Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  In contrast to its surrounds, my acre appeared an evasion of reality, a construct, a moment poised before an inevitable after. How lovely it was, how fortunate I was. Each day my heart recognized its great worth. It was invaluable to me. The moment came when I had to sell it.

  Leopold speaks of the necessity of developing an ecological conscience, of having an awareness of land in a philosophical rather than an economic sense. His articulation of our ethical obligations to the land is considered by many to be quite admirable. We celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of this articulation (if not its implementation) in 1999. A pretty thought, high-minded. And yet when one has to move on (if not exactly in the final sense), one is expected to be sensible, realistic, even canny, about property. I was not in the comfortable kind of financial situation where I could deed my land to a conservation group or land trust. Even if I could have, it would probably have been sold to protect more considerable sanctuary acreage elsewhere, for it was a mere acre in a pricey neighborhood, not contiguous with additional habitat land, though the lagoon did provide a natural larger dimension. I had been developing an ecological conscience for thirty years, and I could continue to develop it still, certainly become a good steward somewhere else, because once I had decided to sell, this particular piece of land and all the creatures that found it to be a perfect earthly home, would be subject to erasure in any meaningful ecological sense, and this would not be considered by society to be selfish, cruel, or irresponsible.

  “Wow, it’s great back here,” the Realtor said. “I often wondered what the heck was going on back here. I’m looking forward to showing this place.”

  I told him I wanted to sell the land as a single piece, with deed restrictions, these being that the land could never be subdivided; that the buildings would be restricted to one house and cottage taking up no more land than the originals; and that the southern half of the property would be left in its natural state as wildlife habitat.

  “Nobody wants to be told what they can do with their land.” He frowned. “I’ll mention your wishes, but you’ll have to accept a significant reduction in price with those kinds of demands. When we get an offer, you and the buyer can negotiate the wording of the agreement. I’m sure the type of person who would be attracted to this property wouldn’t want to tear it all apart.”

  “Really?” I said. “You don’t think?”

  I went through a number of Realtors.

  With a lawyer I drew up a simple and enforceable document that the Realtors found so unnerving that they wouldn’t show it right away to interested parties, preferring word wobble and expressions of good intention. There were many people who loved the land, who loved nature but would never buy anything that was in essence not free and clear. Or, they had no problem with the restrictions personally, but when they had to sell (and heaven forbid that they would right away, of course), they could not impose such coercive restraints on others. The speculators and builders had been dismissed from the beginning. Those interested were people of a more maverick bent, caring people who loved Florida, loved the key—wasn’t it a shame there was so much development, so much change. When they saw the humble document, they said 1) who does she think she is, 2) she’s crazy, 3) she’ll never sell it. Over the months the Realtors took on a counseling manner with me, as though I needed psychological guidance through this problem of my own making, as though I needed to be talked down from my irrational fanciful resolve. They could sell the land for $200,000 more if I dropped the restrictions. They argued that my acre could be destroyed naturally, a hurricane could level everything and the creatures, the birds, would have to go somewhere else anyway. With the money I’d make marketing it smartly, I could buy a hundred acres, maybe more, east of the interstate. There was a lot of pretty ranchland over there. I could conserve that. A lot of pressure would be on that land in a few years, I could do more by saving that. Sell and don’t look back! That’s what people did. You can’t look back.

  I’m not looking back, I said.

  And I wasn’t.

  I was looking ahead, seeing the land behind the wall still existing, still supporting its nests and burrows—a living whole. I was leaving it—soon I would no longer be personally experiencing its loveliness—but I would not abandon it. I would despise myself if I did. If I were to be party to a normal real estate transaction, I would be dooming it; I would be—and this is not at all exaggerated—signing a warrant for its death. (Perhaps the owners of the four new houses that would most likely be built would have the kindness to put out some bird seed.) I wanted more than more money for my land, more than the mere memory of it, the luxury of conserving it falsely and sentimentally through lyrical recall. I wanted it to be.

  It took eight months to find the right buyer. Leopold’s “philosophers” were in short supply in the world of Florida real estate. But the ideal new owners eventually appeared, and they had no problem with the contract between themselves and the land. I had changed no hearts or minds by my attitude or actions, I had simply found—or my baffled but determined Realtors had—people of my persuasion, people who had a land ethic too. Their duties as stewards were not onerous to them. They did not consider the additional legal documents they were obliged to sign an insult to their personal freedom. They were aware that the principle was hardly radical. An aunt had done a similar thing in New England, preserving forty acres of meadow and woodland by conservation easement. They had friends in California who had similarly sold and conserved by deed four hundred acres of high desert. And here was this enchanted acre.

  It had been accomplished. I had persisted. I was well pleased with myself. Selfishly, I had affected the land beyond my tenure. I had gotten my way.

  And with all of this, I am still allowed to miss it so.

  Audubon

  THE ROSEATE SPOONBILL HAD ALMOST BEEN EXTERMINATED BY plume hunters at the turn of the century. The feathers were not as popular as those of the egret for ladies’ hats, but the wings were torn off and made into fans, though the buyer was often disappointed when the brilliant colors quickly faded. Knowledge of the horrors of avian carnage gives reading Edith Wharton a new dimension.

  The spoonbill is a simple and shy creature of many troubles, yet garbed in glory. The young are an immaculate white and only gradually become suffused with pink. Three years must pass and three moltings occur before the bird achieves its full brilliance of nuptial plumage—in rose and carmine and orange—and will mate. The drawing of the spoonbill in John Audubon’s Birds of America, considered not to be by Audubon, does not reflect the true radiance of the bird’s colors. It is not likely that Audubon saw many of them. In his remarks he noted that their flesh was oily and poor eating, and that they were difficult to kill.

  When Audubon visited Key West in 1832, a newspaper editor wrote enthusiastically:

  “It is impossible to associate with him without catching some portion of his spirit; he is surrounded with an atmosphere which infects all who come within it, with a mania for bird killing and bird stuffing.”

  Audubon indeed had a mania. Though his name has become synonymous with wildlife preservation, he was in no manner at any time concerned with conservation. He killed tirelessly for sport and amusement as well as for his art, and he considered it to be a very poor day’s hunting in Florida if he shot fewer than a hundred birds. From St. Augustine, he wrote: “We have drawn seventeen species since our arrival in Florida but the species are now exhausted and therefore I will push off. . . .”

  Audubon shot many thousands of birds and never in his mind made the connection between the wholesale slaughter he so earnestly engaged in and their decreasing number, although in his forties he did begin complaining about the scarcity of mammals and birds for his studies. “Where can I go now,” he grumbled, “and visit nature undisturbed?”

  The Animal People

  FOR CENTURIES POETS, SOME POETS, HAVE TRIED TO GIVE A voice to the animals, and readers, some readers, have felt empathy and sorrow. If animals did have
voices, and they could speak with the tongues of angels—at the very least with the tongues of angels—they would be unable to save themselves from us. What good would language do? Their mysterious otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and coats and skins and shells and eyes. We discover the remarkable intelligence of the whale, the wolf, the elephant—it does not save them, nor does our awareness of the complexity of their lives. Their strength, their skills, their swiftness, the beauty of their flights. It matters not, it seems, whether they are large or small, proud or shy, docile or fierce, wild or domesticated, whether they nurse their young or brood patiently on eggs. If they eat meat, we decry their viciousness; if they eat grasses and seeds, we dismiss them as weak. There is not one of them, not even the songbird who cannot, who does not, conflict with man and his perceived needs and desires. St. Francis converted the wolf of Gubbio to reason, but he performed this miracle only once and as miracles go, it didn’t seem to capture the public’s fancy. Humans don’t want animals to reason with them. It would be a disturbing, unnerving, diminishing experience; it would bring about all manner of awkwardness and guilt.

  We learn more and more about them, and that has not saved them. We know that when they face Death, they fear it. We know that they care for their young and teach them, that they play and grieve, that they have memories and a sense of the future, for which they sometimes plan. We know about their habits, their migrations, that they have a sense of Home, of finding, seeking, returning to Home. We know these things, and it has not saved them. We know where they live on this planet, and nine times out of ten we will go there and . . . rout . . . them . . . out. Nothing that is animal, that is not us, cannot be slaughtered as a pest or sucked dry as a memento or reduced to a trophy or rendered into a product or eaten, eaten, eaten. The French eat horses, the Japanese whales, the Taiwanese dogs. Gorillas and chimpanzees are now being killed in quantity on a commercial level, to provide bushmeat for African workers who are decimating their forests for European timber companies. It’s need or preference or availability, it’s culture, it’s a way to feed the poor, it’s different, it’s plentiful, it’s not plentiful but it’s a nice change of pace, it arouses the palate, it amuses the palate, it’s healthy, it gets rid of something unwanted, it utilizes what’s already dead, it would live too long otherwise and take up too much space, it’s somebody’s way of life, it’s somebody’s livelihood, it’s somebody’s business, it’s an industry.

  The creatures that have been under our “stewardship” the longest, who have been codified by habit for our use, the farm animals, have never been as cruelly kept or confined or slaughtered in such numbers in all of history. They have always suffered a special place in our regard—they are known to us, they are tamed, they are raised to provide us with milk and eggs and meat, they are bred to die. Large-scale corporate agribusinesses are pure Descartes. Animals are no more than machines—milk machines, piglet-making machines, egg-laying machines. Production units converting themselves into profits. Pigs are raised on bare concrete, in windowless metal buildings, or tightly restrained in foul pens and gestation boxes. Two hundred and fifty thousand laying hens can be confined in a single building on a factory farm with fully automated egg collection. The high mortality rate caused by overcrowding is considered economically acceptable. Nothing is more worthless than an individual chicken. Cows are kept pregnant to produce milk, the amount of which is artificially increased with synthetic hormone injections, although the dairy industry already produces enormous quantities of excess milk. The by-products of the dairy industry, calves, are chained in crates twenty-two inches wide and no longer than their bodies and raised on a diet of drug-laced liquid feed for a few months until they’re slaughtered for the delicacy veal. The factory farm today is a crowded, stinking bedlam, filled with suffering animals who are quite literally insane, sprayed with pesticides and fattened on a diet of growth stimulants, antibiotics, and drugs, some of which, like sulfamethazine and clenbuterol, are proven carcinogenics.

  Sliced, cubed, shrink-wrapped, their remains in our vast, spotless supermarkets have borne no resemblance to living things in our minds for some time now—they are merely some things, in another department from the vegetables. The supermarket is not a place where one thinks . . . Animal. Now, even at the source of their lives, where they live their brief lives, they are, in our time, slipping away from being thought of as animals at all. They are explicitly excluded from any protection offered by the Federal Animal Welfare Act, an act that is casually and lightly enforced, if at all, by the Department of Agriculture. “Normal agricultural operation” precludes humane treatment and anticruelty laws do not apply to that which is raised for food. I thought that no one ate veal anymore. After learning how they were raised in darkness, in crates, not in a meadow on mother’s milk at all, I just assumed. . . . But, no, many people say, well, apparently they’re raised in the dark, in crates or something, but the taste is creamy, refined, I like it. . . . Gourmands will stop eating veal only if they become convinced that they’ll get a killer disease if they don’t.

  In England, the beef industry had a setback when a link was found between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a fatal disease of cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal neurological virus in humans. The cows became ill because they were fed the rendered remains of sick sheep. Of course, in this country we are assured that our cows aren’t being fed sick sheep and that no BSE-infected cattle have been found here. We do have many “downer” animals, though, about 100,000 of them a year, that collapse from stress or something, heaven knows, and end up dead prior to the slaughtering process. They are rendered and ground up and become pet food and animal feed. Cattle do eat cattle here. They are fed the ground offal of those that have succumbed to unknown causes, and this has been the practice for many years. If BSE were ever confirmed in this country, which is not at all unlikely, people would stop eating meat for a while for the same reasons the English did. Not because they’d had a sudden telepathic vision of the horrors of the abattoir, or because they’d all been subjected to a reading of James Agee’s “A Mother’s Tale” but because they thought that eating steak would make their brains go funny. It’s unlikely that they’d turn to vegetarianism.

  Vegetarians are still regarded somewhat suspiciously and, in general, not admired much. Their Meat is Murder chirping seems to be an irritant right up there with the noise of a leaf blower or a Jet Ski. And their wishful hope that by their example, animals will be saved, that slaughterhouses will fall silent and “modern” agribusiness will crumble, seems naive, for elementary economics do not apply to the world of agribusiness. If the state of Maine, say, went vegetarian or the entire state of Florida, led by those tanned oldsters who have finally for the first time, grasped what Ecclesiastes 3:19 is saying—went all the way vegan, what would happen?

  Well, such a fundamental, abnormal shift in attitudes would constitute a crisis for many thousands of people in the intensive agricultural industry. On an average day in America, 130,000 cattle, 7,000 calves, 360,000 pigs, and 24 million chickens are killed, and you can’t shut a show like that down overnight. On the nightly news there’d be footage of cows and calves being shot, pigs being bulldozed into pits, chickens being gassed and dumped—for nothing. Vegetarians would be accused of causing the carnage—the blood would be on their hands because they hadn’t been realistic, they hadn’t thought their actions through, they hadn’t realized how illogical and egotistical they were being. Too, the argument goes, even when people don’t eat animals (unless they are zealots or Jains), they are culpable in their deaths. For as well as being turned into the more obvious sofas, shoes, and jackets, animals are transmogrified into anti-aging creams and glue and paint and cement and condoms. Gelatin—benign gelatin, formerly known as hooves—constitutes Jell-O, of course, and is also in ice cream and the increasing number of fat-free products we consume. Animals are turned into all manner of drugs, mood enhancers, and mood stabilizers. Premarin
, an estrogen drug for menopausal women, comes from the urine of pregnant mares. This is a whole new industry that results in the births of approximately 75,000 unwanted foals each year. Off to the slaughterhouse the little ones go, along with the big racehorses who had the misfortune never to see a winner’s circle. Prozac was developed in the laboratory by—well, to make a long story short—injecting rats with various compounds and blenderizing their brains, which were then injected into other rats whose brains were blenderized, and so on to discover a chemical that would block a postulated cause of depression: too many neuroserotonin particles. Not that rat brains are Prozac per se, but it could be said that millions of dead rats are responsible for our being so at peace with ourselves.

  Animals are everywhere in our lives. (We just can’t look into their eyes. And we’ve gotten used to not looking into their eyes.) We distance ourselves from them more and more as we use them in increasingly unnatural ways. They’re practically on the verge of being reclassified, so that our remaining compassion and ethical concerns for them will be made irrelevant. In the laboratory, animals are tools, they’re part of the scientific apparatus, they undergo transformation, they are metamorphized into data. Rats and mice are already excluded from the definition of animal by the Department of Agriculture. Rats and mice are simply not animals, they are something else. And to take it one step further these un-animals are then genetically manipulated and reinvented. Hairless mice were created some time ago to make it easier for researchers to administer injections. There are countless variations of mutant “knockout” mice that lack particular genes crucial to learning or instinctual behavior. There are AIDS mice and cancer mice who self-destruct in novel ways. There are countless creatures in the labs whose genetic code had been permanently altered, creatures programmed to suffer (though suffering to experimenters is considered a theoretical abstraction); to be born with or develop terrible diseases and deformities. The first patent for a genetically altered animal was granted in 1987. The engineering, altering, and manufacturing of animals has barely begun. A side benefit of this is that we don’t have to feel guilty about “animals” anymore. Any sentience they’d possess would be invented by man or could be eliminated altogether. Animals would have no more a real “life” than a lightbulb.