by Ralph Nader
Top Eleven Queries
The Elephant and the Owl then asked the Dolphin to answer the most recurrent questions that humans had sent. “In the interest of time,” said the Dolphin, “I will just handle the top eleven.”
Why haven’t you given us your personal names?
REPLY: “Because this TALKOUT is not about us. Personal names lead to personal questions, which distract.”
How tiring has this program been for you and what do your species think about what you have done?
REPLY: “They’re OK about it. You’re right. It has been the most tiring thing we’ve ever done, but not the scariest. You humans have scared us all many times. The weariest parts were the jostling demands for airtime, the recriminations if various species and members within species did not get their way. You’ll recall we were facing a global revolt by the insects, which was quelled by the Human Genius suggesting the fabulous parade.”
Who is this Human Genius who made the breakthrough TALKOUT possible by the software delivery system that he or she invented?
REPLY: “You know as much about his or her identity as we do. What a hero!”
Did all the huge excitement, uproars, awareness, and discoveries affect the migration patterns of the animal/insect populations?
REPLY: “Yes, of course. What you couldn’t see during the one hundred hours was all the information flowing to our kingdom about safer places to live, what to be on guard against, and where we could get more relief from the dangers around us. For example, chickens started fleeing their coops to go to California, where there is a new law requiring more humane treatment, as they are being raised for the ultimate sacrifice. Wilderness areas, marine sanctuaries, and cleaner estuaries are becoming destinations.”
Backstage, so to speak, was there a lot of shoving, pushing, fighting, and jockeying for better showcasing?
REPLY: “There was some of that, especially with the animals that went rogue. But surprisingly little compared to what we understand would have happened among your species. Remember, the one hundred hours did not change our limited cravings, compared to Homo sapiens’ endless desires.”
You informed yourselves across species for the first time. Were you all surprised by your fantastic physical feats, your intelligence levels, your amazing sense of priorities, putting survival and procreation over everything else?
REPLY: “Without doubt. That was the best thing that came out of the new software of multiple communications, including and beyond the one hundred hours. For that awareness was the basis for trying to improve our relationships with you, humans. And more material is pouring in every hour.”
Do you think this TALKOUT will at all reduce the enormous violence between and among all species, including the violence by homo sapiens against the rest of you, whether deliberate killing for food or inadvertently by damage to the environment and the rhythms of nature that sustain you all?
REPLY: “That’s a hard question because it has many subsets. In the oceans, probably there will be less violence. The sharks made a good case for themselves. On land, over the long run, probably, yes, for knowledge of the cruelty to domesticates being raised for food will lead to more vegetarianism. Also, there are fewer wild animals to hunt and kill. You humans also are finding ways to reduce the number of pets euthanized. Remember, some of these anti-violence or humane groups in your society will replay parts of the one hundred hours again and again, in and outside your schools. But expanding human populations place greater stress on these expected improvements.”
When your ratings were sagging, why didn’t you portray fights between animals, not staging them, but catching them in the wilds per cinema verité? You know we humans like those kind of things.
REPLY: “You see, we do not have this difference between means and ends as you do. Maybe that is because we’re not as smart. To use sadism as a means to get a larger audience for our program’s purposes would not even occur to us independently. When that suggestion was relayed to the TRIAD by the Human Genius, and then by some animals who were picking up this idea from humans, we felt nauseous. No, never.”
Why didn’t you show the intercourse up close and what were the reactions of nearby similar animals or insects who were not copulating? Also why was there never resistance by the females?
REPLY: “Because it is all about the business of procreation and both sexes understand that, to use a controversial term, instinctively during the proper times of year. Except for creatures like the bonobos who are something, aren’t they? More like you, may I suggest?
“By the way, voyeurs sent millions of questions about our mating presentation, which was cinema verité, except when humans demanded that the TRIAD ourselves do it. Such demands on us personally were so overwhelming that we complied just to get on with the program.”
What’s the encore? You can’t let it stop here. If you had your druthers and the guidance of the Human Genius, how would you complete what rumors say is going to be a trilogy?
REPLY: “The second one hundred hours (if we created them) would take care of many requests both from animals who were left out and felt they should have had time on the screen, and from humans who requested to know more about certain aspects of our lives. The third leg of the trilogy, if it were done, is to be determined once we and you humans evaluate the effects and opportunities arising out of the second leg. We learn as we go.”
Tell us about extreme aberrations within the animal/insect world. What we would call dramatically irrational, violent, sadistic behavior or reactive masochism, for example?
REPLY: “We know that when injuries or illnesses come to the animal/insect world, the victims go, as you are wont to say, berserk. When a tiger is injured and can no longer hunt the customary prey, he or she becomes a man-eater, as in India, for instance. What we were not prepared for were other unusual, disruptive, sad, morose types of behavior and activities that are appearing in animals, spawned by this whole process of interaction with the human world. You call it culture shock when native people are intruded upon by colonizers or invaders from another culture. Animals are suffering the same kind of shock. Perhaps that’s why the one hundred hours sometimes appeared chaotic.
“But,” swelled the Dolphin, “how wonderfully enlightening, exciting, AND filled with potential for the good of all of us living, organic creatures inhabiting a tiny planet in a vast, vast inorganic universe was that treasured time of communicating to humans.”
Last Thoughts
The TRIAD moved closer together with the Dolphin’s closing words. They wished to end with a joint and memorable transmission to their vast human audience. The Elephant, the Owl, and the Dolphin each vocalized one sentence in their turn to signify the unity of their message:
“The twenty-first century may be the decisive century of all time when it comes to the relations between the animal and human kingdoms. That was not our choice. It was your science and technology and the ways you are choosing to use them. This century can be one of coexistence or one of human displacement of the capstones of the natural world. Are you sapiens sapient enough to infuse an ethical framework, bolstered by your so-called rule of law, to allow us to peacefully coexist given the driven avarice of some of you and the risky tools of biotechnology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and your weapons, whether deliberate or inadvertent, of mass destruction?
“Your Human Genius has enabled us in the animal/insect world to know that there is controversy over the development and use of these technologies as they relentlessly become deployed by your forces of power and profit, which are dictated by the few who rule the rest of you humans. As one of your philosophers has said, yours ‘is a race between reason and ruin, between virtue and victimization, between prudence and plutocracy, between civic values and commercial values.’ She left little doubt as to how this race is turning out year after year with the abyss coming nearer and nearer.
“The twenty-first century is the fourth stage of humans in their relationships with the a
nimal/insect kingdom. Stage One was millions of years ago when your ancestors were herbivores. Then, Stage Two, you added flesh to your diets, becoming hunters and carnivores. Then some thirteen thousand years ago, Stage Three, you took up agriculture, which included domesticating animals for work and eating. Protecting them and moving into habitats of the free animals, you plunged into a seriously adversarial position, beginning the process of diminishing their numbers and extinguishing some of these animals forever.
“Now the advanced Third Stage is not merging or mutating into the Fourth Stage. We would like to say that the paths ahead are our mutual choices but that, as you well know, is not the case. For you humans are truly the Kings of Beasts, the monarchs whose subjects can either help tame and civilize you or allow you to be the monarchs for the Death Planet, imploding on itself and rejecting the many benign uses of our silent sun, which, though inorganic, is responsible for all the life-giving systems so widely spurned by the Kings of Beasts.
“Quo vadis, oh humans, quo vadis?!”
Fade Out
With those haunting words, the TRIAD faded off the screen, which began to reflect a collage that looked like the universe, with its billions of galaxies, billions of stars, and millions of planets in dynamic, swirling motion. Out of this immensity and panorama of infinity and mystery, the view began to circle closer to our galaxy, the Milky Way, then to our solar system with its seven planets, then to the green planet of Earth.
The picture of Earth remained on the tiny screen for five minutes, without sound or language. Then everything went blank. Almost magically, billions of humans also went about five minutes without sound or language. Silently speechless. Perhaps contemplating, perhaps astonished, perhaps beginning to broaden their frame of reference, mused the Human Genius with a barely discernible expression of satisfied reverie motionless in time, dreaming of a coming vitalized natural world.
Notes
Page 15, Marc Bekoff, “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” Yes! Magazine, March 2, 2011, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/can-animals-save-us/we-second-that-emotion.
Page 16, Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1907),http://www.econlib.org/library/Bentham/bnthPML18.html.
Page 20, Robert M. Sapolsky, “A Natural History of Peace,” New York Times, January 2, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20060101faessay_v85n1_sapolsky.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0.
Page 21, “Not to use his position on the TRIAD for his own advantage . . .” See New York Times, March 7, 2013. This article is also referenced in the discussion of endangered species later in the text.
Page 22, Meeri Kim, “Dolphins Can Recognize Calls From Old Tank Mates From 20 Years Ago, Study Finds,” Washington Post, August 6, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dolphins-can-recognize-calls-from-old-tank-mates-from-over-20-yearsago/2013/08/06/1b1d5ab8-feb3-11e2-bd97-676ec24f1f3f_story.html.
Page 25, Virginia Morell, “Why Do Parrots Talk? Venezuelan Site Offers Clues,” Science 333, no. 6041, July 22, 2011, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6041/news-summaries.
Page 26, Jim Robbins, “Hunting Habits of Wolves Change Ecological Balance in Yellowstone,” New York Times, October 18, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/science/earth/hunting-habits-of-wolves-change-ecological-balance-in.html?_r=0.
Page 30, Jim Robbins, “Reversing Course on Beavers,” New York Times, October 27, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/science/reversing-course-on-beavers.html.
Page 31, Chris Cottrell, “German Legislators Vote to Outlaw Bestiality,” New York Times, February 1, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/world/europe/german-legislators-vote-to-outlaw-bestiality.html.
Page 32, “There are signs among you humans toward normalizing . . .” See New York Times, August 3, 2013.
Page 32, Tim Kreider, “A Man and His Cat,” New York Times, August 1, 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/a-man-and-his-cat/.
Page 33, Cottrell, “German Legislators Vote.”
Page 34, Melissa Hoppert, “Preakness Champion, and Mother, Toughs It Out,” New York Times, May 18, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/sports/rachel-alexandra-2009-preakness-winner-recovers-from-scare.html.
Page 35, Nell Alk, “Dogs and Cats Take Center Stage in Times Square,” Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324348504578606114160899852.
Page 36, “One of your Nature Conservancy magazines described us as . . .” See Nature Conservancy Magazine, August 2010.
Page 39, Lauren Wilcox, “Modern Zoos Could Be Creating a New Kind of Animal: Wild by Nature, Shaped by Captivity,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/modern-zoos-could-be-creating-a-new-kind-of-animal-wild-by-natureshaped-by-captivity/2012/07/25/gJQAdq4IBX_story.html.
Page 40, Michael Cieply, “SeaWorld’s Unusual Retort to a Critical Documentary,” New York Times, July 18, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/business/media/seaworlds-unusual-retort-to-a-critical-documentary.html.
Pages 47–48, Theo Tait, “Don’t Wear Yum-yum Yellow,” London Review of Books 34, no. 15, August 2012, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n15/theo-tait/dont-wear-yum-yum-yellow.
Pages 52–53, Jacqueline Sheehan, “Though Now Apart, We Faced a Common Enemy,” New York Times, March 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/fashion/though-now-apart-we-faced-a-common-enemy-modern-love.html.
Page 57, Jo Tuckman, “Cat Stands for Election in Mexican City,” Guardian, June 19, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/cat-standselection-mexican-city.
Pages 58–59, Dana Jennings, “Twisting and Turning,” New York Times, May 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/in-serpentine-beautiful-snakes-twisting-and-turning.html.
Page 64, Brian Palmer, “Pests That Bug Us Have Their Own Ecological Importance,” Guardian, May 21, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/may/21/insects-cockroach-bed-bugs-environment.
Page 65, “‘Think, think, think,’ cried the roaches . . .” More about cockroaches can be found in Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2013.
Page 71, J. B. MacKinnon, “Appetite of Abundance: On the Benefits of Being Eaten,” Orion, July 2013.
Page 73, Denise Grady, “Researchers Suspect That Camels Are Linked to a Middle East Virus,” New York Times, August 8, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/health/researchers-suspect-camels-are-linked-to-middle-eastvirus.html.
Page 75, Jon Mooallem, “A Child’s Wild Kingdom,” New York Times, May 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-childs-wild-kingdom.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=-FEA25FA43BC209B54AB676B26F2237DD&gwt=pay&assetType=opinion.
Page 78, Ronald A. Sherman, “What Are Leeches and Maggots Doing in Modern Hospitals?,” BottomLineInc, July 23, 2009, http://bottomlineinc.com/what-are-leeches-and-maggots-doing-in-modern-hospitals/.
Page 79, Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2013.
Page 79, David A. Fahrenthold and Joshua Partlow, “Baby Snakehead Is No Bundle of Joy,” Washington Post, October 5, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-co/hotcontent/index.html?section=metro/specials/snakeheads.
Page 79, Patterson Clark, “The Stubborn Life of a Snakehead,” Washington Post, April 30, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/urbanjungle/pages/130430.html.
Pages 80–81, “First is the looks of the fish. Second is the popularity . . .” See New York Times, August 11, 2013.
Page 83, Caroline Porter, “Native Species Step Up to Fight Ash Parasite,” Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323446404579011172323705040.
Page 84, Mooallem, “A Child’s Wild Kingdom.”
Page 85, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145.
Page 87, Sarah Maslin Nir, “An Invasion of 17-Year-Olds, Loud, Lusty and Six-Legged,” New York Times, June 7, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/
08/nyregion/an-invasion-of-17-year-olds-loud-lusty-and-six-legged.html.
Page 88, Andrew Adam Newman, “Freshpet Dog Food Promotes Products Sourced in the U.S.,” New York Times, June 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/business/media/freshpet-dog-food-promotes-productssourced-in-the-us.html?_r=0.
Page 91, “The more coordinated is their prancing and their vocalizing . . .” See New York Times, June 11, 2013.
Page 92, The Reliable Source, “Quoted: Michelle Obama on Dog Fitness,” Washington Post, March 4, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/quoted-michelle-obama-on-dog-fitness/2013/03/04/ c115d62a-84fb-11e2-9d71-f0feafdd1394_blog.html.
Page 92, “‘People will forget,’ soothed her lady-in-waiting, ‘don’t worry.’” See this story in the New York Times, May 12, 2013.
Page 93, John Schwartz, “Donal O’Brien, Audubon Leader, Dies at 79,” New York Times, September 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/nyregion/donal-obrien-audubon-leader-dies-at-79.html.
Page 94, “A Showy Beetle That Befriends Ants,” New York Times, December 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/10/science/a-showy-beetlethat-befriended-ants.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FFrench%20Guiana&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection.
Page 95, “As it started to lift up from its pedestal into wide blue sky, the great condor . . .” See New York Times, May 2013.
Page 96, “Dual Forces in an Andean Rite,” New York Times, August 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/08/10/world/americas/20130810PERU.html.
Page 99, “The Largest Falcon Hospital in the World,” New York Times, April 26, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/28/magazine/look-falcon.html?_r=0.
Page 99, “During the time-out, humans returned to their own daily fare of ‘animal stories’ . . .” See New York Times, April 28, 2013.
Page 99, Carl Zimmer, “A Virtual Pack, to Study Canine Minds,” New York Times, April 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/science/enlistinga-virtual-pack-to-study-dog-minds.html.