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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: JAN-FEB 06
BOOKS
Exploring the myths & mysteries of bears
Bear by Robert E. Bieder |
The Grizzly Maze by Nick Jans |
Robert Bieder and Nick Jans explore the mythology of bears from opposite angles but to common purpose in Bear, a global overview, and The Grizzly Maze, an examination of the fatal maulings of bear advocate Timothy Treadwell, 46, and his friend Amie Huguenard, 37, by a brown bear on October 6, 2003, in Katmai National Park, Alaska.
Bieder, a career scholar, starts with the evolution and diversification of bears. Bear ancestors emerged in Europe and Asia as long as 25 million years ago, but the forebears of today’s bears appeared at about the same time that great apes evolved in Africa.
Conflict emerged between modern bears and early humans as soon as population expansion brought them into overlapping habitat. Bears, as carnivores who had developed the ability to eat vegetation, and humans, as ancestral vegetarians who had learned to scavenge and hunt, were direct competitors. Each killed and ate the other, if able.
Bears had a slight head start, and established themselves in North Africa before humans, but domesticating dogs and taming fire eventually gave humans a decisive edge. By Cro Magnon times, bears had already begun a long retreat to the rockiest, coldest, and most densely forested parts of the temperate latitudes. Humans dominate the rest.
Yet human competition with bears has never really ended. In one-to-one encounters, bears still have the advantage of size and strength. Wherever bears persist in the presence of humans, or have managed to re-establish themselves, as in rural New Jersey, humans tend to feel threatened, despite outnumbering the bears by ratios of hundreds or even thousands to one.
Intuitively, humans tend to perceive bears as human-like, whether benignly as in the example of Teddy-Bear toys, or menacingly, as bears are typically portrayed in folktales. Bears in turn tend to respond to humans as if we were just another bear species. They might eat us, as brown bears might eat black bears, or ignore us if we offer no threat.
Either way, bears usually expect humans to understand bear gestures and etiquette, which has evolved to minimize trouble between bears who mind their own business. Fatal bear/human conflict, as in the case of Treadwell and Huguenard, typically occurs when humans do not do what other well-behaved bears would do, staying out of other bears’ way unless specifically welcomed.
Humans, as Bieder discusses, have developed an extensive inventory of art, literature, and legend imagining bears as possible mates and ancestors. Bears, so far as is known, do not hold such perceptions of people. Among the hundreds of accounts of bear/human conflict on file here at ANIMAL PEOPLE, there are none in which a bear appeared to attempt to initiate sexual contact.
Yet bear behavior toward human children can indicate recognition of likeness. Thousands of bears have killed and injured human children, especially Asian brown bears, but a few bears of almost all kinds have occasionally fostered lost or abandoned children with their own cubs, sometimes for days, weeks, or even years.
The answer to the seeming paradox may be that unlike humans, who will mate any time, bears only mate during a short part of each year, when they rarely meet humans. Yet, like humans, bears nurture their young for an extended time. A female bear is thus more likely to be psychologically primed to parent a child who is close to the size of her own cubs, than any bear is likely to be primed to mate. For humans the odds are almost the opposite.
The Treadwell tragedy occurred, apparently, because he learned to exploit the bear tendency to accept humans as different kinds of bears, and for 13 years got away with often approaching brown bears much more closely than most experts would without tranquilizing the bears first.
Treadwell imagined that he understood Alaskan brown bears much better than anyone else, and perhaps he did, yet he over-anthropomorphized in believing that the mutual understanding he may have developed with some bears would protect him.
Grizzly Maze author Nick Jans visited the site where Treadwell and Huguenard were killed and mostly eaten soon after the incident. Jans continued his investigation by interviewing most of Treadwell’s close associates, viewing his videos, reading his writings, and soliciting much expert perspective.
Jans also paid more attention to Huguenard than most others investigating the case. Huguenard often seems to have been regarded as only another of Treadwell’s many girlfriends. Despite their five years of involvement, she was not well-known to most of Treadwell’s associates. Huguenard seems to have been much more fascinated with Treadwell than with either bears or outdoor living, but she appreciated his work, and visited him in the bush three summers in a row.
In addition, Jans discusses the December 2003 fatal mauling of Vitaly Nikolayenko, a Russian ethologist who for 33 years lived among brown bears on the Kamchataka peninsula. Unfortunately, the bears who became habituated to his presence also became easy pickings for poachers. At least 20 bears Nikolayenko knew were massacred about seven months before his own death. Jans compares and contrasts the Treadwell story to his own changing perspective, as a former bear hunter who now favors leaving bears and their vital habitat alone, and was among the three sponsors of an unsuccessful petition drive that tried to put a ban on aerial predator control on the 2006 Alaska ballot.
Jans concludes that trying to show that humans and bears can co-exist does bears no favors: when humans and bears mingle, bears die. Jans advises admiring bears from a distance, and teaching bears to respect that distance, just as they respect their distance around others of their kind. ––Merritt Clifton
Hunters, Herders, & Hamburgers:
The Past & Future of Human-Animal Relationships
by Richard W. Bulliet
Columbia University Press (61 West 62nd St., New York, NY 10023), 2005.
256 pages, hardcover. $27.50.
“Let’s start with sex and blood,” opens Richard W. Bulliet, hypothesizing that sex and violence in screen entertainment today feeds a human fascination that earlier was satisfied by watching animal mating and barnyard slaughter.
“Carnal reality made fantasy unnecessary,” Bulliet asserts. “Paradoxically, postdomestic societies with high levels of sex-and-blood pornography may exhibit a strong and generalized abhorrence for real-life maiming, killing, and sexual predation.”
By “post-domestic,” Bulliet means societies in which most people no longer directly participate in animal husbandry.
“Domestic society,” Bull-iet continues, “by exposing children to sex and bloodshed, hardens them early and causes them to think of sex and blood in terms of real-life carnality rather than fantasy.”
Extending this argument to the logical conclusion suggests that people still living in “domestic” cultures might prefer bear-baiting, cockfighting, dogfighting, patronizing prostitutes and rape to attending movies. Indeed, violent entertainments and sexual exploitation persist in rural and backward areas. Yet where TV and movies exist, they long since won the competition for popularity.
Bulliet might suggest that this represents a step toward post-domesticity, since TV and movies tend to reach rural areas as part of the growth of an educated middle class, a step removed from hands-on animal care and slaughter. Yet the idlers who most avidly bet on animal fights, and the truck drivers who most notoriously exploit prostitutes, are also at least a step removed from animal husbandry as an occupation.
Probably more interested in stimulating thought than in clinching arguments, Bulliet misses few chances to raise a ruckus. He summarizes the role of donkeys in early Christianity, for example, in a subchapter entitled “Ass-Man: God of the Christians,” and has me kicking myself for not having seen all that he saw when 30-odd years ago I struggled through the same writings by Tertulian, Apuleius, and others whom he cites. The term paper I could have written might have been far more interesting than the one I did write, had I known my ass from the Catacombs.
Yet even then I knew––and my religious studies professors knew––that Bulliet errs in stating flatly that “Jesus and his disciples were not vegetarians.”
The prevailing professorial view was that Jesus might have been vegetarian, since he built upon the teachings of the vegetarian prophet Isaiah, and the vegetarian evangelist John the Baptist. The Jerusalem Church, founded by Jesus’ brother James, taught and practiced vegetarianism, and may have been ancestral to the Sufi sect within Islam, whose teachings hold that Jesus was a vegetarian.
Recent scholarship, summarized by Keith Akers in The Lost Religion of Jesus (2001), has strengthened the view that Jesus’ conflict with the Temple establishment was founded on his opposition to animal sacrifice.
“The future of human/animal relations in real-world terms will be determined by the worldwide expansion of exploitation in a late domestic mode, and the reaction to that expansion by increasingly angry post-domestic activists,” Bulliet writes in conclusion.
“At the present time, neither camp has reason for optimism,” Bulliet believes, since “There is no middle ground...” Yet credible efforts are underway ito develop middle ground.
For instance, companies built on the sale of meat products now include meatless burgers on fast food menus and sell vegan frozen entrés in every supermarket. Many vegetarian activists, recognizing that the world is not going to give up meat overnight, encourage projects such as Humane Farm Animal Care, which seek to improve the lives of farm animals.
Procter & Gamble has spent more than $200 million to develop and introduce alternatives to animal testing. Among the major goals of genetic engineering is finding ways to use fewer animals to get more precise experimental results.
Despite the vociferousness of absolutists, surveys indicate that most activists would feel their most serious objections to animal research were met if experiments were non-invasive and did not cause suffering ––which leaves much opportunity for animal experimenters to seek an acceptable compromise.
“Philosophers, scientists, writers, and filmmakers have been drawn into the maelstrom,” Bulliet goes on. “But in the imaginative realm, the heritage of the late domestic era, with its herds of symbolically degraded beasts being transformed into industrial commodities, has left the creative mind little to build upon.”
Unfortunately, the 50 billion animals per year being transformed into industrial commodities worldwide are not just “symbolically degraded.” They suffer short, miserable lives and actual traumatic deaths––and the creative minds behind such screen hits as Chicken Run and Babe have found plenty to build upon.
“It will take true genius,” he ends, “to rediscover the magic of the predomestic era, when animals communed with gods, half-animal beings commanded respect, and killing inspired awe and incurred guilt.”
Bulliet underestimates the magic of the present era. Ethologists are learning to understand animals as never before. Real animals are beginning to receive moral consideration. Killing animals is increasingly often seen as wrong, not just an act which may incur guilt if expiation rites are not performed, meaningless though they are to the victims. ––Merritt Clifton
Animals, Ethics & Christianity
by Matthew Priebe
14069 S. Lincoln Way, Galt, CA 95632, 2005.
73 pages, paperback. $4.00.
This booklet consists of a 45-page essay––plus 28 pages of footnotes––on the relationship between humankind and other life forms, assessed not on the basis of rights, but from the perspective of the Bible.
Priebe questions how a true Christian should treat the animals over whom humans were given dominion. He argues, citing Biblical passages, that we should treat animals in the same way that God treats us. Priebe argues that kind and merciful dominion is God’s dominion, whereas cruel exploitation, characterising current human use of animals, is Satan’s dominion.
A Seventh Day Adventist, Priebe also promotes vegetarianism.
Wisely, Priebe deals concisely with the horror of animal welfare issues. But the first part of the book, where Priebe quotes from Biblical texts and draws conclusions therefrom, could with advantage have been both deeper and more extended. The same points made by Priebe are perhaps more eloquently addressed in Mathew Scully’s book Dominion, where Scully refers to Biblical texts and then cites specific examples of institutionalized cruelty, to expose the contrast.
In a letter to the reviewer, Priebe stressed that Animals, Ethics & Christianity is aimed at U.S. Christian fundamentalists. Thus, to avoid alienating literal inspirationists, he wastes no effort to attack the ritual of animal sacrifice other than to show that it was abolished in New Testament times.
We see the main value in Priebe’s book as stimulating debate within churches on issues which are usually devoutly avoided.
––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
Baboons: Tales, Traits & Troubles
by Attie Gerber
Lapa Publishers (380 Bosma St., Pretoria, South Africa), 2004.
360 pages, hard cover. 180.95 rand.
Attie Gerber, now a university instructor of video production and digital photography, cofounded the popular South African television program 50/50, which has covered ecological matters for more than 20 years. Baboons: Tales, Traits & Troubles combines superb photographs with commentary mixing information about baboons with advice about wildlife photography.
Gerber explores the interaction of Afrikaans and British settlers with baboons through mentions of baboons in early South African literature. Hated by farmers for crop-raiding, but respected for their intelligence, baboons were at times even put to work. For example, the Cape Argus reported in 1884, a railway signalman named Jumper lost both legs in an accident, and procured a baboon he called Jack to assist him. Photographs show Jack operating the signal levers at Jumper’s instruction.
Much of the book is devoted to baboon social life and behavior, informed by Gerber’s work alongside Rita Miljo, 74, the leading South African baboon expert.
Miljo founded her Centre for Animal Rehabilitation in 1980. CARE now protects more than 300 baboons.
Gerber accompanied two troops of baboons whom Miljo released into the Vredefort Dome Conservancy, filming them for weeks. Their story should have had a happy ending, but didn’t, because the South African government still classifies baboons as vermin, even though many farmers have amended their views.
The Vredefort Dome was created by the impact of an ancient meteor. Farmers in the region recently formed the Vredefort Dome Conservancy, intending to transform the area into a tourist attraction and to apply for World Heritage status.
In 1998 they asked Miljo to bring some of her rehabilitated baboons to that area to re-establish a natural baboon population. Miljo found the Vredefort Dome to be ideal baboon habitat and agreed to release two troops of fifteen members each.
North-West Province conservation department bureaucrats managed to delay the baboon release for four long years, requiring all sorts of veterinary tests on the baboons, and even medical tests on CARE staff.
In line with CARE’s strict release procedures, every farmer at the release site was consulted, and all consented to the baboon reintroduction. Both releases went smoothly. CARE staff stayed with the troops for four and six months, respectively, until Miljo was quite satisfied that the baboons could cope on their own.
In October 2003 four females disappeared from the second troop, and on investigation were found to have been poisoned. A fifth baboon was poisoned later. Then the troop lost a baby whose mother had been poisoned. Four sick baboons survived. Complaints to the provincial conservation authorities elicited little interest and no results.
In August 2004 a farmer shot the alpha male. The farmer boasted that he would “kill the lot of the damned animals.”
Miljo asked one of the Dome Conservancy members to recapture the remaining baboons and keep them safe in an enclosure until she could be persuaded that the proposed world heritage site was safe for her baboons. She notified the provincial conservation authorities, who fined her 750 rand fine for keeping baboons without a permit.
In a separate but parallel case, with a uniquely promising outcome, Miljo was recently prosecuted for rescuing a baby baboon in Mpumalanga Province. She was acquitted on September 1, 2005, when the court recognized that she acted from necessity.
When asked by the prosecutor at her trial in Barberton Magistrates Court why she wasted her time saving the lives of vermin, Rita shot back, “Who are you to tell God that he should not have created baboons?”
––Chris Mercer
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
No One Loved Gorillas More: Dian Fossey Letters from the Mist
Camilla de la Bedoyere with photographs by Bob Campbell
National Geographic Society (1145 17th St. NW, Washington, DC 20036), 2005. 191 pages, illustrated. $30.00 hard cover.
World Atlas of Great Apes & Their Conservation edited by Julian Caldecott & Lera MilesUniversity of California Press (2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704), 94704. 424 pages, illustrated. $45.00 hard cover.
A case could be made that if Dian Fossey had not authored Gorillas In The Mist (1983), the World Atlas of Great Apes & Their Conservation would not exist.
Even if Julian Caldecott and Lera Miles had managed to compile the World Atlas of Great Apes, it probably would not have been published in a volume with 150 color photos, 50 maps, and a preface by United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan. The heavily footnoted text would be buried in obscure scholarly journals, not piled on coffee tables.
Annan probably would never have written, “The great apes are our kin. Like us, they are self-aware and have cultures, tools, politics, and medicine.”
Before Fossey, astute African politicians did not acknowledge kinship to the other apes. Even if they recognized evolution as a verity, unlike some U.S. counterparts, such a statement might have been seized upon by poltical foes as “racist.” Great apes had neither political currency nor much cash currency going in their favor. More scientists were trying to establish laboratories in Africa to exploit access to wild chimps than were working to keep great apes in the wild.
Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees at Gombe before Fossey began studying gorillas at Karisoke. Berute Galdikas, the third of anthropologist Louis Leakey’s “Leakey’s angels,” began studying orangutans in Indonesia soon afterward. Galdikas has yet to write a popular book, but Goodall enjoyed some early success, starring in a 1963 documentary by National Geographic, the major sponsor of their work, and publishing four books in 1970-1972.
Of those books, however, only In The Shadow of Man (1971) was a commercial hit, and she didn’t star in another documentary until 1984, or publish any new books from 1972 to 1986. Twelve of Goodall’s 13 major film credits and 19 of her 23 books followed Gorillas In The Mist, as Goodall demostrated the poise and charisma to build upon Fossey’s breakthrough to recognition, while Fossey herself did not.
Fossey scored the hit that made conserving great apes a global cause, of the prominence of saving whales.
Yet a case could also be made that if Fossey had not been murdered in her cabin at Karisoke on December 26, 1985, Annan could not have argued that, “Saving the great apes is also about saving people...By conserving the great apes, we can also protect the livelihoods of the many people who rely on forests for food, clean water, and much else.”
Educated as an occupational therapist, Fossey appears to have become disillusioned with people long before relocating to Rwanda. Life at Karisoke accentuated her reclusive tendencies. Though unable to work alone, and eventually barely able to do field work at all due to emphysema, Fossey tried as much as possible to isolate the Karisoke gorillas from other humans, discouraging eco-tourism and research that she considered useless or intrusive.
The poachers Fossey pursued apparently caught gorillas chiefly by accident, at first, while trying to snare small hooved animals. They avenged themselves deliberately on gorillas later. Whether a poacher murdered Fossey, or a disgruntled employee, has never been established, but she had so many enemies that there were a multitude of suspects, and she had no friends who were willing or able to identify the killer.
Fossey beyond doubt saved the gorillas, yet most of the sort of gorilla conservation celebrated by Annan and the World Atlas of Great Apes could not have been done without removing her from the scene––as her sponsors were trying to do at her death.
Goodall, photographer Bob Campbell, and International Primate Protection League founder Shirley McGreal, among many others, now feel compelled to defend Fossey––along with scholars Camilla de la Bedoyere and Georgianne Nenaber, who never knew her, but have studied her correspondence.
Nenaber has several times written to ANIMAL PEOPLE in objection to book reviews that mentioned the critical perspectives of close associates Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, and Robert Sapolsky, an acquaintance who has done comparable studies of baboons in Kenya. Nenaber contributed the longest of 11 appreciations of Fossey included in the December 2005 edition of IPPL News, along with a synopsis of remarks by primatologist Geza Teleki.
Science vs. literature
Together, Fossey’s IPPL defenders make a formidable case for her. Clearly Fossey did much to encourage McGreal in building IPPL into a globally active, effective, and influential voice for all nonhuman primates––and for primate defenders who run afoul of corrupt governments.
But even Campbell and fellow primatologists Colin Groves and Ian Redmond mention in their IPPL appreciations Fossey’s mood swings and other odd behavior.
No One Loved Gorillas More is de la Bedoyere’s contribution to the defense. It includes some of Fossey’s letters, but consists mainly of de la Bedoyere’s contextual introduction to Fossey’s life and legacy.
De la Bedoyere acknowledges that as Weber and Vedder observed in The Kingdom of Gorillas, Fossy “lacked the necessary personality traits to adapt and build on her own success.”
Earlier, de la Bedoyere mentions how Weber, Vedder, and others “recognized that her mental health was deteriorating,” but asserts that “few showed her any compassion, or knew how to help her escape from the black depths of her anguish.”
Resisting the help that was offered, Fossey retreated into alcoholism, while those around her struggled to cope with a leader who could no longer lead.
In truth, Gorillas In The Mist was more a literary achievement than a work of science. The science in it lent weight to Fossey’s plea for gorillas, but she caught public interest with her story. The film version of Gorillas In The Mist starred Sigourney Weaver to dramatize the plot, not the research.
There lies a paradox. Had Fossey been only an influential one-book author, no one would care much about her reputation.
Authors are allowed to be depressives, drunks, misanthropes, and on the losing side of political controversy, if they also spin a compelling tale. Fossey has supporters who perceive that her reputation needs defending chiefly because she was also a scientist.
Most and perhaps all of the army of contributors to the World Atlas of Great Apes have more advanced degrees and more credits in scholarly journals. Thousands of footnotes testify to their diligence. A person who starts reading the World Atlas of Great Apes with little knowledge of apes could pass for an expert by the final page.
Yet few people will peruse the World Atlas of Great Apes cover-to-cover––possibly none. Despite the wealth of knowledge within it, it will be used chiefly as a library reference for term papers. None of the contributors have the individual creative flair of Dian Fossey, and even if one or two did, the collective format would bury it.
Term papers will be based on the World Atlas of Great Apes because of the enduring influence of Gorillas In The Mist. Many of the authors enjoy careers in primatology primarily because Gorillas In The Mist inspired them, and inspired foundation trustees to make grant money available to further great ape research.
Fossey is mentioned on only five pages, all in passing. Her reputation has passed from citations by scientists to analysis by literary biographers, whose interest hints that she will continue to be read and be influential long after all the present science becomes obsolete. ––Merritt Clifton