To Leave with the Reindeer

by Olivia Rosenthal

  At first your mother chooses children’s films, as if that could alleviate your teenage-girl growing pains. You see Dersu Uzala, the tale of a trapper who lives alone in the taiga, on the Sino-Siberian border. You recall the time when you thought you could follow the reindeer after Christmas, you realise you wouldn’t have been able to go by yourself, that nature demands skill and cunning, you feel more dependent even than you were as a child, your imagination is less fertile, your determination reduced, your defiance wearing thin. You take revenge in silence. You are not there.

  We are shocked by the deaths of rats and mice but when we offer earthworms, snails, even fish to the menagerie’s animals, it doesn’t occur to any of us that this could be ethically dubious, as they can be prey and food just like the rest.

  You still go on holiday with your parents instead of organising trips with friends your own age. In any case, you don’t have school friends. You go with your parents, you eat with them, you visit the sites they visit, you swim where they swim. In spite or because of your docility, you discomfit the people your parents meet and with whom they’d like to chat. You are opaque, closed off. You take revenge through inertia and silence. You are not present.

  Occasionally, animal liberation activist groups break into wildlife parks or demonstrate close by. On 15 June 2009 in Nantes, a dozen people, faces hidden behind crude dog masks, broke in close to where wolves were living in temporary accommodation. The group littered the building with leaflets which read: ‘We’re back. Don’t think our dreams will be crushed like this. You thought you’d get around it but it catches up with you, it grips you by the neck. The drawbridge is raised but the walls are cracked.’ The text is threatening, the tension between the we and the you pointed, even though at the end they acknowledge that we’re all in the same boat. We thank the team but it’s something we already had on our radar.

  Usually, your mother chooses films that keep well away from sex, death and life’s suffering, but sometimes she makes a bad call. After King Kong, La Fête Sauvage and Dersu Uzala, you watch Patrice Chéreau’s The Wounded Man, a fresh way to discover sexuality: in the public toilets at the Gare du Nord. Doubtless a mistake on your mother’s part; she can’t have read the plot summary properly before taking you. You don’t comment on what you’re seeing as you sit beside her, you’re learning that you can be simultaneously together and apart.

  Whoever chooses to keep a large snake in their home must plan to provide the prey it will need to live on. Mice and rats are the recommended food, mice and rats which can readily be bought frozen for this purpose. A microwave must never be used to defrost the prey. For every meal, one of the bodies must be taken from the freezer and sat in a container of warm water. A pinky will defrost in two to three minutes, an adult rat may take a good two hours. To be sure that the defrosting is effective, you have only to feel the rat. If a sensation of cold or stiffness persists when you hold it in your hand, the warm-water immersion has not been long enough. The defrosted rodent should then be given a few seconds under an incandescent lamp to warm immediately before the meal. It is recommended that you wipe the rat with a napkin to remove excess water from its fur. For a snake to accept it, the defrosted rat must be as close as possible to the body temperature of a living rat.

  Only much later do you see a film that definitively enlightens you about your own sexuality, a black-and-white film that’s mysterious, dazzling, intriguing and poignant.

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  You devote yourself to studying and don’t pronounce another word about the young man you loved, don’t mention his name or reread his letters, you go on as if these events had no impact on your life, made no difference to your future. You are hardly there.

  To give a newborn chick a good start, you have to feed it on newborn baby rats. We get the baby rats from the farm and have them minced. It’s not the best in the morning on an empty stomach, but we do what we have to do. I’m not a vegetarian and my opinion is that if I’m going to eat meat, I have to deserve it, I have to be capable of killing an animal and butchering it.

  In the evenings, you dine with your parents, showing no particular emotion and not feeling any. You learn how to be both together and alone. You are testing out numbness. You are hardly there.

  We try through recruitment to even out the distribution of phobias, those who won’t touch snakes, those who are afraid of spiders, those who can’t put the rats in the box, those who can’t bring themselves to mince them. Some people refuse to do it. You can’t force them.

  Your dazed state is temporary, at least that’s what your parents think, what everyone thinks, what you also think. You are hardly there.

  Before, when I was working down south, there was a fridge van which used to stop at a motorway service station just before Toulon, and which supplied all the zoos and circuses in the region. They had a contract with the abattoirs and collected the chickens, cows’ hindquarters, the offal. I remember the spectacle of the pickups that used to stop there, in the middle of nowhere, to collect their meat, it was surreal.

  You feel nothing, you think nothing, you’re sleepwalking through life, you feel free, you feel alone, as if you’re above the rest, ahead of the pack, you can’t feel anything, you’re detached, you hold yourself apart, you eat, sleep, study, you are calm and poised, you are sensible, you don’t talk, you don’t cry, you don’t suffer, you don’t make threats, you don’t get angry, you’re preparing yourself for a smooth and painless integration into the grown-up world. Slowly you are learning that you can be together and alone.

  Here, luckily, we have a specialist company which sells us boxes of frozen spring chickens. It’s a place that prepares everything zoos require, the handlers don’t personally have to cut up meat that’s been salvaged from abattoirs and declared unfit for humans, they can order from this wholesaler, and the dead rats, mice, chickens and processed meatballs can all be bought from this company.

  You don’t flinch, you don’t sigh or grumble, you read, you write, you fill pages of notebooks, you pass tests and competitive exams, you study without striving, you are a step aside, behind, on the edge, you are vague, you’re light, indefinable, casual, you move through life as if it were a cloud, a fine mist, a gauzy, insubstantial material, you live like a sleepwalker, you are anaesthetised, numb, you’re dazed, nothing can rouse you. You learn that you can be together and alone. You’re hardly there.

  Ophidiophobia, musophobia, ornithophobia and arachnophobia are specific phobias defined by psychoanalysis as phenomena of projection and displacement. Instead of focusing on a significant object of love or hate (the father), the subject displaces their feelings onto a less significant object (rats, spiders, snakes).

  Whatever the relationship between a handler and their parents, they must be able to capture a recalcitrant snake, to return a spider to its terrarium or to defrost chicks to feed young birds of prey. This is precisely the therapy that behaviourists recommend: the patient should be offered gradually increased exposure to the object of fear. The problem at the zoo is that it’s difficult to organise the animals’ care so that it aligns with the staff’s therapeutic treatments.

  You discover that, contrary to what specialists on animals in captivity say, boredom is not worse than death. It constitutes a slow version of it, the slow measure of time that we cannot use because we haven’t learnt to think for ourselves, act for ourselves, feel for ourselves, suffer for ourselves, live for ourselves. We are bored when we’ve no independence and see no means to achieve it. In captivity, the imagination dries up.

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  ‌III

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  You like animals but after a while you stop thinking about them, you stop demanding a living, furry, faithful companion, you stop directing your rage at your parents’ refusal and the frustration it causes. You become used to not having what you want, or perhaps other, more troubling and deeper frustrations take over.

  I am someone who’s always had a good connection with animals, a kind of
immediate instinct for animal feeling, and besides, I was very interested in natural science and how we understand life, so I chose to study biology, I’ve taken a classic path.

  You used to think that people who work with animals don’t talk about their love for them. You thought that love was only for those who didn’t touch, had no experience of, had nothing to do with the use, breeding and butchering of animals. You used to think that love was a luxury, a pleasure solely available to those who admired animals from afar or who kept them as pets.

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  Having left school to begin higher education, you don’t look back, nor do you keep up with the schoolmates you used to see. You choose to begin a brand-new life, to keep the old one to yourself, never to mention it, to engineer separate sections within you, between which communication is impossible, to divide, to distinguish, to break up.

  The first contradiction is philosophical. We experiment on animals because they are like us, yet at the same time we consider them sufficiently different to use them in experiments. The second is personal: usually people like me do biology because they like animals and then the job makes us treat them as if we don’t care. You have to get used to it. I’ve only belatedly started to question my practice, in the beginning I went for a very standard path.

  The institution where you study is relatively far from your home. This allows you to establish some distance, develop some strategies for retreating, to build some protective barriers, some ditches, palisades, fortifications, ramparts. You retreat, you hide, you separate off, you fade out, you try out silence. You are preparing yourself.

  Ethics are complicated because there’s a very strong anthropomorphising tendency towards pets, yet at the same time, statistically, the number of animals used for experiments is very low compared to the numbers that we eat. In our lifetime, considering the complete range of research practices, it comes to about one and a half mice and half a rat.

  Following the discovery of this data, I see my life unfold in the shape of a rodent cut in two, of which one half has been sacrificed for my health and the other for the health of someone close to me. If I die young, the number of animals used on my behalf could add up to a whole number. At least then I’d have the consolation of not being responsible for the systematic sectioning of lab rats.

  You are spending more and more time far from home, you meet students with whom you go to cafés, you demonstrate in the streets, you argue, you debate, you read. But, even though you’re convinced to the contrary, your distance makes no difference to the exclusivity of your relationship with your mother. You are contaminated.

  In the animal research centres, the risks posed by the animals can be divided into two distinct groups. Either they come from animals that are themselves carriers of their own infections, which in some cases (known as zoonoses) are transmissible to humans. Or the risks arise from the manipulation and inoculation of laboratory animals that have been correctly cared for and are completely free of pathogens. Experimentation demands risk management. In fact, people assume a degree of risk that they must be able to measure when they inoculate animals with all kinds of fatal diseases.

  Your feelings towards various young people in your circle are confused but, though you don’t understand why, your body responds only partially to the ardent desires described to you and so often depicted in the books and films that you like. You feel alone, you feel out of step, you feel dazed, numb, ill at ease, sick, disabled. You are contaminated.

  There are four categories of animal labs corresponding to the four groups of pathogens. Group 1 includes biological agents not known to provoke disease in humans. Group 2 includes biological agents which may pose a danger to humans but among which transmission by proximity is highly unlikely. Group 3 includes biological agents capable of causing serious illness in humans. Effective treatments or prophylactics are available but transmission in the community remains possible. Group 4 contains the most dangerous biological agents: those that cause serious illness, are highly transmissible and for which there is neither treatment, nor prophylaxis.

  To succeed in pre-empting the dangers of contamination arising from the inoculation of lab animals with serious diseases, you must be certain that the mental and psychological barrier between people and animals is impregnable. And wherever it may not be impregnable, the means for making it so must be found.

  Your body and your mind live two parallel lives. While your knowledge is flourishing and broadening, you continue in ignorance of your physical self. You are dazed, bewildered, unmindful, distracted, absent, deaf and blind. You are forgetting yourself.

  We create models in the labs, for example models of obese mice, rats deprived of sugar, monkeys with Parkinson’s or baboons with multiple sclerosis, but this doesn’t mean that we’re mistreating animals; we carry out surgery in exactly the same conditions as human surgery, we intubate them, we perform gaseous anaesthesia, we administer analgesics and antibiotics, we are very careful with our subjects insofar as, in order to obtain good scientific data, we must keep the animal in good health, have it awaken comfortably, without any suffering and infection-free; only under these conditions can its disease progress smoothly.

  You too – your pathology is advancing smoothly but at no point do you feel that you’re suffering from disease, from melancholy or from depression. You don’t worry about what’s happening to you, about the way you avoid everything that troubles you. You forget yourself.

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  You go to see Jacques Tourneur’s film Cat People with friends your own age who, like you, enjoy old black-and-white American films. The film tells the story of a Serbian woman living in the US who meets a well-brought-up American and marries him. Seemingly a film you could easily have watched with your mother.

  For each level of animal breeding centre (classified from A1 to A4), isolation facilities in line with contamination prevention standards must be provided. The isolation units are always located well away from other facilities. The isolation zone must be maintained under pressure with double airlock entrances and feedback-controlled doors. For levels A2 and A3 breeding centres, the isolation facilities are moreover indicated by a graphic depicting ‘biological hazard’. Peepholes are provided in the doors to enable observation of isolation rooms. We must also allow for hermetic sealing of the accommodation for the purpose of post-occupation sanitisation.

  On general release in 1942, Tourneur’s Cat People opens with an image of a cage in which a magnificent black panther paces ceaselessly from left to right and right to left. The first time you see the film, you don’t understand what grips you, what attracts you to it. You watch without thinking, without responding. Nothing awakens you. You have ignored yourself for too long.

  I began, as everyone does, by experimenting on decerebrated frogs. We decerebrated them ourselves, it’s very quick, you insert a stylet into the back of the animal’s neck and you cut out the brain. It’s not nice but there’s a whole lot of material out there justifying it, research standards demand it, these are good deeds, we’re improving the human race. As I’m an elder sibling and psychological tests show that first-born children are much more conformist than second ones, well, I’m happy to go with the flow, I do what I’m told, I’ve taken a very classic path.

  In Tourneur’s Cat People, which you see without your mother, the main character Irena Dubrovna, played by Simone Simon, invites Mr Reed to have tea with her the first time they meet. It’s highly inappropriate, you have to admit, but you can excuse a Serb for not knowing American ways. You see Mr Reed and Irena Dubrovna go up the stairs to the young woman’s apartment. You expect Mr Reed’s entry into the building to mark the beginning of their sexual relationship. You are wrong. Instead of the scene so impatiently awaited, in which, for example, Mr Reed takes the mysterious young woman in his arms – nothing. A dazzling ellipsis wrong-foots you.

  Contamination between animals and humans is often more complex than we expect and if we don’t take strict precautions, ful
l-blown health crises may follow. For example, Aids began with people hunting in the bush, killing HIV-carrier chimps for food and being contaminated by the virus via scratches while cutting up the bushmeat. Just one illustration of how an epidemic of such proportions may begin with some very marginal event that we didn’t think to avoid or to treat as such.

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t realised how dark it was getting,’ says Irena Dubrovna in the next shot. You aren’t sure if she’s speaking to Mr Reed, there on the sofa, or to you, the viewer, sunk deep in your cushions and still thrilled, surprised, disappointed, almost outraged that the desire between Reed and Irena has not taken a tangible form. But in this film desire never takes a tangible form, or when it does, it’s already too late. Unquestionably a film you could have seen with your mother, you think, and sigh.

  In a lab-based animal breeding centre, the distinction enforced between the animals’ pre-intervention lives (the dirty zone) and their lives during and post-intervention (the clean zone) is crucial in order to avoid the interference of food, urine, excrement, hairs, vomit, saliva or parasites with the results of any given experiment. Contamination protocol demands the establishment of exacting standards and the use of high-quality equipment. The slightest error puts staff safety at risk and, in the event of leaked pathogenic agents, threatens a proportion of the human race at large.