by Jon Mooallem
The country was urbanizing. By 1910, a majority of Americans would live in cities. Instead of spending time in nature, children relied on secondhand descriptions of wildlife now, and naturalists worried that, without much firsthand experience of animals, kids might accept even these sappy bedtime stories as fact. Teachers around the country were starting to use another of Seton’s books, Wild Animals I Have Known, as a textbook. “All of this would be highly amusing,” one zoo director wrote, “if it were not so pitifully serious to the children of the public schools.”
But some of the nature fakers’ motivations were more poignant than their critics understood. Seton especially was responding to America’s war on predators. His most dignified, sympathetic protagonists were usually the same animals that were being exterminated in the West, like grizzlies and wolves. He was trying to create public empathy for these species—to save them. Like Robert Buchanan with his polar bears more than a hundred years later, Seton knew that regurgitating dry, scientific descriptions wasn’t enough to generate a true emotional response. Seton’s aim instead, he wrote, was to capture the “personality” of an individual animal “and his view of life.” “Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing only in degree from our own, they surely have their rights.”
The nature fakers may be mostly forgotten, but this sentimental compassion lives on in nearly every children’s book about animals I’ve read to my daughter—books that, like everything adults give to little children, are echoes of our own beliefs. And it was evident, too, in so many of the letters about polar bears that schoolchildren wrote to the Department of the Interior in 2007. “I really think it is not fair to the polar bears,” wrote the fourth-grader in Oakland, Juan Piedra. “Also, they could drown and die off and what if they were you?”
Nature can seem this pure and honorable only once we’re no longer afraid of it. We seem to be forever oscillating between demonizing and eradicating certain animals, and then, having beaten those creatures back, empathizing with them as underdogs and wanting to show them compassion. We exert our power, but are then unsettled by how powerful we are.
Large predators—those able to rip us apart—have understandably commanded a huge share of humans’ psychic attention for as long as there have been humans. (Some of the earliest cave paintings are of bears and lions.) But as we’ve insulated ourselves from nature, and diffused the danger of those animals, we’ve started to give them new meanings. That basin of anxious, imaginative energy can get rechanneled into a deep aesthetic appreciation. In the bear especially, Yale’s Stephen Kellert argues, we see a creature a lot like us: it can walk upright, snores when it sleeps, and is roughly our size and shape. But it’s also omnivorous, agile, clever, self-possessed—all the admirable dimensions of ourselves that have been “diminished in modern culture.” For many of us today, who spend our days slumped over spreadsheets or quarreling with our banks over hidden fees, bears look like the composed and competent survivors we wish we still were.
No single piece of research demonstrates this cycle of fear and reverence more clearly than a study, led by the geographer Jennifer Wolch, that examined how cougars were written about in the Los Angeles Times between 1985 and 1995. In the early 1970s, the cougar population in California had been ground down to as low as twenty-four hundred animals. But by 1990, a ban on hunting had allowed the species to come back; the cougar had become an icon of conservation in Southern California. It was described in the newspaper as “majestic” and “innocent,” an embodiment of nature’s grace, and a “symbol of our dwindling wilderness heritage.” But soon cougars started encroaching into the populated areas around Los Angeles. There were two fatal attacks. More people still died in America because of bee stings and black widow spider bites, Wolch writes, but “as reports of cougar-human interaction rose and public fears were fanned by episodic attacks, the images of cougars as charismatic and proud wild animals at home in nature were replaced by terms conjuring danger, death, and criminal intent.” It was as if a switch had flipped. Before 1990, the predominant image in the newspaper was of an “elusive and fascinating wild creature.” After 1990, cougars were “efficient four-legged killers” and baby-snatchers, “roaming like phantoms” in the nearby hills.
The same shift has been happening with wolves lately, especially since Republican legislators maneuvered via a last-minute budget amendment to take away the gray wolf’s federal protection in several states in 2011. (Conservationists defended the wolf as part of America’s natural majesty; Montana’s governor, meanwhile, told his constituents to forget the Endangered Species Act altogether and take matters into their own hands: “If there is a dang wolf in your corral attacking your pregnant cow, shoot that wolf. And if its pals are in the corral, shoot them, too,” he told Reuters.) And a decade after Wolch’s cougar study, similar research looked at newspaper editorials about a proposed black bear hunt in New Jersey and found almost exactly the same scenario: bears being cast both as “menacing threats” and as “God’s creatures” who would gladly “live in peace” if people just left them alone.
When Roosevelt refused to shoot that black bear in Mississippi in 1902, the species’ larger cousin, the grizzly, was being brutally eradicated around the country. And as it disappeared from the land, it found new prestige in our imaginations. Soon a novel by James Oliver Curwood, called The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild, would turn on a scene that is almost exactly the opposite of what happened on the president’s bear hunt. A grizzly named Thor stalks the hunter who has previously shot and wounded him. The bear creeps in behind the hunter, trapping him between a rock wall and a cliff, with nowhere to run—and unarmed. Thor towers over the man angrily, but then pauses, stunned by how “shrinking, harmless and terrified” the creature that had hurt him looked now. And so the animal slowly turns and disappears in the direction from which he’d come, leaving the hunter standing there—letting him live.
The bear was now the merciful one, with a code of honor he refused to break. The hunter was the senseless killer. As Seton once wrote, “No animal will give up its whole life seeking revenge; that kind of mind is found in man alone. The brute creation seeks for peace.” The bear was the bigger man.
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IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG after Roosevelt’s bear hunt in 1902 for the teddy bear to become a full-blown craze. By the end of the decade, Steiff was producing close to a million teddy bears a year. Sets of teddy-bear clothes were sold separately, and Ladies’ Home Journal published patterns for making your own. Your teddy bear could wear pajamas or dress up like a sailor or a fireman. There were even special blankets and caps to keep the toys toasty in winter. That is, despite all its fur, the bear needed a winter coat. In the natural history of the teddy bear, this seems to be the point at which the teddy bear splintered into its own discrete species, when it completely broke away in our imaginations from its relative in the forest.
But the toy confused adults. Their children were trading in dainty baby dolls for beasts—it was troubling. “From all quarters of the globe,” wrote the Washington Post, “comes the demand for Teddy bears, with poor Miss Dolly gazing woefully out of her wide open eyes powerless to prevent the slipping away of her power.” The New York Times published a poem: “The Passing of the Doll.” The teddy bear seemed like a novelty—a fad—and everyone assumed it would be forgotten once Roosevelt left office. Mass-manufactured toys themselves were still fairly new, and so, as the inauguration of Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, approached in 1909, the toy industry was hungry to ramp up production of America’s next cuddly plaything—whatever it might be.
That January, President-elect Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta. The big news, for days in advance, was the menu. The Atlanta Chamber of Commerce was going to serve Taft possum and taters, a Southern specialty that one writer of the time described as “the Christmas goose of the epicurean negro.” An opossum, roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, was typically presented w
hole—head on, pale tail hanging off it like a meaty noodle—with a smaller potato crammed between the animal’s fifty tiny teeth. The one brought to Taft’s table weighed eighteen pounds.
After the meal, the orchestra started to play, and the guests suddenly broke into song while Taft, presumably caught off guard, was presented with a gift. It was a small stuffed opossum toy, beady-eyed and bald-eared. This brand-new creation was intended by a group of local boosters as the William Howard Taft presidency’s answer to the teddy bear. They called it the Billy Possum.
A company, the Georgia Billy Possum Co., was already being formed in Atlanta for large-scale manufacturing of these stuffed animals. According to one account, deals for Billy Possums were being brokered with toy distributors across the country within twenty-four hours of the banquet. (It seems that the company initially experimented with stuffing actual opossum skins, but wound up with something too fleshy-looking and repulsive—like a pale, limp rat.) The Los Angeles Times covered the unveiling of the new toy at the Chamber of Commerce banquet and announced, “The Teddy Bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with ‘Billy Possums.’”
A fit of opossum fever began. There were soon Billy Possum postcards, Billy Possum pins, and Billy Possum pitchers for cream at coffee time. There was even a new ragtime tune: “Possum: The Latest Craze.” Real opossums weren’t that common in cities. So a toy shop in Brooklyn ran an in-store promotion with a live, captive opossum, so that children could familiarize themselves with the animal that was primed to “rival the Teddy Bear in popularity.” (“Do not let it be said,” the store’s advertisement read, “that any man, woman or child in Brooklyn has not seen the cute little animal whose name is mentioned more perhaps in all parts of the world to-day than any other.”) At Taft’s inaugural parade, the Georgia delegation was given Billy Possums to wear clipped to their lapels. There were smaller Billy Possums–on-a-stick to wave like flags.
But, despite all this marketing, the life of the Billy Possum turned out to be demoralizingly brief. The toy was a flop, peaking and petering out within months of its introduction that January and almost entirely forgotten by the end of the year. That is, Billy Possum never even made it to Christmastime, a special sort of failure for a toy.
In retrospect, the failure of the Billy Possum can probably be explained two ways. The first is straightforward: opossums are ugly. But the Billy Possum’s backstory was all wrong, too, particularly compared with the teddy bear’s.
Through most of human’s evolutionary history, what has made the bear magnificent in our eyes is the animal’s independence from us—its parallel life as a menace and competitor. But by the time Roosevelt was hunting bears in Mississippi, with the country exterminating its predators from coast to coast, that stature was being crushed. That one black bear, tied to a tree outside Smedes, symbolized the predicament of all bears. The animals now lived or died according to our wants and whims. It said something ominous about the future of bears, but it also raised disquieting questions about who we’d become, if the survival of such a creature was now up to us. The legend of Roosevelt and the bear resonated as an allegory of the confusion that America was only beginning to face. The bear was a helpless victim roped to a tree. The president of the United States decided to show it some mercy.
Taft, on the other hand, ate his opossum for supper. He ate a lot of it, in fact—so much that, after his first several helpings, a doctor seated nearby actually passed him a note, suggesting it might be a good idea if he slowed down. “Well I like possum,” Taft told reporters the next day. “I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep.”
Today a small selection of stuffed opossums has found its way back onto the market. Judging from the reviews I found on Amazon, the toys seem to be mostly bought as gag gifts for people who have had creepy run-ins with actual opossums. One woman explains that the Fiesta Toys ten-inch plush opossum is so realistic-looking that her daughter screamed when she first took it out of the box. “We all love it now,” the woman goes on, “but opossums are not lovable in real life.”
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A CENTURY AFTER ROOSEVELT drew the line in Mississippi, the trap that the Center for Biological Diversity was setting for the Bush administration hinged on one question: Was the polar bear a teddy bear or a Billy Possum? How lovable was it? Now that it had been proposed for endangered species status, would the animal whip up enough public sympathy to steer clear of the candidate list and force the administration’s hand, or could it be quietly shunted aside like the Kittlitz’s murrelet? In the end, the answer was more complicated than anyone imagined.
In 2008, the Bush administration did place the polar bear on the endangered species list. It classified the bear as “threatened,” a designation that gives the government more flexibility and doesn’t guarantee the same level of protection for the species that a fully “endangered” one receives. This allowed the administration to write what’s called a 4d rule for the polar bear, an amendment that adjusts how the law will apply to a particular species. The polar bear’s 4d rule was exceptionally dramatic. It asserted that regulating greenhouse gases was outside the bounds of the Endangered Species Act; in this one case, the Fish and Wildlife Service was exempt from addressing the primary threat to an imperiled species. In a press conference, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne explained that he wasn’t about to let a law about animals be “abused to make global warming policies.” The government, finding no way to wiggle out of the corner that the Center for Biological Diversity had backed it into, had looked the environmentalists right in the eye, kicked a ragged hole in the wall, and crawled through it.
An almost incomprehensible carnival of lawsuits kicked off. The Center for Biological Diversity and its partners ginned up several. The first, brought against the government, tried to get rid of the 4d rule by demanding that the bear be listed as endangered and not just threatened (4d rules can be applied only to threatened species). They presented rather embarrassing internal government documents showing that the decision had been politically manipulated, not solely based on the best available science. This, in turn, forced the government—it was the Obama administration by now—to defend the bear’s threatened classification. Surprisingly, at no point in the history of the Endangered Species Act had anyone had to parse the legal difference between “endangered” and “threatened,” and so the government now produced a richly perplexing document that tried to do just that, drawing ephemeral distinctions between phrases like “on the brink of extinction” and “the step just prior to the brink of extinction” that allowed it to define “threatened” in a way that applied perfectly to the polar bear’s situation. Of course, this semantic hair-splitting then had to be rebutted by the Center for Biological Diversity, which offered its own semantic hair-splitting.
By the time I visited Churchill, the whole legal fight had, to my mind, devolved into an existential debate about the nature of time. (If the government defined “endangered” as likely to go extinct, then “threatened” must mean likely to be likely to go extinct. But what does that mean? And so on.) As the litigation vanished deeper into this procedural rabbit warren, the media lost interest. It got hard even to remember the Center for Biological Diversity’s original goals: to get America thinking seriously about climate change; to get the Endangered Species Act and the entire national project of conservation that it enables to start addressing, or just acknowledging, climate change as the game-changing, environmental challenge of our time; to begin to imagine how it will undermine or downright shatter the work of conservationists who, having fought to keep imperiled species swaddled safely inside their native habitats, will now watch the habitats themselves change, or fall out from under the animals entirely, like the sea ice under the bears.
The polar bear, really, was just a prop to underscore the problem of climate change—a problem that, if left un
addressed, begs the question of whether addressing anything else is worthwhile. But now everyone had been yanked into a frothing, bottomless argument about the prop itself. Six years after she’d filed the original petition to list the bear, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kassie Siegel was in a federal court in Washington arguing the definitions of “endangered” and “threatened” again when, finally, the judge asked her: “What does all that mean in the real world?”
4.
THE CONNECTION
One afternoon, I rented a truck and drove outside town to see a dog breeder named Brian Ladoon. It was a bleak day, even for Churchill. Clouds lumped in the sky like smoke, and wind charged off the crumpling gray slate of the bay.
Ladoon was born in Churchill and has lived here most of his life. The previous week, he’d finished third out of three candidates in Churchill’s mayoral election. (His platform was to shut down the town every winter, charter a big jet, and fly everyone somewhere tropical. He got thirty-five votes.) He’s played a big role in reviving a rare breed of dog, called the Canadian Eskimo dog, and keeps his stock of about 140 animals on a sloping tract of coastline, far off the area’s one actual road, behind the old military radar domes. People call the area Mile 5. The dogs are chained to stakes down near the water, where a dirt trail empties into a wide bulb of rocky land. I could hear them baying and howling when I pulled up. Offshore, the rusted wreck of a ship called the MV Ithaca, which ran aground in 1960, tilted out of Hudson Bay. It was an austere scene, and as I took it in through the windshield of my truck, a school bus full of tourists suddenly pulled away and a preposterously big polar bear came into view behind it. The bear was walking alongside a blue hatchback, dwarfing it.