically save everything. And no one cried for the lined pocketbook.
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WHY ARE WE DRAWN to certain wild animals and not others? Can the cultural carrying capacity of a species—its charisma, essentially—be predicted or deconstructed?
That’s the mystery that the Center for Biological Diversity was trying to game in its listing petitions, and that conservation groups have long puzzled over, working to move the public to a particular ecological cause through the story of just the right, sympathetic victim—the bald eagle, which brought attention to DDT in the 1970s; or the spotted owl, which took on the logging industry in the nineties. Why exactly, according to one survey, are 73 percent of Americans willing to block construction of a power plant and pay more for their electricity in order to save mountain lions, but only 48 percent willing to do so to protect a plant called Furbish’s lousewort—especially since, frankly, few of us are likely ever to see a mountain lion or a Furbish’s lousewort whether the power plant is built or not.*
Part of the answer seems to be that we are attracted to animals that resemble us physically, a principle called “phylogenetic relatedness.” Monkeys are more likable than otters; and otters—with their recognizable facial structures, little mustaches, and shrunken hands—are more likable than lizards. We may be especially sympathetic to phylogenetically related animals because we assume that a creature that looks vaguely like us will have similarly high capacities for thought, pain, and feeling. (In one study, researchers told interviewees that a small mob had just cornered and kicked an animal “like a football” until it was bloodied, unconscious, or dead. The more similar that animal was to humans, the stiffer the fine or the more jail time interviewees recommended for the abusers.)
We are also evolutionarily programmed to empathize with species that resemble human babies—with large, forward-facing eyes; floppy limbs; circular faces; and a roly-poly shape. This helps explain, for example, why polar bear cubs wind up on so many cutesy wall calendars, and why cartoon fish, like Pixar’s Nemo, are never drawn realistically, with eyes on either side of their heads. The Yale social ecologist Stephen Kellert has summed it up this way: “People generally prefer large attractive animals with an erect bearing, animals that walk, run, or fly rather than crawl, slither, or live underground. A good candidate for the average human nightmare might be a creature that is small, ugly, predatory, likely to inflict injury or property damage, lacking in intelligence or feeling, and a denizen of dark, damp places, inclined to crawl and slither about.” In other words, we like the polar bear, not the Glacier Bay wolf spider.
Still, physicality explains only so much, and what it does explain can feel obvious. There is a purely cultural dimension to the way we think about wild animals; their meanings can shift and float in and out of fashion over time. As the softening of the polar bear’s image suggests, the stories we tell about animals depend on the times and places in which we tell them. This was proved more than a century ago, during an inadvertent nationwide popularity contest of bear versus opossum.
It began in November 1902, when President Theodore Roosevelt took a train to Mississippi, to escape the White House for four days of roughing it and black bear hunting outside the town of Smedes. On the second morning of the hunt, the dogs caught the scent of a bear and chased it into the swampy thickets outside of camp. After a chase, Roosevelt turned back for lunch. But his hunting guide—a yarn-spinning ex-slave named Holt Collier, well-known in the Delta for having killed three thousand bears—eventually managed to corner the animal near a watering hole late that afternoon. The bear snatched one of the hounds by the neck and mashed its spine, killing it. After it injured a second dog, Collier leapt off his horse and cracked the bear on the head so hard that he bent back the butt of his rifle. Then he roped the animal to a tree and tooted away on his bugle, calling in the president for the honor of the kill.
The bear was a 235-pound female—semiconscious, injured, mangy-looking by some accounts, and, Collier judged, shrunken to about half its normal weight by Mississippi’s drought. When Roosevelt saw the pitiful animal lashed to the tree, he refused to fire at it, or to have anyone else shoot it, either; he felt it went against his code as a sportsman. Instead, he asked a hunting companion to put the bear out of its misery with a knife. But that detail of the story would quickly get lost. A few days later, a political cartoonist in Washington, Clifford Berryman, memorialized the moment when Roosevelt declined to fire his weapon as an almost saintly scene. He called the cartoon “Drawing the Line in Mississippi.” Roosevelt was shown with his rifle down and his hand outstretched to spare the bear, while the animal sat on its hind legs like a baying puppy, with frightened wide eyes and two ears pricked up on the top of its head. It looked as helpless as an infant, as if it needed to be reassured or swept into someone’s arms. It wouldn’t have registered as familiar at the time, but, looking at the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: it’s a teddy bear.
Essentially, the bear from the cartoon was turned into a plush toy and named after the president. There are competing legends about who made the first teddy bears: it was either Rose Michtom, the wife of a Brooklyn toy-shop owner, or a German seamstress named Margarete Steiff, whose family owned the felt manufacturing company Steiff, still the world’s most prominent teddy bear producer. We do know that Steiff had been selling a line of stuffed animal toys, including a bear, for several years before Roosevelt’s hunt. But Steiff’s original bear was a much more realistic animal, less cuddly and infantile, with the humping, brutish back of a wild one. Also, the bear was chained through its nose to a peg.
Bears, after all, were considered monsters. For so long, the animal had been a shorthand for the unruliness and danger that Americans were encountering on the western frontier. Bears rarely turned up in toy catalogs and books, one historian notes, and “when they did they looked mean and were apparently designed to upset young children.” Two years before Roosevelt’s trip, Ladies’ Home Journal published a kids’ adventure story about a fourteen-year-old named Balser, described as “the happiest boy in Indiana” because he owned a rifle, “ten pounds of powder, and lead enough to kill every living creature within a radius of five miles.” In the story, Balser winds up killing a bear, but gets bitten in the process. So, in the story’s feel-good conclusion, the boy and his father track down the bear’s mate and shoot her, too, in revenge.
For bears—real bears, out on the land, with pulses and appetites—turn-of-the-century America was a painful and inhospitable place. All kinds of large carnivores were being systematically exterminated, from east to west, to keep from complicating the lives of humans. Wolves, cougars, and coyotes especially were demonized as Americans’ competitors: “brutal murderers” that killed and ate “harmless, beautiful animals”—namely, the livestock that people were raising to eat themselves. In 1906, an arm of the federal government, the Bureau of Biological Survey, began killing tens of thousands of wolves and coyotes every year, with traps and poisoned meat. The government also offered bounties, roping ordinary citizens into the work. One bureau biologist would justify the war on wolves by insisting, “Large predatory mammals, destructive of livestock and game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.”
This is to say, the teddy bear was born in the middle of a great spasm of extermination that would go on for decades. (Even the Audubon Society began eradicating predatory birds, like hawks and eagles, from their bird sanctuaries.) It was a natural escalation of the mind-set formed a century earlier, in Thomas Jefferson’s time, when Americans told themselves that the gruesome Incognitum had been driven extinct to wipe the continent clean for their use. Now the country was finishing off all these smaller, less imposing Incognitums—buffing out the land’s last scratches of wildness so that all we could see in its surface was our own reflection.
The teddy bear was only one sign that some people, deep down, had started to feel conflicted about all that kill
ing. America still hated and feared the bear. But all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a hug.
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THIS AFFECTION was already starting to percolate when Roosevelt went to Mississippi. Two years earlier, in 1900, the bestselling author Ernest Thompson Seton published The Biography of a Grizzly, a book that tenderized the reputation of the bear in the same way the teddy bear would. The story begins with a mother grizzly and her cubs “living the quiet life that all bears prefer.” But when a rancher opens fire, only one cub survives—a morose little guy named Wahb who must find his way in a shrinking wilderness riddled with steel traps and tainted by the “horrible odor” of man. Yes, Seton argued, grizzlies were once ferocious. But the barbarity of men with rifles and traps had put them in their place. Now was the time to show the bear some mercy: “The giant has become inoffensive now,” he later wrote. “He is shy, indeed, and seeks only to be let mind his own business.”
By the time Seton wrote The Biography of a Grizzly, he was a controversial figure at the vanguard of a new literary genre called realistic wild animal stories. These stories claimed to be credible natural histories of wildlife. But they dramatized the lives of animals as though they were the anthropomorphic heroes of fiction. (Jack London’s White Fang may be the realistic wild animal story that’s best remembered today.) Seton insisted that his stories were steeped in a nuanced and accurate knowledge of animal behavior, gained from his years in the field. And yet he endowed his animals with a cleverness and morality that sometimes border on the ridiculous. He wrote, for example, of a mother fox that feeds her trapped offspring poisoned meat so that the pup won’t have to suffer the indignity of being chained up. Then she nobly commits suicide herself.
Seton was not the most unrealistic realistic wild animal story author. Some almost completely sanitized nature of its violence or trauma. (The writer William Long described a scene of wolves ripping apart a deer as being “peaceable as a breakfast table.”) Still, Seton was one of the most successful authors, and he became a target for the backlash against the genre by other naturalists. One critic derided realistic wild animal stories as the “yellow journalism of the woods.” Theodore Roosevelt was one of the authors’ most vicious enemies, dubbing them “nature fakers,” which is the name by which they’re remembered today. The fear was that these writers were misleading readers about the way nature worked. Children would be especially vulnerable to their lies.