Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  Good question. Coping with our inner yahoos is a central theme of ethics, psychology, and religion. The yahoo goes by different names. Freud calls it the Id. George Lucas called it Darth Vader. When Jesus warned that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, he was warning about the yahoo. George Jones sang about it in “Almost Persuaded.” Evolutionary psychologists trace its origins to the Pleistocene, and neuroscientists say it divides its time between your frontal lobes and your limbic system.

  Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist who has explored the moral ramifications of the yahoo more than anyone else, compares it to an emotional elephant being ridden by a rational rider. The elephant is large and usually calls the shots, albeit unconsciously. The rider is weaker than the elephant, but smarter. With practice, the rider can exert some control over the elephant. I have argued in this book that the paradoxes that characterize our relationships with other species are the unavoidable result of the perennial tug of war between the rational part of us and the yahoo within. But what are the implications of living in a world that is morally convoluted, in which consistency is elusive, and often impossible? Do we throw up our hands in despair? Does moral complexity mean moral paralysis?

  No. I have met lots of animal people who have come to terms with their carnivorous yahoo. They work for animals in different ways and on different scales. Most of them do small things that help animals and make them feel good about themselves. Some of them cut back on their meat consumption or adopt a shelter dog. Others donate money to PETA or the World Wildlife Fund or pull over to the side of the road and carry a box turtle in the middle of a highway to safety.

  Others work for animals in a big way. Michael Mountain is one of them.

  HELPING ANIMALS ON A GRAND SCALE:

  A GLOBAL KINDNESS REVOLUTION

  A man walks into a bar…

  The bar was in the Sheraton Hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was attending a conference on human-animal relationships. The man was in his early sixties, tall, wiry, reddish hair, neatly trimmed beard, outdoorsy—a ruddy Abraham Lincoln. He looked around and saw that the only empty seat in the place was next to me.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” English accent. Oxbridge.

  “No. Have a seat. I’m Hal Herzog.”

  “Michael Mountain, Best Friends Animal Society”

  “Oh, yeah—I think I’ve heard of that. Out in the middle of nowhere, right? In the desert.”

  “Yes. Kanab, Utah.”

  We order beers.

  I asked him about Best Friends. He says that it was founded twenty-five years ago by a ragtag band of animal lovers who dreamed of a place where homeless dogs and cats would never be euthanized. He tells me that it has grown to a $35 million operation (the same size as PETA); that Best Friends rescued 6,000 animals during Hurricane Katrina; that they are no longer Best Friends Animal Sanctuary but have reorganized as Best Friends Animal Society, a nationwide network of people and grassroots community organizations, all devoted to saving animals.

  I am impressed. But I am more impressed when our discussion turns to how people think about animals. He gets it: Human attitudes toward other species are inevitably paradoxical and inconsistent. He confesses some of his own moral lapses. He is a vegan and does not eat any animal products. But he purchases pigs’ ears for his dogs to chew on. The dogs love them but Michael says he can’t stop thinking about the poor pigs.

  Then he tells me about the convoluted ethical guidelines that he follows in dealing with the biting horseflies that buzz around his house in the summer.

  “Here is my rule,” he says. “If I am walking outside and a horsefly bites me, it is permissible for me to swat it, just like you would a mosquito. However, if the horsefly comes into my house, I have to rescue it and take it outside.” Smiling, he adds, “Where it will bite me the next time I go for a walk.”

  “Huh? That’s completely ass-backwards,” I say. “It should be OK to kill a fly that has invaded your house, your home territory, and not OK for you to kill one outdoors when you are on its home territory. Is there a rationale for your rule?”

  He laughs.

  “Of course. There is always a rationale. But a rationale is not necessarily rational. I suppose my rule is much like the philosophy behind Best Friends. You can’t save all the animals in the world, but the ones that come into your care, you are responsible for. So, once the fly enters my house, I have a responsibility to treat it with kindness.”

  Here is a rare bird: a morally serious person who can laugh at himself.

  Having recently stepped down as Best Friends’ president, chief fund-raiser, and the editor of its magazine, Michael Mountain has teamed up with a young entrepreneur named Landon Pollack on a couple of new projects. One of these is rehabilitating the image of pit bulls in the United States. The other is organizing a global community of people who care about animals and the natural world. Its name is Zoe, the Greek word for life.

  “We want to lead a global kindness revolution that will transform the way people relate to animals, nature, and each other.”

  A global kindness revolution? It sounds grandiose, possibly insane. But the guy seems like the real deal.

  I glance at my watch. We have been talking for two hours. It’s closing in on midnight and we are the only ones left in the bar. As we get up to leave, Michael says that I should come out to Kanab, to talk more and see what Best Friends is about.

  “Maybe I’ll take you up on it.”

  I get back to my hotel room and telephone Mary Jean. “Would you be interested in flying to Utah next summer?”

  THE ANIMAL SANCTUARY IN THE

  MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

  Mary Jean and I get off the plane in Las Vegas, pick up a black Hyundai from Avis, and head north up I-15. To get to Kanab, Utah, you drive two hours to Saint George, turn off the interstate, and drive another couple of hours on a two-lane blacktop, dipping into Arizona through Colorado City (usually referred to in the media as a “polygamy enclave”) and the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, on into Kanab, a town with one traffic light and 3,769 full-time (human) residents.

  The next morning, we head out to Best Friends, five miles out of town on Highway 89. I expect the sanctuary to look like a big petting zoo. Wrong.

  Nestled next to the Delaware-sized Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the 3,700-acre sanctuary is encompassed within another 30,000 acres the organization leases from the Bureau of Land Management. The vista is of biblical proportions—big sky, miles of sandstone cliffs, and mesas that remind me of the colors in the giant box of Crayola crayons I used to fight over with my sister: Brick Red, Burnt Sienna, Mahogany, Raw Umber, Carnation Pink, Copper, Maroon. I feel as if I’ve seen this place before. Later I learn that I have. Many of my favorite TV shows as a child were shot in or around Angel Canyon—The Lone Ranger, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke—even Death Valley Days, starring Ronald Reagan. Since the 1920s, nearly 100 feature films have been shot here, including Planet of the Apes, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, and The Outlaw Josey Wales.

  Best Friends offers daily tours for the 30,000 visitors that stop by every year, but Michael has arranged a special behind-the-scenes tour for us. Our guide is Faith Maloney, a cheery sixty-five-year-old Englishwoman who seems to know the name of every one of the 1,700 rescued dogs, cats, pigs, horses, rabbits, donkeys, peacocks, guinea pigs, and parrots in residence. Michael and Faith were part of a small group referred to reverently as “the founders.” Best Friends grew from the vision of some young idealists in the mid-1960s who had a desire to do some good in the world. (“We were not hippies,” Michael warns me. “If anything, we were the anti-hippies. For example, our rule was no drugs.”) After a stint in the Yucatan, the group became involved in politics, religion, and social services before disbanding, but some of them reunited and discovered that they had a common interest in saving animals.

  In the early ’80s, the group stumbled on Kanab Cany
on, which they renamed Angel Canyon. Despite its remoteness, they decided that the canyon was just the place to establish a home for animals no one wanted. They did not foresee that their small shelter in southwestern Utah would become one of the nation’s largest animal protection organizations; that an army of volunteers would one day walk dogs, hose down pot-bellied pigs, and shovel horse manure; that the sanctuary would be the subject of a hit television series (National Geographic Channel’s Dogtown); or that Best Friends would play a pivotal role in the most successful campaign in the history of the American animal protection movement—the establishment of community-based spay/neuter and adoption programs that has reduced the number of dogs and cats killed each year in animal shelters from 17 million to 4 million.

  We meet Faith at the visitor center and walk over to Piggy Paradise (Best Friends has a penchant for cute names). We see a volunteer from Virginia exercising a pot-bellied pig by tempting it with pieces of no-fat popcorn. We talk to a woman farrier who is rebuilding the shattered hoof of an enormous draft horse that had been abandoned at a local dump. Then we jump into Faith’s car and take off to Casa del Calmar. It is a house—a real house (no animals are kept in cages at Best Friends)—for cats with incurable conditions like feline leukemia. The place is spotless, nary a whiff of pee, even though purring cats are draped everywhere. Faith explains that the focus of Best Friends is on animals with special needs—a three-legged cat, a dog with a lump on its throat the size of a baseball, an eagle with a broken wing. Most of them come from other shelters that can’t give them the longer-term care they need. This is the shelter of last resort for the blind, the deaf, the psychologically damaged.

  After brief stops at Bunny House, Horse Haven, Parrot Garden, and Wild Friends (a rehab center for turtles, owls, hawks, bob cats, and songbirds), we turn into Dogtown Heights, a ninety-acre complex that is home to some 400 dogs. At Old Friends, a facility for aging dogs, I meet Ruby Benjamin, an energetic seventy-eight-year-old psychotherapist from Manhattan who volunteers for a couple of weeks at Best Friends every year. “My heart is here,” she tells me. “When I come to Best Friends, it is like getting a big hug.”

  In the main building at Dogtown, we are introduced to Cherry, a smallish black and white pit bull lying placidly on a cushion under the desk of a young woman who is typing on a computer. The doleful-eyed Cherry looks completely laid-back—you would never suspect that she was one of nearly two dozen of quarterback Michael Vick’s fighting dogs that were taken to Best Friends in the aftermath of the raid on Bad Newz Kennels in Virginia.

  Then it’s a quick tour of the clinic. A visiting intern from a California vet school is spaying a cat in the surgical theater under the supervision of one of the six staff veterinarians. We stick our heads in the hydrotherapy room. Then, a technician proudly shows us his new state-of-the-art computer imaging X-ray machine. The clinic is better equipped than some of the hospitals I’ve been in.

  Faith has arranged for us to have lunch with Frank McMillan. Dr. Frank, as he known at Best Friends, is a veterinarian and an authority on the mental health of companion animals. He is the person in charge of rehabilitating the Vick pit bulls. He says that these animals are suffering from a canine version of post-traumatic stress disorder. Horribly mistreated at the hands of dogfighters, their primary symptom is not aggression but fear. Frank and a team of animal behaviorists have been working with them for a year and a half. He originally expected the worst, but he has been pleasantly surprised. Twenty-one of the twenty-two dogs, he says, are making real progress. Several have passed a standardized canine “good citizen” test. And, so far, two have been placed in homes and one is in foster care.

  The next morning, I return to spend the day as a volunteer. I am assigned to Dogtown. I am greeted by a man named Don Bain, a retired banker from Texas. He and his wife stumbled on Best Friends, fell in love with the place, and wound up buying a house in Kanab. Now he works in Dogtown as the “puppy socialization coordinator,” which is, for my money, the world’s greatest job title. He assigns me to work with a staff member named Terry. My job is to help Terry feed a dozen or so dogs. One of them is Shadow, one of the Vick pit bulls. Shadow takes one look at me and snarls. Terry tells me that he is like that sometimes with strange men.

  That’s OK. I know that it is not his fault. He is a victim. At most animal shelters, he would have gotten the needle long ago. At Best Friends he has a home for life, even if he turns out to be unadoptable.

  Then it is walk time.

  Terry teams me up with another volunteer, Dora, a woman from Kansas City who works at Home Depot. She is driving home from San Francisco and has taken a two-day detour so she could spend a day volunteering at Best Friends. Dora snaps a leash on a brown Lab-ish looking dog named Cinderella. I get Lola, a mixed-breed I instantly fall in love with because she is the long-lost twin of my childhood dog, Frisky. Off we go on the walking trail through the pinion pines, juniper, rabbit bush, and prickly pear, the White Cliffs of the Grand Staircase in the distance. The dogs are happy and so are we…at least until Dora and I, busily talking about dogs, become hopelessly lost. Terry finds us just as the wind kicks up, the temperature drops, thunder rolls, and the rain starts to fall.

  Over dinner, Mary Jean and I tell Michael about our experiences at the sanctuary. After hanging around Kanab for a week, we are astonished at what a handful of dreamers with a vision have accomplished in the Utah desert. It is a first-class operation. The bathrooms are clean and the staff returns your phone calls. More impressively, all the animals are individuals at Best Friends. The staff does not talk about “dogs” or “cats” or “horses” they talk about James, Minda, and Moonshine (a black-and-white guinea pig). There is an eerie tranquility about the place. Everyone is so nice. It’s all a little spooky.

  The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that humans should not mistreat animals, but only because he felt that animal cruelty makes people more violent toward other people. The vision of the founders of Best Friends was the converse of Kant’s dictum; they were convinced that being nice to animals makes us kinder to other humans.

  Now Michael wants to take this philosophy to a new level through Zoe, his new project and the focus of his global kindness revolution. It is still in the early stages, but Michael has put together a management team and an advisory board that consists of corporate heavy-hitters and experts from the worlds of animal protection, the sciences and humanities, communications, marketing, publishing, and social networking. They are thinking big—a series of books, perhaps a magazine and television network, a Huffington Post–type Web site where you can go for a daily hit of animal and environmental news. Zoe will be a lifestyle brand, a big tent for all kinds of people who care about animals and nature—recyclers, tree huggers, vegans and “relaxed vegetarians,” people who drink free-trade coffee and people who eat cruelty-free chickens. In short, people who want to make the world a better place, people who want to reconnect with animals and nature, but aren’t quite sure how to do it.

  The scope of his vision tires me out. Michael thinks differently than I do. He thinks BIG. Too big for me.

  I change the subject. “Have you always been good with animals?”

  He surprises me. “Well, I don’t get all gooey over them. I am better at organizing and editing and putting people together than I am with taking care of animals.”

  But then he tells me about the ants in his kitchen. “They are cute, the ants. They are basically like a sanitation department. The ants come in to the kitchen on these patrols. If they don’t find anything, they go back outside. But if Miss Popsicle, my cat, has left a little piece of food somewhere, they mount a military operation to transport it outside. It is really quite amazing. It takes a lot of ants to carry a piece of cat food. When I see them putting this much work into it, I try to help them out by getting them and the piece of cat food on a piece of tissue paper and take them outside.”

  I try to imagine a man who can chat up the CEO of a Fortune 500 corpora
tion, who is on a first-name basis with Hollywood’s A-list, but who claims he is not particularly good with animals, down on hands and knees on his kitchen floor gently brushing tiny ants onto a Kleenex and transporting them back to their nest, just to make their day a little easier.

  THE LADY AND THE SEA TURTLES

  Michael Mountain is a dreamer trying to pull off a global revolution. But most animal people are more like Judy Muzee. She owns Beach Combers Hair and Nail Studio, a beauty shop on Edisto Island, South Carolina. She spends her spare time trying to save endangered sea turtles.

  The path to becoming an animal rescuer usually begins with concern for a single animal—an emaciated stray dog, perhaps, or a cat on the euthanasia list at an animal shelter with a three-day-and-out policy. Sea turtle people are different. They don’t get much back in the way of the warm and fuzzies. Indeed, many of them will never even see one of the animals they are trying to save. It is enough for them to know when they patrol the beach at dawn that just beyond the surf, a 300-pound female loggerhead might be waiting for the sun to set so she can lumber ashore, laboriously dig a nest two feet deep in the sand, and lay a hundred squishy eggs the size of Ping-Pong balls which will hatch a couple of months later, and that, with luck, one in a thousand hatchlings will survive to repeat the process twenty-five years later.

  For a beach town, Edisto is backwater. It has no motel, no putt-putt, no McDonald’s, and no water park. There is, however, a grungy Piggly Wiggly supermarket and Whaley’s, a slightly seedy bar with a pool table, good food, and an easy ambience two blocks off the main road near the town’s water tower. Mary Jean and I were in Whaley’s one Sunday evening sipping beer while waiting for our shrimp sandwiches. Mary Jean was talking to the woman sitting on the barstool next to her. My attention was divided between the NASCAR race on the television above the bar and two guys across from me talking fishing and drinking oyster shooters for dinner. (You drop a raw oyster in the bottom of a shot glass, add an ounce of Smirnoff, a little Tabasco sauce, and a squeeze of lemon. Toss it down in one gulp, and chase it with a swig of Bud Lite.)