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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: May 2006
B O O K S
How Animals Talk And Other Pleasant Studies of Birds and Beasts
by William J. Long ˆ Bear & Co. (1 Park Street, Rochester, VT 05767), 276 pages, paperback. $18.00.
William J. Long (1867-1952), was a United Church of Christ minister who became one of the best-known U.S. authors of nature books of the early 20th century.
How Animals Talk followed earlier Long hits including Ways of Woodfolk, Beasts of the Field, Fowls of the Air, and Secrets of the Woods. It appeared 12 years after Theodore Roosevelt, then U.S. President, enduringly identified Long as the most egregious of the alleged “nature-fakers,” in remarks amplified by Roosevelt’s hunting buddy Edward B. Clark, White House correspondent for the Chicago Evening Post.
Naturalist John Burroughs had already been attacking Long for propounding “sham natural history” since 1903, with Roosevelt’s warm endorsement, but it was Roosevelt’s invention of the term “nature-faker,” that demolished Long’s stature well beyond his own lifetime, even though Long far outlived all of his critics.
In the original and narrowest definition, a “nature-faker” was an author whose observations seemed dubious and were unverified by others. The definition rapidly expanded, as the debate raged, to include all authors who presumed to impose anthropomorphic interpretations upon natural observation, especially interpretations which supposed that animals might think as humans do, or have comparable morality.
Long was in distinguished company as a purported “nature-faker.” Among the others accused were Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Scouting movement, whose 1903 volume Wild Animals I Have Known was Burroughs’ first target, and Jack London, whose White Fang (1905) attacked dogfighting and pet theft.
All were animal advocates, in their own understanding of what effective animal advocacy meant. Roosevelt in particular remains difficult to categorize, since he was at once openly fond of living animals, and outspokenly critical of cruel or unsporting treatment of animals, yet not averse to killing animals whenever he felt that the killing could be rationalized.
“Son of an incorporator and charter trustee of the American Museum of Natural History,” recounts Gerald Carson in his essay T.R. & the ‘Nature Fakers,’ “Roosevelt in his boyhood…studied the songbirds of Long Island, New York, with nature book and shotgun and took lessons in taxidermy before he reached his teens.”
Despite his early initiation into hunting and scientific “sacrifice,” however, Roosevelt soon developed reservations about killing for “mere damnable and detestable curiosity,” as Charles Darwin put it.
“He thought seriously of becoming a professional biologist,” Carson continues, “but was put off by the emphasis at Harvard, during his undergraduate years, upon the laboratory approach to natural science—the embalming, the microscopy, and the dissection of tissues and embryos. It was an uncongenial approach to the young New Yorker who kept live animals in his own living quarters.”
Roosevelt eventually compromised between his personal sense of morality toward animals and his participation in hunting by promoting the notions of “fair chase” and “sportsmanship.” Along with Burroughs and many others, Roosevelt argued that hunters were best qualified by concern and experience to restore North American wildlife from the then-prevailing depletion to huntable abundance. Roosevelt and friends developed the “hunter/conservationist” philosophy of wildlife management which has prevailed ever since.
Their first political victory consisted of beating back other animal advocates, including Long and his readers, who sought to protect wildlife by banning hunting. Long was the most prominent naturalist backing a coalition of humane and religious leadership.
Unlike Long, whose sympathy for animals was deep and genuine, many of the religious opponents of hunting were chiefly concerned that Sunday hunting might threaten church attendance.
Even before Long rose to prominence, Roosevelt in the mid-1890s helped to buy off humane opposition to hunting by giving the American SPCA the New York City animal control contract and the then-Albany-based American Humane Association the contract to operate orphanages for New York state. In exchange for financial stability and a quasi-governmental role, the humane organizations retreated from wildlife advocacy.
Prohibiting Sunday hunting then bought off the eccelesiasts, allowing New York state to pioneer the present system of funding wildlife management through the sale of hunting licenses. Maintaining the population of hunters thus became as much a concern of governmental wildlife management as maintaining wildlife itself.
Among the alleged nature-fakers, Thompson Seton sought to placate everyone, attempting to incorporate church-going, hunter/conservationism, and humane concerns into the broad-tent ethos of Scouting.
Jack London, while specifying that he could not defend Long’s extreme interpretations of animal behavior, moved philosophically toward proto-animal rights activism. As well as speaking out memorably for dogs and horses, London prominently attacked circus animal abuse just as circuses reached their height of popularity, shortly before the advent of screen entertainment began their century-long slow decline.
The nationwide string of Jack London Clubs begun by second Massachusetts SPCA president Francis Rowley, with London’s muscular support, may be viewed as proto-animal rights groups, and still existed as late as 1963, but lost their early energy after London killed himself in 1916, at least partially in despair over the suffering caused by World War I.
As both Thompson Seton and London were eminently able to defend themselves, Burroughs and Roosevelt focused their scorn on Long.
Long, summarized Carson, “not only described occurrences that no other observers had been fortunate enough to see, but maintained that the denizens of the fields and forests established schools in which they trained their young for the life struggle ahead of them…Many of [his books] were issued at low prices for school use. The young were thus being corrupted, in Roosevelt’s view, with consequences as grave as would be the case if geography classes were taught that the earth was flat.”
Superficially about biological accuracy, the “nature-fakers” debate was at heart a debate about the human presumption of a right to use and abuse animals, in particular to hunt them––as Ralph H. Lutts discusses in depth in The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment (1990).
“Long’s most effective response,” continued Carson, “was to drop the biological issue and raise the question of President Roosevelt’s motives. He described Roosevelt as less the lover of nature than a game butcher who ‘hides behind a tree and kills three bull elks in succession, leaving their carcasses to rot…Every time he gets near the heart of a wild thing he puts a bullet through it.”
Long won considerable support, including from The New York Sun and the British Humanitarian League, but Roosevelt’s prominence backed by the scientific authority of Burroughs and U.S. Biological Survey chief C. Hart Merriam prevailed.
The debate enduringly established the public image of hunters as practical, realistic observers of wildlife, in contrast to the alleged sentimentality and anthropomorphism of humanitarians, who favored Long, but were often ill-equipped to defend him with anything more than anecdotes and questionable interpretation.
On wildlife, at least, Long was the scientific voice of the humane movement. If his arguments failed, there was no one else to take his place.
How Animals Talk marked Long’s retreat to writing less for the public than for his most devoted readers, at the fringe of scientific respectability, or perhaps a step beyond, even at a time when the study of para-normal phenomena had yet to be discredited to the extent that it was within another decade.
Within Long’s own time, How Animals Talk was essentially a cult classic. More than 50 years posthumously, many of his most controversial observations have been confirmed, and at least some of his once seemingly far-fetched contentions have been scientifically validated.
Now known, for instance, is that many birds have far more advanced intelligence in many aspects of communication and problem-solving than most mammals; that human behavior generally has antecedents in animal behavior; that much animal behavior is learned, not instinctive; and that many species communicate by a variety of means that tend to be beyond human perception.
Some animals, including prairie dogs, appear to communicate in at least the beginnings of language, with grammar and a vocabulary.
Marc Bekoff, who combines distinguished scientific achievement with open sympathy for animal rights activism, acknowledges that “William Long presages numerous areas that are ‘hot topics’ in the study of animal behavior,” but Long may have been damned by association when Rupert Shel-drake, author of Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, endorsed How Animals Talk as “The classic book on animal telepathy.”
Even conceding that Long may not have invented his observations, as Roosevelt et al charged, and even accepting that Long was well ahead of his time in many of his interpretations of animal behavior, “Extra-ordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” As a man of religious faith, Long easily accepted para-normal explanations for behavior, even when they seemed to flunk the Occam’s Razor test of being the simplest explanation for the observed phenomena.
The Bear & Company reissue of How Animals Talk enables readers to make up their own minds about Long, without reference to the “nature-fakers” controversy.
The language is unaltered from the 1919 edition, affording a charming window into a bygone era.
How Animals Talk is believed to have been the first book to seriously explore the possibility of telepathic communication among animals, which at the time might have seemed to be a relatively reasonable hypothesis. The discoveries that bats use radar, dolphins use sonar, and elephants and great whales use low-frequency sound were all decades away, for example, along with the possibility that these animals use their ultra-sonic and sub-sonic abilities to communicate as well as to evaluate the world around them. Yet, even though how animals communicated seemed in 1919 to be deeply mysterious, even Roosevelt et al had no doubt that they do communicate by various means.
“Whether you search the wood or the city or the universe, the only interesting thing you will ever find anywhere is the thrill and mystery of awakening life,” wrote Long. “That the animal is alive, and alive in a way you ought to be but are not, is the last and most fascinating discovery you are likely to make in nature’s kingdom.”
As Long pointed out, it is not good enough to make an ornithology of mere feathers, or to accept without reservation what scientists have to say. For true understanding, it is necessary to observe animals in their own environment.
Writing at a time when even many of the most common North American wildlife species had largely vanished from the vicinity of human habitation, Long introduced his readers to birds, deer, bears and foxes, emphasizing seeing them in everyday life without awareness of being watched.
Only through ethological observation, Long argued, can we truly appreciate telepathy among animals. But Long wrote ten years before Konrad Lorenz even began his studies of greylag geese, long before Lorenz invented the term “ethology.”
“Every wild creature is finely ‘sensible’ in the true meaning of the word, his sensitiveness being due to the fact that there is nothing dead or even asleep in nature; the natural animal or the natural man is from head to foot wholly alive and awake,” Long contended. “This because every atom of him or every cell, as a biologist might insist, is of itself sentient and has the faculty of perception.”
This, in two sentences, summarizes the difficulty of accepting Long at face value as an influential and prescient nature writer. He was ahead of his time in understanding the premise of ecology: that natural environments as a whole function much like individual living organisms. Yet Long was at odds with science in asserting that even cells with no perceptive organs are “sentient,” capable of perception.
Yet there was thought behind Long’s assertions. The discovery of DNA, a year after Long’s death, provided a much simpler explanation for some of the processes that Long deduced must exist at the cellular level. Long was less “wrong” than ahead of science in observation and intuition, and not content to await scientific discovery in his zeal to share appreciation of the sacredness of life.
Long argued that there are three marked differences between humans and animals. First, he believed, animals retain a spirit of play throughout life, which he felt that humans had largely lost. In this, Long inverted the usual belief of post-Darwinian natural observers, before Bekoff’s pioneering studies of animal play, that animals are wholly focused on “survival of the fittest.”
More conventionally, Long asserted that animals live in their sensations, and are happy, while humans dwell mostly in thoughts and postpone happiness for the future. Animals, Long believed, are fully alive at every moment, while humans are only alive “the day before yesterday.”
These are essentially theological beliefs, echoing some Biblical passages as well as teachings of Buddhism and other eastern religions––but the notion that the process of evolving into modern humanity involved a fall from grace is as all-pervasive in environmentalism as in self-aware religious doctrine.
If Theodore Roosevelt had not been addicted as he was to hunting, and less closely aligned with Burroughs and Merriam in his quest to persuade Congress to preserve natural habitat, he and Long might have found common ground in their qualms about studying nature by “collecting more skins or skulls.”
Accused Long, addressing the scientists who emphasized taxonomy above ethology, “You have unconsciously placed destruction above fulfillment, stark death above the beautiful mystery of life, and in so doing we estrange ourselves from meeting on any common ground of understanding.”
Though Long made mistakes in reaching beyond what could be credibly documented in his own time, How Animals Talk is a wonderful book about understanding and recognizing the mysteries of our natural world.
––Bev Pervan & Merritt Clifton
Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good
by Jonathan Balcombe
Palgrave/MacMillan (175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010), 2006.
256 pages, hardcover. $24.95.
Balcombe writes, “When animals are stereotyped, the public is done a disservice. Reinforcing the myth, we perpetuate a one-dimensional perception of the animal kingdom....It is only when we get close to animals, and examine them with open minds, that we are likely to glimpse the being within. Natural history writing is strewn with incidents in which writers are moved to awe by the intelligence, sensitivity and awareness of animals they have lived with.”
Balcombe points out many aspects of pleasure-seeking animal behavior. As all vertebrates have a nervous system very much the same as ours, it is reasonable to assume that all are alive to both pain and pleasure, contrary to the derision that greeted authors who suggested this in earlier times. As Balcombe points out, “In the face of these discoveries, the position that pleasurable states are the sole domain of the human species is narrow and anthropocentric. To deny animals conscious experiences is to deny that they plan, desire, anticipate, tease, grieve, enjoy, tolerate, and gauge. It is to reject that they make decisions.”
With such evidence as this book has to offer, we as a species need to take a deeper look into our own morality, to give thought to whether that little mouthful of flesh which we put on the plate justifies depriving a sentient being of the many pleasures of life.
“If animals feel more than pain but are also capable of pleasure,” then surely we have an even greater responsibility to them.
Of minor note: on page 20, figure1.3 illustrates an eriolobis or camel-thorn branch, not Zisyphus mucronata or wait-a-bit thorn, which has hooked barbs, not the long white thorns shown in the picture.
––Beverley Pervan
Animal Instinct by Dorothy B. Hayes
Universe (2021 Pine Lake Rd., Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512), 2005. 234 pages, paperback. $15.95.
Animal Instinct author Dorothy B. Hayes was formerly known as Dot Hayes, longtime staff writer and public relations director for Friends of Animals. Earlier, Hayes covered animal issues for several Connecticut newspapers.
Animal Instinct is an autobiographical novel describing just over a year in the life of an advocacy group staff writer named Eleanor Aquitane Green.
Structurally and thematically, Animal Instinct is a “working girl story,” about coping with the pressures of a high-stress job under a demanding and often capricious boss, in an all-female environment where the rules of hierarchy are much more flexible––and therefore treacherous––than in the male-dominated news business.
There is history in Animal Instinct, as characters inform Green of background in summaries that are generally accurate in gist, off by up to 10 years in detail––but the mistakes are not more egregious than those made in the several formal histories that Hayes lists as sources.
Hayes also tries to educate readers about the issues that form the background to her plot, at times to the detriment of the story line.
Readers who are not familiar with the internal politics of national advocacy groups may be surprised at some of the goings-on, as Green is.
Insiders may be surprised, however, that Hayes describes mostly business-as-usual. Hayes’ tenure at FoA spanned high-level opposition infiltration of three national animal rights groups, several instances of animal rights groups attempting hostile takeovers of each other, an explosive sexual harassment case at one group, and several financial scandals, but none of this gets more than a passing mention.
Hayes’ most successful accomplishment is melding aspects of multiple real-life models into single characters. Longtime animal advocacy insiders will enjoy trying to match the characters with real-life counterparts, but will often find that there is no one exact match.
Green’s boss Honor Vine, for example, combines elements of Friends of Animals’ president Priscilla Feral, FoA founder Alice Herrington, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, International Society for Animal Rights founder Helen Jones, and perhaps Animal Welfare Institute founder Christine Stevens.
Some of these also help to model other characters. Relatively few, other than bit players, appear to be based on just one person, and even then, one female minor character seems to be modeled on a man.
Mild satire is tempered by Hayes’ still somewhat star-struck regard for animal advocates and their work. Many accomplished but rarely recognized street-level activists are saluted in passing introductions of characters. Occasionally Hayes clutters a paragraph with mentions of names, but at times she also memorably and recognizably sketches people worthy of note in just a few lines.
Animal Instinct almost certainly will not amuse everyone who helped to inspire it, but is an entertaining tribute to the people behind the stars of the animal cause.
––Merritt Clifton
Cesar’s Way by Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier
Harmony Books ( 231 Broad St., Nevada City, CA 95959), 2006. 304 pages, hard cover. $24.95.
Dog behaviourist Cesar Millan’s weekly show The Dog Whisperer airs on the National Geographic Channel. His Dog Psychology Center in Los Angeles, California, enjoys a celebrity clientele. His book Cesar’s Way is about dogs, but is also the autobiography of a poor Mexican who came to America as an illegal immigrant.
We have had family dogs all our lives, yet only after reading Millan’s book did we realize how many mistakes we made in training and understanding them. If we were to get another dog, it would only be after anxious consideration of our responsibilities: Would we commit ourselves to taking the dog for a long, tiring walk for at least an hour every morning, and another half hour every evening? Every day?
Millan believes that when one understands the evolutionary needs of dogs, one realizes that draining off energy by hard exercise is essential to their health.
Millan argues that affection should only be given to reinforce discipline, and that discipline, which comes second only to exercise in importance, must be consciously renewed with every event and activity.
Stick to cats if you are not prepared to make the effort required to fulfill a dog’s life, Millan advises.
This is not a book about how to get your dog to respond to commands. It is far more fundamental than that. Millan provides insight into dog psychology, based on canine evolution, and explains how to know what your dog is thinking. He believes that such an understanding makes for a safe and happy relationship with a companion dog, and avoids creating what Millan terms “re-zone” aggressors, such as the two Presa Canarios kept by San Francisco attorneys Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel, who fatally mauled neighbor Diane Whipple in January 2001.
Millan emphasizes that dogs are social animals, with pack instincts, and that it is important to use this when controlling a dog. Affection must be given after exercise and eating. Knoller and Noel often gave affection to their dogs after they had attacked people, Millan says, thereby reinforcing bad behavior.
Millan points out that many homeless people have better adjusted and behaved dogs than rich people, mostly because they spend more time with the dogs in a variety of environments.
––Chris Mercer & Bev Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
Listen
by Stephanie S. Tolan
Harper Collins Publishers
(1350 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10019), 2006.
197 pages, paperback. $15.99.
Charley, 12, is trying to come to terms with the death of her mother in a car accident that leaves Charley herself struggling to learn to walk again. Compounding her sense of isolation is the desertion of her best friend.
While exercising her damaged leg in the woods near her home, Charley finds a feral dog. Not knowing why, she feels an intense need to tame this dog, take him home, and care for him. Because she has never had a dog before, her father tries to talk her into getting a puppy. But Charley only connects to this particular animal, whom she names Coyote, spending weeks trying to get close to him.
She tries food as an inducement, but telepathic flashes show her that the dog was once caught and locked away with the lure of food, and so she feels she has to try something else. On the Internet she discovers Jane Goodall and her experiences in becoming acquainted with the wild chimpanzees at Gombe. Charley studies the Goodall methods and tries to use them with Coyote.
Further inspiration comes from a book of nature photographs that her late mother had published. All of her photos were taken in the woods around their home. Alongside each photo is a poem or quotation, and from these Charley also finds ideas about how to tame Coyote. The photos encourage Charley to explore the woods, to experience the beauty of nature’s garden, and to appreciate compassion for all animals, as Charley’s mother did.
––Beverley Pervan
<www.cannedlion.co.za>
South Africa