City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Lonely. The head of biology at Buenos Aires Zoo, Adrian Sestelo, has argued that it is inappropriate to compare an animal’s responses to a human’s. ‘When you don’t know the biology of a species, to unjustifiably claim it suffers abuse, is stressed or depressed, is to make one of man’s most common mistakes, which is to humanise animal behaviour.’ At the time of that statement Sestelo was weighing into a debate about one particular animal, Sandra the orangutan. Sandra had been held in a cage with iron bars and had nowhere to hide. She was distressed by being constantly on display and used to (still does) cover her head with a piece of cardboard or a cloth. She was the only orangutan at the Buenos Aires Zoo.

  I too think anthropomorphism can lead to false sentimentality, but it is impossible to live closely with any animal, to become intimate with one, and not see that it has a rich emotional life. I could, but won’t, throw any amounts of research at you, tell you of elephants who weep, mourn, honour their dead; of lions remembering those who freed them from captivity; gorillas who are intimate with their human family members; dolphins who’ve fallen in love and even tried to have sex with humans; of my arthritic old cat. It’s a miracle I’ve managed to write an entire book and got this far without mentioning my cat Wilson who, in old age, seems to be kept alive by the love and friendship that exists between him and Virginia and me, his human comrades.

  The Melbourne Zoo has evolved since Ranee’s time, but she haunts me when I walk Royal Park, as I do most weeks. In its earliest days, housed in the Botanic Gardens, the zoo was an acclimatisation zoo and accommodated rabbits, foxes, kangaroos and starlings. After it moved to Royal Park the zoo became interested in a more exotic range of creatures. They also wanted, indeed needed, to charge entrance fees, and Ranee was the star attraction. During her twenty-one-year residence she contributed five per cent of the zoo’s annual income.

  In 1888 the zoo set up an ethnographic village as a part of their fiftieth birthday celebrations. Woiwurrung and Boon Wurrung living in Coranderrk, near Healesville, were brought back to their traditional lands. Weapons were arranged carefully around them. They were asked to throw boomerangs while onlookers stood around and watched. Stuffed animals added to the atmosphere. The Royal Melbourne Zoo is not the only zoo with such tales to tell, of course. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo kept a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga in the monkey house after he’d been kidnapped by slavers. Benga wore modern clothes and entertained the crowd by shooting a bow and arrow at a target. He made friends with one of the orangutans, which the crowd found extremely amusing. An African-American clergyman, the Reverend James H. Gordon, took exception to this and successfully lobbied for Ota’s release. There was a period when Benga was allowed to roam the grounds of the zoo but he became violent, and so he was moved out altogether. Benga shot himself in the heart after the outbreak of World War I prevented his return to Africa. ‘It was a mistake,’ said John Calvelli, senior vice-president for public affairs of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which owns and runs the zoo, in 2006. ‘When you reflect on it, you realise that it was a moment in time. You have to look at the time in which it happened, and you try to understand why this would occur.’5

  Philosopher Peter Singer has described the history of human moral progress as an expansion of the circle of beings we regard as persons, which makes sense to me. In 2012 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was unsuccessful in invoking the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude to gain freedom for orcas in captivity. In 2013 the Nonhuman Rights Project initiated three legal claims on behalf of four chimpanzees in New York State. Initially rejected, the cases moved into a series of appeals that continue some five years later. In late 2014 Sandra the orangutan was declared a ‘non-human person’. She was finally to be taken off display. ‘The ruling was historic,’ according to Andrés Gil Dominguez of the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights in Argentina, ‘because before a nonhuman primate like Sandra was considered an object and therefore there was no dispute about its captivity.’

  This story has no happy ending, though. A new home was never found for Sandra and she is too institutionalised to survive in the wild. Even if she weren’t, there is barely enough wilderness to sustain her. Orangutan are a critically endangered species in part because deforestation, the production of palm oil, and the endless bushfires that have destroyed their habitat. The Indonesian government recently released figures suggesting the populations are bouncing back dramatically, but scientists have refuted those figures—it is not biologically possible for orangutan to breed at the rate suggested and there is no evidence of this increased population. On the contrary, many believe the orangutan will be extinct in the wild within a decade.

  This leaves zoos with a dilemma. Outgoing director of the Melbourne Zoo Kevin Tanner recently commented that zoos ‘should only be in existence if they want to save animals in the wild’. 6 But he also acknowledged that the world outside seemed to be getting worse: species loss, habitat destruction and climate change all increasing at a rapid pace.

  While Sandra’s enclosure has been improved since the court decisions, she still doesn’t have much space. Judge Elena Liberatori, the judge who made the ruling on Sandra’s personhood and has been in charge of overseeing improvements for her, managed to convince a ferry company to donate some ropes for her to play with. ‘Her natural habitat is missing, and I think she’ll never have it,’ Liberatori said. ‘I wish she had soil, grass, plants. They have a tree now. It was one of the improvements, but it’s just some wood, not a real tree.’

  Ranee died on December 18, 1904 of ‘a very large accumulation of biliary calculi, weighing over 100 lbs., in the liver, that organ having been almost completely destroyed. The accumulation must have been going on for years…’ In her final years she was not as ‘gentle’ as she once had been. In particular, she wouldn’t let anyone near her mouth, and after she died it was discovered that one of her molars had grown thirteen centimetres longer than it should have, causing her a lot of pain. But she was, in the end, not totally alone. She became attached to one of her keepers and when he lay on the grass sleeping or resting she’d stand over him and wave flies from his face with her trunk. If people tried to approach him when he was resting she’d become angry and force the visitors back.

  At the same time I was researching Ranee’s life—not long after the death of my dad, John—Peter, my biological father, went into care. From the moment of his diagnosis, Parkinson’s disease, what he feared most was losing cognitive function. After many years of living with the illness, that loss became undeniable. Through 2017 I visited him most weeks. He was deeply distressed by his dementia, but what I found more alarming, to be honest, was his body’s constant restlessness. He lurched up and raced off. Some days he couldn’t stop walking. I’d find myself chasing him down corridors at a trot and when I finally caught and grabbed him bodily—at his request—he kept on moving, ramming the walking frame into me and the furniture around him. He couldn’t turn himself off. He’d lose balance and fall. If I was in the room I’d try and catch him but, let’s face it, I’m not young anymore. My back is not great and I do not do the various exercises for it that I should do. I struggled, physically I mean, to cope with the situation. On one visit my father just looked at me, then put his head in his hands and cried. But on other days he was cheerful and I walked him around in a wheelchair and he enjoyed the garden. There was a sculpted birdbath with bronze parrots, which he liked, as did I. He’d get up from his chair when we passed it, to pat the parrots on their shiny heads. One day he seemed to forget I was pushing his chair and said to the friend we were walking with, ‘I thought Sophie had disappeared but I see her more now.’ And it was true I was visiting him more in The Home than I did in his home. On another day, he told people that I was dead.

  Rage hit me, from time to time, like a gale-force gust. Knocked me sideways. These men who came into my life, then left it to build other families. These men who expected
me to love them unconditionally, despite the mess of life and bad behaviour (theirs, mine). These men who I nonetheless tried to offer care to as they died, and who did their best to love me.

  One day I wheeled Peter under an oak tree and stopped to take a picture of it for @sophtreeofday. I told him I was planning to lead a walk I called Ranee’s Walk, in honour of an elephant. I didn’t tell him that elephants reminded me of trees, particularly old river gums when they silver to the colour of an elephant’s hide. There are so many things that I never took the chance to tell my father about me, his only daughter, the random collection of thoughts I have most days, thoughts that I have attempted to bring together here, in this book. Likewise there are so many things he never told me. I wish he’d told me the kinds of things he mentioned that afternoon, one of the last I spent with him.

  Things like this: when he was a small boy he’d ridden Betty, the elephant at the Royal Melbourne Zoo. Betty was not Ranee’s successor—that was Queenie, who arrived at the zoo in 1902. Queenie gave rides for forty years to up to five hundred children and parents each day, walking an estimated 165,000 kilometres around and around the same enclosure. Hard surfaces are painful for elephants’ sensitive feet. Many of them die of arthritis after years of pounding bitumen, and these days foot and joint problems are regarded as the most important health issue for captive elephants. Melbourne’s bull elephant Bong Su was euthanised in late 2017, after forty years at the zoo, when the pain from his arthritis became unmanageable. Peter Stroud, former curator at Melbourne Zoo and director of Werribee Zoo, wrote at the time:

  I have come to the realisation that zoos are no place for elephants. It is long overdue for Australian zoos to courageously confront the substandard conditions their elephants endure and look for better ways to provide for them. Bong Su is dead. Not because he reached old age, but because he was broken by cramped and impoverished zoo conditions and a terrible inability, through much of his life, to meet his true needs.7

  At least Bong Su was loved by those who cared for him. Queenie not so much, though the general public adored her. Queenie’s keeper was a man called Wilfred Lawson. Kenneth Brown, Lawson’s nephew, remembers riding on Queenie’s head as a schoolboy. ‘I would help Uncle wash her down,’ Brown says. ‘It was a big job to wash her down, wipe her all over and dry her.’ She was given a lot of rubbish to eat by children, and Brown cleaned out her mouth. He says she was very gentle and would turn over for them during her bath. But he also said that Lawson often hit Queenie with a stick. ‘I didn’t like my uncle hitting her,’ Brown has said. ‘He used to belt her to get past the monkeys.’

  Queenie trampled Lawson to death in 1944.

  ‘My dad believed it was deliberate, because Mr Lawson was pretty rough with her,’ Joyce Hamilton, the daughter of a second elephant keeper, Adolphus Stanley, told a journalist sixty years after the event. She remembered hearing the news and being worried that it was her dad who had died. When she rushed home she found him sitting in his chair, alive and well. Stanley had looked after Queenie for a month while Lawson was on holidays and they’d got on well. Hamilton believed that after a month of her father’s care Queenie cracked once Lawson returned from holidays and resumed his job.8

  Adolphus Stanley considered Queenie ‘the loveliest animal in the zoo’. It was he who shot her in 1945. The zoo said this was because of food shortages but it’s hard not to imagine that her killing of Lawson and the consequent impact on her use as an income earner were also factors. Betty, the elephant Peter rode, replaced Queenie in 1939, along with an elephant calf called Peggy. That pleases me—that Betty had a friend. Peggy and Betty generated a lot of income for the zoo, but elephant rides were stopped in 1962 on the grounds that they were cruel.

  I wondered why Stanley had agreed to shoot Queenie if it was true that he’d cared for her, but then read he’d done so to ensure her death was quick. This is something of a relief if you’ve read George Orwell’s account of shooting an elephant, which Orwell himself equated with murder.

  After three shots, wrote Orwell, the bull was not dead.

  He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock. In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.9

  I’ve seen elephants in the wild, most notably in Sri Lanka, where I saw a mother feeding her baby. I’ve visited an elephant orphanage and watched elephants washing each other, and being washed by their keepers, in a broad river that ran through the estate; seen calves being fed from the bottle. But such positive sightings are rare. On the trip to Los Angeles where I tracked, or imagined that I tracked, P-22, I visited the LA zoo’s ‘revamped’ elephant enclosure. It was appalling. They had nowhere to get away from the public gaze. They were always being looked at and they clearly hated it: stood with their backs to us, faces pushed into the wall, rocking. I stopped looking. When I got back to our accommodation I took to the internet and found that those elephants were named Billy, who was thirty-two, and Tina and Jewel, who were in their early fifties. In 2012 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ordered the zoo to exercise the three Asian elephants at least two hours a day on soil rather than concrete to reduce the impact on their legs and pads. The injunction also banned the use of electric shocks, and a barbed stick known as a bull hook. In May 2017 the court’s ruling on the elephants’ behalf was overturned.

  I read a lot about elephants to prepare for Ranee’s Walk, and subsequently to write this essay, including an essay that described the last surviving matriarch of her herd heading to a clifftop every night to feel the waves pound on the rocks then reverberate up through the rock and into her, making her feel less alone. I found this intensely distressing and had to put the essay down. My nerve began to fail me. Having undertaken to bear witness to what humans are doing to this planet, to all that lives upon it, I found I was beginning to look away. To read less about what was happening in the world in general, to elephants (and trees) in particular.

  When I was flying across America in early 2018 I read a book that spoke about the notion of narrative fallacy, which means, in effect, trying to neaten things with hindsight, or to create a logical discourse through the inclusion of incidental details that are not, in fact, related. I found myself thinking about this a lot on that flight, because I was writing these essays, and because I am interested in finding patterns in seemingly random events, and then a few hours after I got off the plane I found out that Peter had died. A few months later, when a friend read a draft of this essay she commented, ‘It’s really about repressed grief, isn’t it?’ And I was horrified. Not because she was wrong, but because I don’t want to suggest that the natural death of a parent is in any way akin to the grief that we may soon live in a world where there will be no elephants left in the wild.

  Loss, and grief, can feel like many strands or like one large knot. The emotion does not necessarily make you cry, or even feel sad, but leads to a certain unravelling of self as that knot comes undone. Going about your day as you once did is difficult. The very idea of self feels like a narrative fallacy, the kind of fallacy that makes you c
onsider Ranee’s disarticulated skeleton as a metaphor, before you realise using her like that makes you feel physically ill. I don’t want to make Ranee’s story more meaningful by generating a shape to her life that is pleasing. I do not want to give in to the siren song of a resolved narrative. One that makes sense of what humans are doing to this planet, or what the passage of time does to us.

  James Bradley writes of this complicated compression of grief in a beautiful essay about the recent loss of his father in the midst of the unfolding climate catastrophe.

  Grief teaches us that time is plastic. A lifetime is an ocean and an instant. It does not matter whether something happened a week ago, a year ago, a decade ago: all loss is now. Grief does not stop, or disappear. It suffuses, inhabits us. The dead are both gone and never gone, living absences we bear with us. Perhaps something similar is true of extinction. What is lost remains with us, felt in its unpresence.10

  When Ranee died there were a few million African elephants and about 100,000 Asian elephants. Today, there are an estimated 450,000–700,000 African elephants left and about a third the number of wild Asian elephants. Elephants weep for the loss of their kin, and we humans should be weeping for them too. But not just weeping. We should also be fighting for their survival.

  Before the flight across America where I’d been meditating on the idea of narrative fallacy, I’d been in Mexico. I was meeting friends on Isla Mujeres, not far off the coast of Cancun. I caught a ferry and then a taxi, and put my suitcases down in my room before walking through a grove of coconut palms to the beach. I’d been thinking about that swim for a long time. When I got to the peerless blue-green ocean I found that the hotel had roped off a small section of water and we were allowed to paddle there, or stand there with cocktail in hand, but not allowed to swim out into the ocean itself. I don’t know if the problem was the boats, or rips, or pollution. I stood with the warm water lapping my knees, surrounded by the crowds, watching people taking selfies and remembered a scene from the book, or perhaps the film, of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in which humans live in a zoo.