Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  The fact remains that in roughly three hundred years during which human beings have been both (a) swimming, unknowingly or not, above giant stingrays in shallow water and (b) recording unusual things that happened to them in the ocean generally, there has been not a single instance of a stingray spiking someone to death in the heart, which is what happened to Irwin. The barbed end of the stingray’s tail—over which, I’m told, rays have unholy power of control and accuracy; they kill tiny, tiny fish with it—passed directly in between two of Irwin’s ribs and into his left ventricle. He stood up, pulled it out, and died. There was video of this, but the Irwin family has destroyed it. In the weeks following, Australians began slaughtering rays in the coastal waters. Police and beachcombers were finding mangled carcasses. But Michael Hornby, director of Irwin’s Wildlife Warrior fund, issued a statement disavowing these acts and making clear that it would “not accept and not stand for anyone who’s taken a form of retribution” on the rays.

  Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point. Which is what you told yourself about the Irwin story. We’d gone three hundred years without an incident like this; if we could go three hundred more, we’d be all right. Clear snorkels.

  As it was, we went six weeks. On October 19, 2006, in the waters off Boca Raton, Florida, a man named James Bertakis was boating with a family friend when a giant stingray leapt out of the water and into his lap. It’s important to visualize this correctly. The animal landed on his actual lap, with Bertakis in a sitting position, empty-handed—he had no rod—and the ray landed facing him, so they were eye to eye. This scene was described in some detail by the woman present. Bertakis and the ray were staring at each other, and it was flexing its tail. And then, bang. Up over its body and directly into the heart muscle, the heart flesh, inches deep.

  Reporters immediately asked the internationally regarded marine biologists at the University of Miami if there could be any connection, but Dr. Bob Cowen, the researcher put forward as spokesperson by the department, responded that he could “not imagine any connection” and that the attacks were “just two really unusual situations.”

  “Except not,” said Livengood.

  * * *

  We were sitting now, and I’d just read off that skeptical quotation, along with several others, in order to suggest—politely, I hoped—that the position held by those in his profession who could be called mainstream is that what may seem like an evolution in global animal behavior is really just an increase in media attention, or a string of coincidences that get stitched together on the Internet, or most charitably, an increase in the exposure of individual human beings to undomesticated animals, as our habitats expand and the animals become more desperate for food sources, more willing to venture out.

  “What do you mean, ‘Except not’?” I asked.

  “Except they weren’t unusual.”

  I assumed, of course, that he meant there’d been other barb-to-heart ray attacks, and was prepared to ask if he’d share the data.

  “Rays? No,” he said. “Or at least those are the only two we’ve seen. But everything else…” He looked up into the corner with his head tilted as if I’d told him to pose for a picture that way. Then he popped to his feet.

  “You want to see our file?” he asked. He’d wandered over to another, larger computer in the corner of his office and was messing around on it.

  I’d already shown him my file, when we first sat down. Mine was in a manila folder. It contained cutouts and printouts of all the articles I’d archived in the preceding year plus. Most of them I’d e-mailed first to friends, with little jokey subject headers along the lines of Gird Thyself. It was one of the lucky recipients who replied, after the thirtieth or fortieth message, “Did you know there’s actually a guy who believes this is happening?” When I wrote back saying, “Yes: myself,” he sent another message, saying, “Right, but this guy studies animals.”

  When I showed Livengood my folder, he gave out a single loud laugh, and said, “That’s what we get in a week, since people found out about us.”

  * * *

  I won’t play dumb with you—I already knew, by this point, that by “us” Livengood meant not him and his colleagues but him and a bunch of isolated obsessives—bloggers and amateur naturalists and sci-fi people dizzy with their first taste of contrarian legitimacy and also, I suppose, people like me who’d become helplessly fixated for no honorable reason on a cabalistic pattern in the news. This “us,” if it’s even an “us,” doesn’t have a good acronym yet and hasn’t given any papers at conferences or generated much of a media profile at all, really, apart from a few stray “opposing point of view” quotes in wire-service articles like the ones I’d gathered.

  “Check this out,” Livengood said, sliding his chair to the side to make room for me. On the screen was a large parti-color map of the world, in a circular shape like an old navigational map. The landmasses and coastlines were thickly riddled here and there with tiny black dots, about pencil-tip size. There were maybe twenty-five stray black dots on the open seas. Livengood said—breezily, like someone giving an office tour to the new guy—“Those are all confirmed, and most of those are from the past six years.”

  “What are they, exactly?”

  “Start clicking on them!” he said, like he’d been wondering when I’d get to this.

  I sat there for at least half an hour. At one point, Livengood got up and went off down the hall. It was true that the sheaf of articles I’d been so proud of was a Cracker Jack flip-book in comparison with what Livengood and his various TAs had collected. I should say that for an item to make his list, it must stand up to the admittedly soft but at least not nonexistent test of being (a) not a hoax—that is, independently verifiable as an incident through follow-up research—and (b) not the result of some obvious confusion. I invite you to verify these things as well, through Google or LexisNexis or in a few cases an article in Animal Behavior Abstracts (a complete-looking set of which sat on the shelves behind Livengood’s desk); you won’t find them in the Weekly World News, either, but on the BBC website, the AP, Science, and Nature, places that have a vested interest in not getting fooled. Anyway, I assure you I don’t know enough about even the normal goings-on in the animal kingdom to fabricate this many anomalies.

  I figured out that some of the little dots, when you clicked on them, led to multiple incidents, signifying vectors of activity, usually but not always confined to a single species. There are four small English seaport towns, for instance, where various seabirds have started targeting people. A swan came out of the water there and took a dog under. Indeed, when measured in actual numbers, birds may be the single most active species in terms of manifesting whatever lies beneath this shift. In Boston, for the past few years, there’s been what can only be called an ongoing siege of wild turkeys. Children and old people getting attacked. In Sonoma County, California, the chicken population not long ago carried out “a flurry of attacks on neighborhood children.” The mother of one of the victims told a reporter, “It’s not charming when you have to see your baby attacked … seeing the blood going down his face and seeing him screaming … I can’t sleep at night.”

  A fair share of the new violence is animal-on-animal. Needless to say, it garners less attention in the media. In the Polish village of Stubienko, in June 2000 (one of the earlier blips in Livengood’s collection), the storks went crazy and started slaughtering chickens, hundreds of them. (There were, I’m seeing only now, additional reports of “sporadic attacks on humans” at the time.) Observers were “at a loss to explain the aberrant behavior.”

  You see what I mean, I hope, about there being something off in these stories. The storks started slaughtering the chickens.

  Much of the intra-animal violence seems to suggest sheer madness. Chimps have repeatedly been documented engaging in “rape, wife beating, murder, and infanticide.” Elephants on the African savanna have been rapi
ng rhinoceroses, something that is evidently just as startling to zoologists as to the layperson.

  Indeed, if you’ve paid attention to one particular facet of this story as it’s unfolded, it’s probably the work of Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist and environmental scientist who’s been tracking the accelerated mental degeneration of elephant populations in severely destabilized areas of Africa and Asia. She’s an extremely well-regarded researcher whose work is adding up to maybe the most persuasive proof yet mounted that the overlap between our psyches and those of the more developed animals has been massively underestimated when it comes to affection, suffering, stress, and we don’t even know what areas. That’s how I understand her work, at any rate. Earlier this year, a major magazine brought her to national attention, and she has a book deal, and to make a long story short, she declined an interview, for which I blame her not even slightly; if I were an internationally respected animal scientist, I’d drive cold muddy hours out of my way to avoid even a Rumsfeld-and-Saddam-style meeting with Marc Livengood, not that I don’t personally find him heroic. Nonetheless there is perhaps more of a kinship between their respective working theses than either would care to admit. (Livengood regards Bradshaw with a bit of jealousy and eye-rolling, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn.)

  Bradshaw’s focus doesn’t stray onto the animal-on-human part of the elephant crackup—nonetheless, they are killing us, too, in numbers never imagined. More than a thousand victims in less than a decade. Forty-four Nigerian communities “erased” by rampaging elephants in a single migratory season. Some of the incidents have been quite spectacular, with multiple animals working in concert (as opposed to isolated or “rogue” males, which frequently act up); they’re storming through neighborhoods, turning on crowds. If you’ve ever seen an elephant attack a human being, it’s very personal-looking anyway. They keep going after you when you’re down. And at first, at least, you’re conscious, while they basically knock the bejeezus out of you with their trunks and then stomp you into the earth. In one place, the animals first rampaged, clearing the town, then broke into unprotected casks of locally brewed rice beer, then hurled themselves against electrified fences and died. Bradshaw writes, “Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part, revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths.” Not to be outdone, “angry villagers” are poisoning to death an average of twenty elephants each year, according to The New York Times.

  As suggested by the tortured-ray carcasses that washed up in the wake of the Irwin killing, swift acts of human retaliation have not infrequently followed the more dramatic of the late attacks. In Salt Springs, Florida, where gators went berserk a year and a half ago and killed three women in a week, the citizens “declared war on alligators.” That’s how one busy trapper described it. “People are really going crazy,” he said. In other cases, cooler heads have prevailed and more peaceful measures have been adopted. One example: in Bombay, earlier this year, a pack of leopards entered the town—just sauntered out of the forest at the heart of that city—and assassinated a total of twenty-two people. J. C. Daniel, an environmentalist who has monitored the wildlife in that forest for forty years, said, “We have to study why the animal is coming out. It never came out before.” But the people responded creatively. In hopes of calming the beasts—and with a gesture that had weird overtones of sacrificial offerings to assuage angry cat gods—officials in the area are releasing hundreds and hundreds of little pigs and rabbits into the forest. (2 Kings 17:25: “And when they began to dwell there, they feared not the Lord: and the Lord sent lions among them, which killed them.”)

  In China it’s the pets that are changing. The AP reported, “About 90,000 people in Beijing have been attacked by dogs and cats in the first six months of this year, up almost 34 percent for the same period last year, the government said.” In America, where animals have perhaps a freer recourse to weapons, at least four people have been shot by their dogs in the past two years. One incident involved a stun gun. One reportedly took place while the animal was being beaten, its owner hoped to death. That killing, then, could accurately be described as self-defense. (In a third incident, in Memphis, a dog shot its owner in the back while the man was arguing with his girlfriend—this one may have been accidental.)

  A pack of two hundred dogs descended out of the mountains—this was in Albania—ran straight into the middle of the town of Mamurras, and just started going after people, old people, young people, “dragging them to the ground and inflicting serious wounds.” One witness spoke of a “clearly identifiable leader.” (Lest we assume this to be a seasonal occurrence in Albania, the town’s mayor, Anton Frroku, stated, “Even in the movies, I have never seen a horde of two hundred stray dogs from the mountains attacking people in the middle of a town.”)

  “Clearly identifiable leader”: Elsewhere, too, there are suggestions of organization, cooperation. In India one of the country’s busiest highways has been repeatedly taken over and brought to a standstill by what the BBC has described as “troops” of “monkey raiders,” two thousand at a time. “We have already seen that new troops have entered the area in recent weeks,” a local official tells the BBC. There was talk of “relocating” them. In Britain, where the rat population has increased by 40 percent in the last decade, and old people are saying they haven’t seen anything like it since the Blitz, scientists have pinned the otherwise inexplicable surge on the fact that the rats “have been learning from other rats how to avoid the poisons.” Again, look at these numbers. We’re consistently seeing increases not of 4 or 5 percent but on the order of 40, 50 percent.

  In at least one situation, clearly discernible technological innovation has entered the picture. A community of chimpanzees living on the edges of the savanna in Senegal has learned to fashion and use spears, which they sharpen with their teeth. These are chimps we’ve been observing for two hundred years; they have never used spears. Now they’ve begun spiking little bush babies with them. The bush babies hide in hollow trees. The chimps do a sort of frog-gigging number on them and pull them out like fondue. Within a year of the first chimp having been observed using a weapon this way, nine others had caught on and were recorded doing it in a total of twenty-two observed instances, suggesting that at least at the simian level these fairly radical behavioral changes are taking place within the span of a single generation.

  The science behind all this is, you might say, disturbingly fundamental. As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We’ve known this for a long time. You learn it in college biology. Things evolve faster nearer the equator. Heat speeds up molecular activity. You have a population of squid—it divides. One branch hangs out up by Alaska, the other goes down to the coast of Peru. Go and visit them fifty thousand years later. The group up by Alaska is slowly subdividing into two species. The one down by Peru has turned into twenty-six species and is no longer even recognizable. Well, these days the whole planet is experiencing that effect. More heat, more light. The animals are doing things differently; they’re showing up places they’re not supposed to go, sleeping at different times, eating different things. Talk with any field-worker and it’s a truism that the guidebooks are becoming obsolete at ten times the speed. As a researcher told the BBC in 2001, “There is a genetic change in their response to daylight. We can detect this change over as short a time period as five years. Evolution is happening and it is happening very fast.” And he was talking only about a particular species of mosquito. Dr. Christina Holzapfel, at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has been watching changes among Canadian red squirrels. “Phenotypic plasticity is not the whole story,” she told Science. “Studies show,” a source quoted her as saying, “that over the past several decades, rapid climate change has led to heritable, genetic changes in animal populations.” Most recently a piece in Smithsonian stated, “Lately there has been evidence that plants and animals are changing much faster.”

  What this means is that we picked a bad time
to have all the animals enraged at us, since just at the moment when their disposition might be expected to turn, they happen to be evolving like crazy.

  What stuck out above all else, as I clicked through Livengood’s dots, was the same tendency that had presented itself when I was still just idly following news items on the Internet, namely the extraordinary number of “first time” attacks. That is, not simply unprecedented types of attack, such as leopard packs going forth and killing in a crowded city, but rather pure cases of animals that have never shown a desire to kill human beings before, killing them.

  It was only a couple of years ago, in an October 2006 posting on the website of the Institute for the Future—an “independent nonprofit research group” headquartered in the States, that puts its considerable budget toward working “with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future”—that the first tentative red flag was raised on this whole issue, insofar as it marked the first time a group of nondismissible, intellectually clubbable types had gone so far, had been explicit:

  “File this under the wildest of wildcards, but are the number of attacks by animals formerly thought to be relatively harmless or difficult to provoke on the rise? Are there other interesting statistics suggesting an increase in the number of attacks by animals that previously were not especially aggressive?”

  Blogger and fellow seeker Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, there sure as hell are.

  Attacks of dolphins on humans are noticeably up, with a particularly violent population repeatedly attacking dozens of swimmers off the coast of Cancún, killing at least two, with several more unexplained drownings that may have been “take under” incidents. Every marine biologist reached for comment after those confirmed attacks said the same thing: “There’s no such thing as a fatal dolphin attack.”