Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

  After rediscovering the Palos Verdes blue at the fuel depot, Rudi Mattoni was put in charge of a captive breeding operation for the butterfly. In 2003, he hired Jana as his assistant. She had moved to Los Angeles from Austin several years earlier as a newlywed. Her husband was going to try to make it as an actor, and she was starting graduate school in ecology at UCLA. But before long, her marriage ended, devolving into what would become a contentious and drawn-out divorce. Pregnant with her second child, she was desperate for money and needed a new, more conventional job with regular hours. (Her previous fieldwork, studying the effects of wildfires on lizards in the chaparral, involved a lot of jumping around during controlled burns.) She was on the verge of moving back in with her mom in Austin when Mattoni took her on. She’d be breeding the butterfly in a fluorescent-lit double-wide trailer at the fuel depot.

  The work wore Jana down. Every morning, she had to go through and individually inspect several thousand eggs or larvae with a dissecting microscope. It was horribly labor intensive—the larvae can be about the size of an eyelash—and, worse, extremely depressing: huge numbers of the young turned up dead each day; she was essentially a butterfly undertaker. (“I cried a lot,” she told me.) Meanwhile, the captive rearing program was producing only enough butterflies to breed more butterflies in captivity, not enough to release any at the fuel depot, or to set up new populations elsewhere in the species’ historic range. Jana found this discouraging. It didn’t represent a failure, exactly, but an absence of hope. She talks about her work as “undoing an injustice that was done to nature by man.” But here nothing was being done to correct the injustice done to the butterfly or to restore its former glory. The butterfly was still stifled—trapped on the military base. She felt stifled, too.

  Mattoni, her boss, was an accomplished but, by all accounts, bullheaded man. Captive rearing of endangered butterflies has always been as much of an art as a science, with scientists developing their own idiosyncratic strategies and tricks. Mattoni was a pioneer of the field. In the late seventies, for example, he’d bred pink bollworm moths for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (The moths Mattoni bred were sterilized, then released into the wild to mate with the pink bollworms that were plaguing California’s cotton crop, eventually wearing that wild population down; it was a canny form of pest control.) Mattoni founded a company and worked up a large-scale, laboratory-like moth “factory” and, by 1982, was churning out two million pink bollworms a day. He became known in entomological circles for a lecture he gave called “How to Breed Two Million Moths for Fun and Profit.” His approach with the Palos Verdes blues wasn’t nearly as industrialized or clinical, but the general ethos was the same. He’d started on the project believing that there was no butterfly he couldn’t breed by the millions, either, if he wanted to.

  Jana, however, suspected that certain ways Mattoni insisted she handle the larvae were causing the high death rates. She wondered if she could do better by the butterfly. Eventually, she was entrusted with eighteen female Palos Verdes blues as guinea pigs for developing a new method. She gave these butterflies the same unbending attentiveness her toddler and newborn were demanding of her, throwing herself into re-engineering the entire breeding process. Within two years, the captive stock exploded. Soon she had enough butterflies to start a small new population on an oceanfront preserve, away from the fuel depot. It felt like a triumph. She got a tattoo of a Palos Verdes blue on her right ankle with the words “. . . And then she flew.”

  As her divorce plodded on and the legal documents piled up, Jana felt herself clinging to the Palos Verdes blue, identifying with it in a richly personal way that many scientists might not admit to—as two kindred underdogs, spurned but battling their way out of a corner. She wasn’t just anthropomorphizing the butterfly; you could say she was Oprah-pomorphizing it. The butterfly was becoming her avatar, a gauge of her ability to reinvent and empower herself as a scientist and single mother. Resuscitating the Palos Verdes blue became both a literal test of her abilities and a metaphor for her own resilience. “That was me redefining myself,” she told me. The symbolism was almost too easy. Butterflies have always been symbols of rebirth and renewal, and the closer Jana got, the more levels of metaphor she saw. A larva, for example, doesn’t just develop into a butterfly inside the pupa; it first breaks down completely into an amorphous goop, then re-forms. Mattoni called it “the soup stage.”

  “You’re not what you were before,” Jana told me, “but neither are you what you’re going to be. The soup stage really sucks, but you just have to embrace being soup for a while.”

  —

  IN 2007, FISH AND WILDLIFE asked Jana to adapt her techniques to breed Lange’s metalmarks, and she set up the Butterfly Project at Moorpark under the auspices of a nonprofit called the Urban Wildlands Group. By then, Jana had had a falling out with Mattoni, which she wasn’t keen to discuss with me. All she would say is “Rudi knows more about butterflies than I ever will.”

  The ranks of California butterfly people are riddled with eccentrics. (I heard about a lepidopterist with a fantastically large collection of cocktail swizzle sticks, for example, and one who performs in a cowboy-costumed vaudevillian song-and-dance duo—come to think of it, I’m not sure they aren’t actually the same guy.) But I was quickly getting the impression that Rudi Mattoni stands out. For decades, he’d been an idealistic and truculent crusader for endangered insects around Southern California, and seems to have left a trail of cheesed-off local governments, corporations, developers, and even other conservationists in his wake. A former colleague told me, “Rudi always had a bit of a persecution complex, like a prophet not recognized in his own time.” Still, I gathered that his influence was enormous. His former partners and protégés seemed to have fanned out to work on butterfly conservation projects across the state. One senior Fish and Wildlife employee, who worked with Mattoni in the eighties, described him to me as “one of the last of the nineteenth-century naturalists.”

  Mattoni was born in 1927 and grew up in Beverly Hills, collecting butterflies and hunting for horned lizards. He’d been on the Lepidopterists’ Society’s trip to Antioch Dunes in 1954—the one that altered the course of Jerry Powell’s career—but one of the seminal experiences of Mattoni’s early life happened years earlier, around 1943, when Mattoni and a few butterfly-collecting friends ditched high school one February morning and drove out to a rocky riverbed east of Los Angeles known as the San Gabriel Wash. In an area no bigger than three square miles, they encountered thousands of small, powdery metallic blue butterflies called Sonoran blues, Philotes sonorensis, twinkling like tinsel in the air. The density of the population rivaled any other butterfly population in the world, and the sight of that many butterflies in one place, all streaming through their discordant orbits, was so breathtaking that Mattoni would still be able to close his eyes and see it as an old man. But in 1967, the Army Corps of Engineers bulldozed the habitat as part of a project to shore up the local water supply. The plants and butterflies were gone. Mattoni took it personally. “After that,” he would later say, “I thought, ‘Fuck all. I’m never going to see another butterfly.’”

  He gave up butterflies for at least a decade. He worked in the munitions industry at North American Aviation. He led a NASA experiment to shoot Salmonella and E. coli into outer space. He coauthored a manual called “Sanitation and Personal Hygiene During Aerospace Missions.” He made and lost a couple of million dollars trading bonds.

  Eventually, Mattoni found his way back to butterflies. In the early eighties, his was one of the loudest voices in what one conservationist describes as L.A.’s “crazy butterfly fringe,” mounting a battle to save the endangered El Segundo blue on the last remnant of its habitat: three hundred acres of dunes between the runways of Los Angeles International Airport and a Chevron refinery—yet another ragged refuge for insects. Mattoni worked at the dunes for ten years, studying and restoring the habitat and pulling weeds, while airliners throttled skyward just abov
e his head. By the late nineties, he was shouting down the enemies of another rare Southern California bug: the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly, an inch-long fly with bulging Martian eyes. Several cities and the National Association of Home Builders were suing the federal government to undo the fly’s protections under the Endangered Species Act. Its presence on 365 acres of junked-up land had stalled development, and the insect was being held up as a symbol of how wrongheaded and ludicrous environmental protection was getting. (As late as 2011, politicians were still trying to get the fly removed from the endangered species list.) The fact that the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly had the misfortune of being named “fly” made it the perfect target. Outraged businessmen turned up at hearings with flyswatters. “It’s hard to throw your support behind a maggot,” one city attorney told the press. Mattoni responded by telling a reporter, “The stupidity of politicians is so mind-boggling.”

  By this time, one former colleague told me, Mattoni was becoming “apocalyptically pessimistic.” He was squabbling more, and more bitterly, with his enemies and allies, including the nonprofit overseeing the Palos Verdes blue’s recovery. When the group’s director fired Mattoni, Mattoni simply packed up all the butterfly pupae from the fuel depot, put them in his car, and drove to his house. It was soon after that that Mattoni “imploded, exploded, decided to hit the reset button,” as the colleague put it. In 2003, at the age of seventy-six, he abruptly stepped down from his job at UCLA. He went to Buenos Aires, where he still lives.

  Among the many papers Mattoni published in his career, I found one about the butterflies he’d seen as a teenager at the San Gabriel Wash. In it, Mattoni used specimens he’d collected there as a young man to demonstrate that those blue butterflies were actually exceedingly different from other subspecies of Philotes sonorensis. They should be considered their own subspecies, he argued—if only now, after their extinction. In keeping with tradition, Mattoni got to name the new butterfly in his paper.

  He called it Philotes sonorensis extinctis—the “Human Folly blue.” The name alone suggests that Mattoni was beginning to see humanity with the same skepticism and disappointment that had crept up on William Temple Hornaday, that the baselines were shifting beneath his feet. He ended the paper curtly, betraying how pointless he was coming to believe his work was. “Should curiosity of biological matters survive for future humans,” Mattoni wrote, “this note may be useful.”

  —

  THE FIRST TIME I took my family to Antioch Dunes was two days before Isla’s second birthday. “Good God,” my wife, Wandee, gasped when the gypsum plant came into view.

  When we got out of the car, Wandee thought she saw something flutter past. “Is that a butterfly?” she said. Isla suddenly whipped around, grabbing at the air. After that, we decided to keep Isla strapped to one of our backs in a carrier, on the off chance that she managed to snatch a Lange’s or accidentally stomp an endangered plant, both federal offenses under Section 9(a)(2)(B) of the Endangered Species Act. In that fragile environment, our little girl suddenly seemed to have the capacity of a Godzilla—a heedless destroyer, trundling between bushes as though they were Japanese office towers.

  There was no shortage of butterflies in Isla’s life. They spread their sequined wings on her favorite hoodie and flitted out of sticker books, winding up on the walls. By now, the wild animals were everywhere in our house—the geese on her quilt, the fawn on her wall. They seemed to be spontaneously generating, like a cuddly infestation, spreading through every storybook on her shelf. I read that one researcher, pulling a random sample of a hundred recent children’s books, found only eleven that did not have animals in them. And what really struck me as strange was how often those critters have nothing to do with nature at all, but are only arbitrary stand-ins for people: the ungainly pig that yearns to be a figure skater; the squirrels that look disapprovingly at the bear who cannot stop biting her nails; a family of raccoons that bakes hamentashen for the family of beavers at Purim. It had all started to feel slightly insane, and I was hungry for an explanation. As Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, had pointed out to me, “Right when someone is learning to be human, we surround them with animals.”

  Almost from birth, kids seem drawn to other creatures on their own. In psychology studies, children as young as six months try to get closer to, and provoke more physical contact with, actual dogs and cats than they do battery-operated imitations. Infants smile more at a rabbit than at a toy. Even two-day-old babies have been shown to pay closer attention to “a dozen spotlights representing the joints and contours of a walking hen” than to a similar, randomly generated pattern of lights. It all provides evidence for what Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson has dubbed “biophilia”—his theory that human beings are inherently attuned to other life forms. It’s as though we have a deep well of attention set aside for animals, a powerful but uncategorized interest, waiting to be channeled into more cogent emotions, such as fascination or fear.* The attraction is so strong that a pair of psychologists felt compelled to assert in one scientific paper that a lack of interest in animals among children “can be normal,” too.

  Children fixate on animals in their imaginative lives also. They see animals in the inkblots of the Rorschach test twice as often as adults do. When, in 1955, a Tufts University psychologist went into a New Haven preschool and asked kids to tell her a story that they’d made up on the spot, between 65 and 80 percent of them told her a story about animals. Other research has found that 60 percent of the dreams that children have between the ages of three and five years old are about animals. But as kids grow up, the percentage of animal dreams goes down. By the time they’re fourteen, it’s only 20 percent. Similarly, fears of beasts like lions and sharks peak during preschool, then are gradually replaced by more human terrors, such as death, kidnapping, and not fitting in at school. I found a melancholic subtext to all this research—the way our world intrudes on, and then finally blots out, even the wildlife in children’s heads.

  Adults, meanwhile, have always tended to see kids and animals as vaguely equivalent, or at least more like each other than like us. “Children,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals.” Kids begin life naked, unable to speak, and motivated by only instincts and urges. Like a pet dog, they need to be fed, housebroken, and taught to sleep through the night without howling. For Freud, this animalness was problematic: socializing children meant sculpting their wildness into humanity. But these days, it’s easy to feel that society is the problematic force; we see it despoiling so much. And so, feeling that we are losing the wild everywhere, we’re prone to romanticize our wild children the same way we romanticize wild animals. Maybe we keep giving animal stuff to kids because their imaginations innately brim with animals, but maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe we long to see children and animals together—free creatures living in an innocence we’ve strayed from.

  It’s impossible to know. Most scientific research focused on kids and animals dissects children’s relationships with their pets, not their abstract feelings about wildlife or the many secondhand images of it they encounter. In 1979, however, the Yale social ecologist Stephen Kellert and a Fish and Wildlife Service employee, Miriam O. Westervelt, interviewed kids at twenty-two schools in Connecticut, in grades two through eleven, to gauge their attitudes toward wild animals. As far as I can tell, it’s the only study of its kind. What they discovered is an obvious but deflating truth: little kids are like animals, too consumed by their own interests to register much concern or compassion for other animals in the abstract.

  Kids under the age of six especially “were found to be egocentric, domineering, and self-serving,” Kellert later wrote. “Young children reveal little recognition or appreciation of the autonomous feelings and independence of
animals” and “also express the greatest fear of the natural world.” It was the younger kids, not the eighth- or eleventh-graders, who were more likely to believe that farmers should “kill all the foxes” if a particular fox eats their chickens; that it’s okay to slaughter animals for fur coats; that most wild animals are “dangerous to people”; and that all poisonous animals, like rattlesnakes, “should be gotten rid of.” It was the younger kids who were more likely to agree with the statement “It’s silly when people love animals as much as they love people,” whereas virtually none of the teenagers believed it was silly. Most second-graders agreed with the statement “If they found oil where wild animals lived, we would have to get the oil, even if it harmed the animals.” Eleventh-graders overwhelmingly did not.

  “Our society frequently romanticizes young children’s attitudes toward animals,” Kellert writes, “believing that they possess some special intuitive affinity for the natural world and that animals constitute for young people little friends or kindred spirits.” But the data was clear: the younger the kids, the more “exploitative, harsh, and unfeeling” they were—the more their relationship to wildlife was based on the satisfaction of “short-term needs and anxiety toward the unknown.” Older kids wanted to go camping in wildlife habitats; younger ones wanted “to stay where lots of other people were.”