by Ralph Nader
“Then came our miracle maker, a doctoral student named Wallace J. Nichols, who wanted to study us. And did he ever! The short version of the story is that he earned the trust and respect of local people so that they began to increasingly protect us gentle, one-hundred-fifty-pound creatures from certain extinction. This grassroots network is active in fifty coastal communities. Tourists are visiting to witness the comeback of our turtles. We now have some fifteen thousand nests on the beaches of southern Mexico while the locals derived a sense of pride from saving us for their grandchildren to inherit.”
The turtle signed off with the message: “You see it can be done. We thank those farseeing humans among you.”
Another success story came to the (underwater) stage. Enter the giant blue whale to thank twentieth-century humans for a sea change in public perceptions, attitudes, and policies toward whales. Whaledom was throbbing with excitement over the new book The Sounding of the Whale by a Princeton professor of history and science, Dr. Graham Burnett, which examined the no-limit slaughter of the whales by the whalers, shielded in their business by public images of whales as demons with evil eyes, and then looked at the rising influence of international regulation based on just-in-time science to save these largest mammals in the world.
“The struggle is not over,” the whale told the listeners. “Some nations are resistant, increasing shipping traffic is killing whales in collisions, and habitats are dwindling though marine reserves are expanding. But the blue whale should know: its impending extinction has been reversed, benefiting from a more aesthetic, beautiful, and intelligent understanding of the many whale species by humans.
The blue whale’s dignified presentation, given directly from the ocean, connected with the expanding human wonder and public adulation as more people discovered about the lives of the whales. Millions of children were enthralled, which bodes well for future human conservation efforts.
The Owl thought the blue whale’s gratitude would make a good transition to another topic, the dramatic change in public attitudes toward chimpanzees, something to which Dr. Jane Goodall’s fifty years of research with them mightily contributed. Experimentation in chimpanzee labs is grinding to a halt on what Dr. Goodall calls complex animals with intricate social lives. They are heading for sanctuaries. Research on chimps, even if it benefits humans, will soon only be justified by how it benefits the chimps.
What the chimpanzee, called Elaine by humans, had to address was the disappointed scientists who work with these primates to discover or refine vaccines or treatments for human diseases. An onerous permit process could delay drug tests in chimps, for hepatitis C, for example, and thus slow down the saving of many human lives. Elaine said she thought chimpanzees were smart enough to understand that they and humans both benefit from some drug trials, and that they would support the scientists in accelerating any permit process.
A vindicated Jane Goodall could only smile watching Elaine dispel the myths that came from movies such as Ronald Reagan’s Bedtime for Bonzo, in which chimps were presented as nothing but cute foils for humans. She loved the new movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where the superior apes are played by human actors and come out as the heroes.
The Owl hadn’t forgotten the fact that the Dolphin as one of the TRIAD, had used his authority to jump into the lineup without asking permission. So, the Owl thought it wouldn’t be too unprecedented if he made a few humorous remarks about his own species when he saw the cat, who was up next, sitting back licking his fur and preening.
“Did you know,” he asked, “what owl pellets are? Poop? Vomit? Owl bones? Well, not quite vomit. You see owls swallow small mammals whole, but they don’t have enough stomach acid, like the Tasmanian devil has, to digest fur and bones. So an owl has evolved with two stomachs, one to separate the digestible and indigestible portions. Both items go down the gizzard, but only the digestible material moves into the owl’s intestines. The gizzard continues to compress the indigestible portion, turning it into pellets, which go back to the glandular stomach and hours later are regurgitated.”
The cat had now finished its obsessive grooming. He wanted to tell everyone that a feline was running for mayor of Xalapa in eastern Mexico with the campaign slogan, “Tired of voting for rats? Vote for a cat who knows how to catch them.” Morris, a two-year-old black-and-white kitten with orange eyes, had become a social media sensation in that country, but the rest of the world did not know about this feline candidate launched by a group of disillusioned voters.
More affirmative coverage followed.
“Did you know,” said the Elephant, “that the U.S. military bases in the U.S. spend seventy million dollars a year on protecting threatened and endangered species, such as the red-cockaded woodpecker, desert tortoises, and vulnerable shrikes, from their noisy military training maneuvers and shooting? Thanks to a 1960 law called the Sikes Act, the Marines and other branches hire dozens of biologists and natural resource managers to scan millions of acres of these military ranges. The desert tortoise has been known to stop Marines in their tracks on their shooting ranges. There are even road signs with the warnings ‘Desert Tortoise Advisory.’”
The Elephant drew the obvious conclusion. “Here you have Marines who are trained to kill other humans around the world, and they’re ordered to stop what they’re doing to let some desert tortoises find their sanctuaries. How can we in the animal kingdom not be forever grateful for such animaltarianism?”
These words coming from an Elephant, whose species is being vanquished by illegal shooters for their tusks and the insatiable Chinese market. What marvelous self-control—a virtue that did not go unnoticed by some observers in the riveted global audience.
Testing the Waters
It was time to test the waters, not yet by putting forward some of the grimmer facts, but by rehabilitating the image of a species on which humans had fastened a host of irrational fears. The Elephant decided to take this communion between the human and the subhuman to a most dangerous televised cliff—that between them and what they saw as the most repulsive species—reptilian snakes.
What prompted her was a new photographic book that has just been published called Serpentine, with what one reviewer, Dana Jennings, called a hundred “hypnotic portraits of dangerous and colorful snakes from across six continents.” The Elephant repeated the reviewer’s words, which continued: “The images shock us out of our modern human complacency and arrogance, remind us that all of us, human and nonhuman, are just trying to get by on this lonely planet.”
Then the Elephant started putting the snakes onto the screen to be seen by the bulging eyes of many millions of viewers. One by one they slithered, twisted, and leaped past: the deadly mambas and spitting cobras, the boas and rattlers, the royal pythons and the palm pit vipers, the rough-scaled death adder, the blackheaded bushmaster and the blue Malaysian coral snake.
The Elephant quoted author Mark Laita as being unable to “take [his] eyes off them, from the spade-shaped wedge of head to the tapered tail, and all that sinuous muscle in between . . . Their beauty heightens the danger. The danger amplifies their beauty.” For once a reviewer was talking about exactly what many of the distant mesmerized audience was feeling.
Humans Complain About Animals,
and Animals Complain About Humans
As these snakes were getting a lot of positive feedback, the trio thought it was time to try the second part of their strategy, allaying human fears. This, they thought, could be done by educating humans about why certain very annoying events were taking place. They would begin with what humans called the epidemic of invasive species, and closely monitor audience reaction.
Of course some parts of this controversy, as humans presented it, were a bit obscure to animals, as they obviously did not recognize national borders to the freedom to roam. They do know about natural equilibrium and that species outside their normal habitat can bring disruption and disaster as they struggle to adapt and survive, and, often without
their natural predators, proliferate like mad.
The words “invasive species,” however, turned them off. Invaders are deliberate. There was nothing deliberate in pet Indonesian pythons being let loose from their owners into the Everglades and turning into the giant monsters of those waters, eating into extinction or near-extinction many mammals, fish, and birds. The big snakes didn’t ask for this new home. Bird-eating snakes hitchhiking to Hawaii in aircraft landing gear were not intentionally looking for a tropical paradise in which to raise their families. Asian carp were taken from their homelands and now fill the Mississippi River nearly up to Lake Michigan with their aggressive dominance. The European zebra mussels, found in the ballast water of ships coming to America, did not plan for such a journey, but did they ever adapt. Poisonous foreign toads and feral camels came to Australia through the activities of humans. African bees, treekilling beetles, mosquitoes, and fire ants came along for the ride to America involuntarily.
The TRIAD called the subject not invasive, but said forced emigration/immigration of subhuman species was brought about by humans. Subhumans had learned that there are biologists, “mix-o-ecologists,” searching for answers, for ways to slow down the human transfer of “alien species,” but on the ground and in the waters, little is being done. If this is the coming “homogenization of the planet,” what happens to the price paid by biological diversity bred of millennia of steady equilibrium?
Working on their own, representatives of the forced emigrant species came to the conclusion that the best way to supplement their discussion of why they were ending up in countries they had no intention of visiting was to use a visual aid. They paraded before a startled human audience with the same message: “We didn’t ask to go. We’re just trying to survive, but we are being demonized through no fault of our own and hunted down. What do you expect us to do? Ask for humans to round us up and deport us to our native habitat, which we would disrupt as well by our numbers and acquired characteristics?
“Maybe you should acquire a taste for us and give yourselves an economic incentive to catch and consume us. You wouldn’t touch Asian carp but they are desired solid food in Asia. Why can’t you eat us? A lot of us are plain old protein.”
A funny reaction ensued. Many humans seemed to be getting the message, but animal viewers were outraged when they heard recommendations that they be featured on dinner plates. “Betrayers, traitors, sellouts, saboteurs,” were the epithets thrown at these televised spokes-animals by their peers. How could they suggest such slaughter of innocents, they cried out. “You’d better not come back home,” hissed a Florida python sunning itself after devouring a stray goat. “You’d all better get yourselves to a human zoo/prison if you know what’s good for you.”
“Now I know what humans mean by Stockholm Syndrome,” bleated the poisonous toad, “and you’d better not eat me, for your own sake.”
For the time being the TRIAD ignored the complaints of their fellow animals, more intent on keeping humans willing to entertain animal viewpoints, if not adopt them. They acted to keep the responsive mood flowing by again mentioning the value animals offer humans.
Two grizzly bears, three Antarctic penguins, a nurse shark, and a lioness spoke on this point, each saying her or his bodily system was worth studying. The bears spoke about how they can eat huge amounts before hibernating, getting fat but without their blood pressure and cholesterol spiraling up. Penguins showed how much humans can learn from this bird’s fasting. While the shark really piqued human curiosity by declaring that sharks have developed something over four hundred million years of evolution that keeps cancer at bay. “We have compounds in our bodies that kill tumor cells. Wouldn’t you humans want to study that immunity, rather than slaughter us for shark fin soup?”
The female lion now took her turn, telling viewers that she had a biological capability to evaluate her health, the quality of her mate, and her environment to determine the sex of her offspring. This has been reported by Meeri Kim about a study of 2,300 animals over three generations at the famous San Diego Zoo, done by Stanford University’s evolutionary biologist Joseph P. Garner. Sex selection has been earlier confirmed in certain birds and insects, but now this finding needs further confirmation in the wilds.
Still, scientists such as Garner, even with the best interests of the animals at heart, can be intrusive and disruptive. There had been all this talk about invasive species, but none about invasive biologists. The audience, the Dolphin guessed, would now be receptive to a privacy invasion complaint.
Onto the screen came a sandhill crane, a pygmy rabbit, and a seal to enter a plea to respect their solitude from close flying drones called “Ravens.” These small drones, about double the size of the planes kids used to fly in parks, are said, the crane noted, “to give humans a cheaper, safer, and more accurate count and location of subhumans. But you humans say this is just the beginning and that the number of drones watching us will increase manifold soon.
“It is no longer tags on our bodies or legs. Everything about us will be digitized: our nesting sites, the frequency and ways of our lovemaking, our fights, our modes of resting. You will be taking the mystery entirely out of the animal kingdom and making it what you call ‘retrievable data.’ Have you, with your large brains, thought of the downsides of taking away our mystery; that is, the downsides to you humans when your curiosity, your sense of wonder and awe are reduced to ‘retrievable data’? We leave to your superior intelligences and your natural philosophers to elaborate what we are suggesting you ponder. What you know can be easily turned to destructive uses, as you have experienced in your own history.”
As if to punctuate this intriguing nudge, the screen brought out in brilliant color several gorgeously ornate octopi, those elusive, mysterious, intelligent, and delicate invertebrates. One of them said, “So complex is the biological dynamism of us octopi and so little known that marine scientists believe we can teach you a great deal about organic capabilities, as much as you have learned from owls and whales but in greater, far greater variety. But not if you scare us; if your searching disrupts our fragile underwater habitat for survival and reproduction then you won’t learn much. You must understand us concerning this caution,” said the octopi as they glided away from the screen.
The Owl sensed a need for some communal understanding. “We know that humans, especially real animal lovers, are elated when they discover a new species or genus, and how worried they are when they learn about how close to extinction a particular species is. Why, just this month, your newspapers reported a discovery of a new bat genus in the grasslands of the South Sudan while at the same time a book came out on the world’s rarest birds with photographs of five hundred fifteen species under threat of extinction, such as our white-bellied cinclodes, the long-whiskered owlet and Africa’s El Oro parakeet.
“We’re just asking that you give us some space. View us, study us, but don’t unduly disrupt our habitats or life cycles.”
So far so good. Humans who, after all, were generally not all that concerned with the rights of biologists and, indeed, often thought of scientists as out of touch didn’t see why they had to pester the poor octopi and birds.
Why not, the Dolphin thought, follow with another example of meddling by an institution, which was thought to be beneficial to the ecological system, but, in fact, was undermining the natural order, the USA’s Wildlife Services Agency? This “service” partially consisted of destroying millions of animals every year, such as starlings, after classifying them as “invasive species.” However, the killing was usually so poorly targeted that the agency’s agents ended up destroying many other species in the process, including thirteen endangered ones.
The Elephant presented a petition that called the WSA an “out-of-control rogue agency that shoots, snares, and poisons a million native animals a year,” including wolves, bears, and coyotes. Throughout their habitat, these animals became agitated, fearful, and angry. So did their kind around the world. The Elep
hant saw a crisis coming fast, especially if one of these harried animals attacked a human.
A biology professor from Georgia then showed how this thoughtless destruction of animals could boomerang against the human species. The Elephant quoted him as saying that the Wildlife Services had to be more sensitive to the role of the value of “apex predators.” He gave as an example the elimination of native wolves in the Northwest many years ago that opened the way for nonnative coyotes who then pushed out foxes that ate deer mice. This rodent population exploded loaded with ticks carrying Lyme disease—now a major health hazard.
A Dangerous Gamble
That, too, had gone over well since most viewers had no love for bureaucratic agencies and could well imagine the USA’s Wildlife Services Agency as careless and wasteful.
It was time for a new effort at rehabilitation, one even more difficult than the work they had put into giving snakes a more positive profile. It was time to try an insect. After all, the TRIAD had to admit, they hadn’t had a single insect on the screen thus far. Equity demanded they feature at least one. That’s not to say they weren’t apprehensive.
The Elephant gave the signal and two German cockroaches scurried across the screen, stopping midway to speak to a suddenly repulsed human viewership across all cultures around the world. Exclamations of disgust were everywhere, yet few clicked the off button.
In perfect unison, the cockroaches conceded that they had little credibility but they added that they also had little ambition to hide the truth. The truth is that the earth needs cockroaches. “The microbes in our stomachs make leaves in the forests digestible to many mammals.” They sputtered, “In the tropics you call us jungle pollinators. We also are morsels to lizards and birds.” They pulled a quote from a human expert, Coby Schal of North Carolina State University: “Most of the 5,000 known species of cockroaches, plus probably just as many that have not been described, have huge ecological importance.” Schal said roaches get a bad rap from the 1 percent of the cockroach species that infests our homes!
