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

by Jon Mooallem

  Conversations with Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication at Yale University, and Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, informed my understanding of how Americans think about climate change. The poll from the Pew Research Center, “Little Change in Opinions about Global Warming,” was released on October 27, 2010. Congressman John Boehner called the idea that carbon was harming the environment “almost comical” on an April 19, 2009, broadcast of This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

  I spoke with Christopher Andrews, the director of the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences and the academy’s chief of public engagement, about why the museum was overhauling its climate change exhibit. (Chris also shared an internal audit of the exhibit’s effectiveness.) And I learned about the polar bear “transition center” from Don Peterkin, Gordon Glover, and Douglas Ross at Assiniboine Park.

  John Hadidian, director of Urban Wildlife programs at the Humane Society of the United States, first introduced me to the term “cultural carrying capacity.”

  2. AMERICAN INCOGNITUM

  My account of the military’s exit and the birth of the tourism industry relies on coverage of those eras in the Winnipeg Free Press but, primarily, on the conversations I had in Churchill with people who lived through them. Mike Macri, Paul Ratson, Mark Ingebrigtson, Dennis Compayre, Ed Bazlik, Claude Daudet, Myrtle Demeulles, Bob and Pat Penwarden, Don and Kyle Walkoski, and Mayor Mike Spence were among the many good oral historians I encountered in town. Len Smith answered questions after I returned.

  I learned about Ursula Böttcher from a short, March 30, 2012, obituary in the Telegraph and from an April 9, 1980, New York Times article by Paul L. Montgomery that describes how a New York City transit strike was squashing attendance at the circus, leaving Böttcher to do her polar bear show for a mostly empty arena. “It’s a hard bread to eat, but you go on,” she told the paper.

  I read several newspaper stories about the films Polar Bear Alert and Blue Water, White Death, including a May 12, 1971, New York Times review of the latter by Vincent Camby. Peter Benchley talks about his debt to that film in the introduction to a later edition of Jaws (New York: Random House, 1991), 1–2. Animal Planet’s Plexiglas cube stunt is mentioned in Chris Palmer, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2010), 148. Chris, director of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University, also stressed to me the influence that Polar Bear Alert and Blue Water, White Death have had on the field.

  My description of the Tommy Mutanen mauling and its aftermath is drawn from both the Winnipeg Free Press and the firsthand accounts of Mark Ingebrigtson, Mike Reimer, and Sandi Coleman, the television reporter I mention, among others.

  I extrapolated the value of the polar bear tourism economy in Churchill from “Evidence of the Socio-Economic Importance of Polar Bears for Canada,” a 2011 report commissioned by Environment Canada, a government agency, and prepared by ÉcoRessources Consultants—and specifically from Figure 2: “Monetary Values Associated With Polar Bears in Canada, by Value Category (Aggregate Amounts for Canada).” The tourism study I mention is “Last-chance Tourism: The Boom, Doom, and Gloom of Visiting Vanishing Destinations,” by Harvey Lemelin et al., Current Issues in Tourism 13 (2010).

  Hudson Bay’s southern polar bear population has been studied for more than three decades by Ian Stirling, a retired adjunct professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Alberta and research scientist emeritus with Environment Edmonton. I benefited from many studies he’s authored and coauthored over the years, as well as his book Polar Bears (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). A key source for understanding exactly how climate change will affect the town’s bear population is “Polar Bears in a Warming Climate,” Integrative and Comparative Biology 44 (2004), by Andrew E. Derocher, Nicholas J. Lunn, and Ian Stirling. An even more valuable resource for me was Andy Derocher himself. Not only did Andy talk me through the science with great patience and skill, he also looked over sections of this book before publication. I’m grateful to him for being so generous with his time, and also to Steven Amstrup, an equally gifted scientific explainer.

  Robert F. “Rocky” Rockwell at the American Museum of Natural History talked with me about his goose research and the reactions it provoked. The scientific paper that established how futile it is for polar bears to chase geese is “The Significance of Supplemental Food to Polar Bears During the Ice-Free Period of Hudson Bay,” Canadian Journal of Zoology, 63 (1985), by Nicholas J. Lunn and Ian Stirling. I first saw this research mentioned in Richard Ellis’s encyclopedic book On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear (New York: Knopf, 2009), 95.

  Early America’s over-the-top enthusiasm for mammoths has attracted a number of perceptive historians. My writing on the subject relies primarily on books by three of them: Barrow, Nature’s Ghosts; Paul Semonin, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2000); and Lee Alan Dugatkin, Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Dugatkin’s book is also the indispensable resource for anyone interested in Thomas Jefferson’s moose gambit. I also consulted Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Thomas Jefferson as Paleontologist,” Science 82 (1935); Gilbert Chinard, “Eighteenth-Century Theories on America as a Human Habitat,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 91 (1947); and Ralph N. Miller, “American Nationalism as a Theory of Nature,” The William and Mary Quarterly 12 (1955). Especially useful for understanding Jefferson the man were Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) and Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Random House, 1996).

  Details about America’s “mammoth fever” are covered in Semonin’s American Monster, as well as in “The Cheese and the Words,” by Jeffrey L. Pasley in Jeffrey L. Pasley and Andrew Whitmore Robertson, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 32–33. Semonin also describes a 1,230-pound “mammoth cheese,” fabricated by a certain Baptist congregation in Massachusetts as a gift for President Jefferson in 1802. The cheese was six feet in diameter, made from the milk of nine hundred cows, and pressed on a cider press built specifically for the operation, engraved with the words “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” However, as Pasley shows, the cheese actually had nothing to do with the mammoth; it was just a gift—albeit a strange one—and was nicknamed the “Mammoth Cheese” by someone else. The cheese was still knocking around the White House as late as 1804 and observed, by that time, to be “very far from being good.”

  3. BILLY POSSUMS

  To learn about the effort to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, I interviewed many of the people involved and slogged through many legal documents, including the original petition filed by Kassie Siegel and Brendan Cumming, “Petition to List the Polar Bear (Ursus maritimus) as a Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act.” Kassie, in particular, was a patient and fair-minded explainer of the ins and outs of the case. I also benefited from conversations with Holly Doremus at the UC Berkeley School of Law, both about the polar bear case and the listing process in general.

  The 2008 documentary Polar Bear Fever, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, gives a good overview of the swelling of public interest in polar bears during that time. The 2007 UN report I refer to is “The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment,” and its lead author, Richard B. Alley, was quoted in the February 2, 2007, New York Times article “Panel Issues Bleak Report on Climate Change.” Terry Macko at WWF discussed the Golden Compass campaign with me.

  In researching the history of the Endangered Species Act and the
candidate list, I read a number of good books, including Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (New York: Knopf, 1995); Dale D. Goble, J. Michael Scott, and Frank W. Davis, eds., The Endangered Species Act at Thirty, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005); and two well-researched reports by the Center for Biological Diversity: 2004’s “Extinction and the Endangered Species Act,” by Kierán F. Suckling, Rhiwena Slack, and Brian Nowicki and 2005’s “Progress or Extinction?: A Systematic Review of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Endangered Species Act Listing Program 1974–2004,” by D. Noah Greenwald and Kierán F. Suckling. Two other important sources were John G. Sidle, “Arbitrary and Capricious Species Conservation,” Conservation Biology 12 (1998) and Shannon Petersen, “Congress and Charismatic Megafauna: A Legislative History of the Endangered Species Act,” Environmental Law 29 (1999). It’s Petersen who notes that major newspapers devoted only one sentence to the passage of the law and who describes Congress as regarding it as “a largely symbolic effort.” Brendan Cummings delivers his “Yes I voted to kill the polar bear” zinger in Polar Bear Fever.

  Yale University’s Stephen R. Kellert is considered a godfather of the emerging field of human-animal studies, and I relied on both conversations with him and a very large pile of his writings from the last forty-plus years to understand that research. The opinion poll about mountain lions and lousewarts, for example, comes from Kellert’s “A Study of American Attitudes Toward Animals: A Report to the Fish and Wildlife Service of the United States Service of the United States Department of the Interior,” published in 1967. My discussion of phylogenetic relatedness relies, in part, on his “Public Perceptions of Predators, Particularly the Wolf and the Coyote,” Biological Conservation 31 (1985). And his book The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996) summarizes and elaborates on some of his most interesting findings. Michael J. Manfredo, at Colorado State University, was another good guide into this field. The study in which a particular animal is said to have been kicked “like a football” is “Human-to-Animal Similarity and Participant Mood Influence Punishment Recommendations for Animal Abusers,” by Michael W. Allen et al., Society and Animals 10 (2002).

  Findings mentioned in the footnote come from William Siemer et al., “Factors that Influence Concern About Human–Black Bear Interactions in Residential Settings,” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 14 (2009); George Feldhamer, “Charismatic Mammalian Megafauna: Public Empathy and Marketing Strategy,” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2003); Lingling Xiang, “Animal Use in Award-Winning TV Commercials in China Versus the U.S.” (masters thesis, University of Florida, 2008); Susan Clayton, John Fraser, and Carol Saunders, “Zoo Experiences: Conversations, Connections, and Concern for Animals,” Zoo Biology 28 (2008); E. Paul Ashley, Amanda Kosloski, and Scott A. Petrie, “Incidence of Intentional Vehicle-Reptile Collisions,” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 12 (2007); Jennifer Wolch and Jin Zhang, “Siren Songs: Gendered Discourse of Concern for Sea Creatures,” in A Companion to Feminist Geography, eds. L. Nelson and J. Seager (London: Blackwell, 2005); R. J. Hoage, Perceptions of Animals in American Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); and Janis Wiley Driscoll, “Attitudes Toward Animals: Species Ratings,” Society and Animals 3 (1995). John Fraser, a researcher with the Wildlife Conservation Society, told me about his discovery that people are more likely to presume a given tiger is female. This was in the course of his telling me many other, more important things.

  I drew details about Roosevelt’s bear-hunting trip from its coverage in the New York Times and Washington Post and from Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 431–45. My history of the teddy bear is rooted in a number of sources, all frustratingly incomplete. These include the Brinkley book; the Steiff company’s Web site; Donna Varga, “Babes in the Woods: Wilderness Aesthetics in Children’s Stories and Toys, 1830–1915,” Society and Animals 17 (2009); and Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 92–97. Cross describes earlier depictions of bears as “apparently designed to upset young children.”

  America’s extermination of predators in the early 1900s is covered well in Barrow’s Nature’s Ghosts and in Lisa Mighetto’s Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). I read about the Ladies’ Home Journal story about Balser in Varga’s “Babe in the Woods.” The bureau biologist who claims predators “no longer have a place in our advancing civilization” is quoted in Stephen R. Kellert et al., “Human Culture and Large Carnivore Conservation in North America,” Conservation Biology 10 (1996): 979.

  I read, and actually kind of enjoyed, Seton’s The Biography of a Grizzly (New York: Century Co., 1900) and parts of his books Wild Animals I Have Known: Being the Personal Histories of Lobo, Silverspot, Rappylup, Bingo, The Springfield Fox, The Pacing Mustang, Wully and Redruff (New York: Scribners, 1900) and Animal Heroes: Being the Histories of a Cat, a Dog, a Pigeon, a Lynx, Two Wolves & a Reindeer and in Elucidation of the Same, Over 200 Drawings (New York: Gosset & Dunlap, 1905). Seton’s description of “shy” and “inoffensive” bears is quoted in “The Bear” by Daniel J. Gelo, in American Wildlife in Symbol and Story, eds. Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 151. It was probably Gelo’s essay that led me to consider Seton and teddy bears together.

  Mighetto’s Wild Animals and American Environmental Ethics puts the nature fakers in historical context, as does Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2001). William Long’s description of polite wolves appears in “The Sociology of a Wolf Pack,” Independent 66 (1909). U.S. Census Bureau data tracks the urbanization of America during this time. The anguished zoo director I mention is William Temple Hornaday, quoted in Gregory J. Dehler, “An American Crusader: William Temple Hornaday and Wildlife Protection, 1840–1940” (PhD diss., Lehigh University, 2001): 151.

  The cougar study I summarize is “Changing Attitudes Toward California Cougars,” by Jennifer R. Wolch et al., Society and Animals 5 (1997). Montana governor Brian Schweitzer trash-talked wolves in a February 17, 2011, Reuters article. The study about New Jersey black bears is “The Black Bear Hunt in New Jersey: A Constructionist Analysis of an Intractable Conflict,” by Dave Harker and Diane C. Bates, Society and Animals 15 (2007). I read only the parts of James Oliver Curwood’s The Grizzly King: A Romance of the Wild (New York: Doubleday, 1916) that I absolutely had to.

  I learned about the teddy bear’s runaway popularity and the Billy Possum’s rise and fall by reading many bizarre news articles of the time in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle, among other papers. (I read, for example, that in 1909, a Mrs. John Rossman started breeding live opossums in her Brooklyn apartment and insisted to the Washington Post that the fact that fashionable women on the street were not yet carrying these Billy Possums around as accessories “is due entirely to the cold weather.”) The “Christmas goose” line comes from Margaret Warner Morley, The Carolina Mountains (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 77. The Amazon.com review was posted by “Unusualfinds” on July 6, 2010. The reviewer goes on to say that she removed the toy opossum’s hideous tail, took out some of the stuffing, shortened it, and sewed it back on: “Easy to do and made it much more toy-like looking, and less realistic.”

  My speculation about why the story of Roosevelt’s bear hunt resonated with the public owes a lot to a conversation I had with Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. We were discussing the more recent mass affection for polar bears but his thoughts on bears and humans in general stuck with me and resurfaced here.

  The Obama administration’s argument that the polar bear is a threatened, and not endangered, species i
s laid out most clearly—albeit not so clearly at all—in the memorandum “Supplemental Explanation for the Legal Basis of the Department’s May 14, 2008 Determination of Threatened Status for Polar Bears,” dated December 22, 2010. The federal judge’s questioning of Kassie Siegel is quoted in “Judge Skeptical About Remanding Polar Bear Case to Obama Administration,” by Lawrence Hurly of Greenwire, published by the New York Times on February 23, 2011.

  4. THE CONNECTION

  I’m indebted to Brian Ladoon for his time and insights, and for protecting me from polar bears while I was at Mile 5. The Canadian Geographic article I mention is “Dangerous Liaisons,” by Pauline Comeau, September–October 1997.

  I learned to see Churchill from the perspective of wildlife photographers by talking with Daniel J. Cox, Mike Macri, and Norbert Rosing. Chris Palmer’s Shooting in the Wild exposes the trickery going on in wildlife filmmaking. Also helpful was Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  The radio show whose Web site revived Norbert Rosing’s photographs of the bear and dog was called Speaking of Faith and is now called On Being. Stuart Brown, who assembled the package “Animals at Play” in the December 1994 issue of National Geographic, which included Rosing’s photos, helped me reconstruct the chronology of events.

  Margie Carroll’s books, Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish and A Busy Spring for Grandella the Gray Fox, are published by the Margie Carroll Press: margiecarrollpress.com.

  Thanks to the winners of 2010’s Project Polar Bear contest for letting me and my family crash their grand-prize buggy ride, and a special thanks to Sam Leist for e-mailing me his video of the female yearling standoff so that I could better describe it.