Animal Envy

by Ralph Nader

  The open mike reverberated with concurrence, though the Owl wondered what kind of role models the sloth and the tortoise would be in carrying their message to humans, who are always striving to be what they are not or at least are dissatisfied if they are unable to advance their state in life, except perhaps for self-controlled Buddhists.

  A giant domesticated gorilla in a reserve took the mike. “I am a gorilla, pretty close to the chief primate, the humans, but in a world of difference. Man, do they think they’re better than gorillas, except when we are on top of a skyscraper holding a tiny damsel in danger. You see, fellow animals, good subhumans, you only get to the human psyche by massaging its ego, by praising what they should be doing because only they—the humans—can do it among all the animal kingdom. That was our starting point in this TALKOUT and we shouldn’t stray from it.

  “Show them how much is in their hands, such as ending shark fin soup and saving fifty million sharks a year, without changing the taste of the soup, even. Highlight their best practices, the story of Loro Piana securing eighty-five thousand hectares (two hundred thousand acres) in Argentina for the sustainable development and shearing of the vicuna. As humans say, ‘Doing well is doing good.’

  “Humor them. They mythologize and joke about us. They ask, ‘Where does an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sleep? Answer: Anywhere it wants.’ That is obviously a recurrent lie, but we do somersaults laughing whenever we hear them say this in front of us. Then they giggle like crazy.

  “Take it from us gorillas. We know them well, what’s left of us that is!”

  The camel took the stage. “I, the camel, can do no better than to quote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

  I fear that the animals see man as a being like them who in a most dangerous manner has lost his animal common sense—as the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.

  “And here’s another by Homer, c. 750 BC: ‘Of all the creatures that breathe and creep on the surface of the earth, none is more to be pitied than man.’

  “Why these pearls of wisdom?” summed up the camel. “Because we should take humans as they are, stop idealizing them, and give them high praise whenever they favor us regardless of their motivations, selfishness or idealism. But with the new software, we have to do this constantly and intelligently because of their short attention span and how quickly they wallow in despair.”

  “Appeal to them through their children,” said the duck, not waiting for an introduction. “The earlier parent and children subhumans’ segment garnered some of our highest ratings. Still, it should have had more about ducks.

  “Look at us, the ducks, followed by a string of little ducklings. Photos are taken by humans everywhere. Traffic stops to let us pass by. It’s not because of the adult ducks. It is because of the kids.

  “Now I know there are exceptions—look at what the meat companies and eaters do to the poor little lambs—but generally speaking I am right. Innocent, vulnerable children of all species speak to posterity, procreation, continuity, legacy, purpose, pride, and security in old age. Humans project these feelings onto their own progeny. Children give a larger, longer frame of reference, the opposite of shortsighted immediate gratification. Speak to them of their offspring and you’ll touch their better selves. Children nourish ecological wisdom,” the duck quacked.

  As the duck waddled off, a bulldog came forward. Though humans saw him as a melancholy beast, such canines were often happy-go-lucky. He counseled, “We need to remember that there are many humans that have already come to understand us or, at least, treat us as deserving of respect. I’m saying this because I just read an old story from the New York Times.

  “In June brood II cicadas were erupting from the ground after seventeen years of nestling beneath the earth. They come to mate and die by the billions in the eastern United States.They mate on leaves, bark, porches, and banisters noisily. They come and expire in less than three weeks, having laid their eggs that are heading down underground for the next seventeen years. It seems that

  Joe Vega, a retired New York City police officer who lives in Cornwall, New York, found the swarm so bad he had to wear goggles to chop wood in his drive; he also had to drive with the windows tightly shut. Eventually, unwilling to simply wait out the bugs’ short life cycle, he contacted an exterminator.

  But when he called First Rate Solutions Inc., a local pest-control company, he discovered that its owner, Samuel Soto, categorically refused to kill cicadas.

  “I’m very sympathetic to their plight,” said Mr. Soto, who went so far as to take out a $250 advertisement in the local paper explaining that cicadas are harmless. “I’m not going to spray them, because they’re going to be gone in two weeks. Let them enjoy life for two weeks.

  “I could have made some money,” he added, “but it’s not the right thing to do.”

  “Absolutely amazing,” whispered a worm who was listening. “Sure it helps that the cicadas are harmless to humans, do not bite or sting as they fly around, but for Mr. Soto to treat an insect with the compassion normally reserved for a household pet or mega fauna is deeply touching.”

  The TRIAD thought that Mr. Mooallem’s book had generated enough discussion without overdoing it. But listening to the sloth, the tortoise, the giant gorilla, the camel, the duck, and the bulldog gave them an idea—THE POWER OF STORIES. Why not return to the air with more stories of the lives and loves of the animal kingdom? Isn’t that exactly how children relate to animals in reality and in fiction?

  For dog’s sake, the advertising giants in the U.S. know this, for they are using dogs to speak in human stories to promote their dog food. For example, Merrick, the pet food maker, “promotes [buying] American ingredients . . . [in] a 2012 online video, ‘Tails From the Revolution,’ in which a talking dog wearing a beret sits in front of an American Flag.

  “‘The new goal of the bowl is that it should runneth over with real, wholesome food,’ says the dog, adding that it should be ‘locally sourced.’” (Meaning, mainly, the food should not be imported to them from China.)

  The TRIAD put out the call for the most intriguing animal interest stories to be selected for a specially promoted program. “That sure will test our hunch,” a spider, about to nab a fly in its web, responded.

  Story Time

  It’s true humans’ likes are predictable but looking over audience surveys the TRIAD had to say that one of the top four viewing favorites was a surprise to them. These favorites were violence, disasters, sex, and . . . protests. Humans liked to watch protests, as long as they were not against something they treasured, so that was the place to begin.

  “Bull-etin,” said the big bull, the first up for the day’s stories, “we bulls have been leading protests for years against this offensive sport and they are starting to pay off. As the New York Times reports, ‘Bullfighting may be experiencing an irreversible decline. One reason: the financial crisis that has led municipalities to cut back on their funding of festivals featuring bullfights and the running of bulls. Unthinkably, breeders are sending their bulls to butchers rather than to the rink. Higher sales taxes and much higher unemployment have led to a 40 percent drop in major bullfighting arenas between 2007 and 2012. Strengthening animal rights groups and the ban on the bloody sport in the autonomous region of Catalonia are depressing the number of events as well.’

  “Olé, olé,” bellowed the bull—one of the survivors.

  The next protest presented had great novelty interest, and because of that the TRIAD decided to run it although it was taking up a topic that they had wanted to avoid, due to its sensitivity—humans’ mistreatment of animals slated for the dinner plate. The unusualness of the item was that it showed barnyard cooperation. The subject was the abuse of farm pigs, but it was not a pig but a rooster that was leading the charge. In order to further the protest of conditions, a rooster had snuck into one of these dusty factory farms in Arkansas.

  What he showed at first had no
narration, only a few words flowing across the screen identifying what was familiar but not graphically so to millions of people. The rooster’s camera simply zeroed in closely on the suffocating cages where the pigs could not even turn around. The telescopic lens zoomed in close to picture the eyes of the animals and their desperate attempts to find the tiniest of comforts or relief from their mashed-together existence. At feeding time, the camera once again showed the faces of the pig and of the chicken locked as they are in two-foot-wide cages.

  These are the same pigs that human researchers are finding to be highly intelligent, social animals with a genetic makeup suitable for deriving biological parts to replace damaged or lost human organs. The special advanced lens was able also to magnify the vermin on the skin of these animals. The words across the screen said that these are the animals on their way to your dinner plate, sufficiently drugged with antibiotics and cleaned of their feces, at least visibly, to make you pick their severed parts up at your nearby supermarket hundreds or thousands of miles away. (The pastured pigs, forest-fed at Joel Salatin’s “Hog Heaven” commercial farm in Swaope, Virginia, looked on in horror.)

  Then, suddenly, the silence was broken as images gave way to brief statements by spokes-animals. The chicken called out to viewers: “I am chirping for billions of chickens and turkeys asking you to stop the indiscriminate slaughter. You are poisoning yourselves by filling us full of antibiotics which are then absorbed by their eaters.”

  The pig: “Every meal we get in our cages is loaded with drugs that are passed on to and into the humans.”

  The cow mooed: “Listen to Peter Singer of Princeton University. He has gone so far, sometimes enraging his humans, as to say that a dog or a cat, being a sentient creature, is to be valued more than an infant born in a vegetative state. So we are not alone. He has a growing and loud following among the animal welfare movement who would, if they could, ban all meat eating as more humane for us and healthier to humans.”

  The turkey: “Right on, cow. And let’s opt for a vegetarian Thanksgiving Day. Many humans are getting behind that belief and our side has the energy, if not the numbers yet.”

  The goat took up the cudgels: “Humans, this means we have accepted the full logic of what we are asking for, knowing that if meat eating declined there would be vastly fewer of us and the few left would be pets.”

  “Oh, my,” said the lamb, “I’m one animal who can deal with those consequences ’cause if I was alive, I’d last longer and become a sheep. But being tender is my fate.”

  The next day, the global sales of fruits and vegetable rose significantly. The managers at KFC and McDonald’s were furious, having passed anti-disparagement laws preventing humans from taking pictures of these industrial farms. Luckily those laws left out roosters with cameras!

  That piece had been effective but a bit heavy, so now the TRIAD put on a more lighthearted story, the all-singing, all-dancing lyrebird. The camera went to the Australian subcontinent where the male lyrebirds sing and dance as a mating ritual. The male lyrebirds fan out their large tails in a spectacular array during which they sing four separate songs with four special dances to woo the females during the six weeks in the winter when the birds breed. These males are focused; they sing and they dance almost nonstop in this period. The more coordinated is their prancing and their vocalizing, the more irresistible the female lyrebirds find them.

  The narration was conducted by a wide-eyed dingo. Ratings shot up—the graceful dance spoke for itself. It didn’t hurt that humans have a known voyeuristic tendency, and love watching love-making of any species, down to grasshoppers and beetles.

  Next up, a story of two parent mice working together to raise their children. This story had a scientific underpinning.

  “Knowing more about us means learning more about you,” squeaked an unidentified rodent, who had introduced the segment. He went on, “An experiment with male rodent brains indicated that they are wired to nurture once they father offspring. They become smarter and more courageous and levelheaded, according to neuroscientist Kelly Lambert’s methodical examination of deer mice—just like she found with female deer mice.” Turns out this message was brought to you by a deer mouse from California whose brethren have given their lives for such a finding.

  The TRIAD’s ratings manager—an adult jaguar from the Caura River jungle of Venezuela—noticed an anomaly, a huge plunge in viewers in the Washington, D.C., area. It seems that Rusty the red panda escaped from the National Zoo. Top topic on Twitter. Rusty was finally caught with the help of a Twitter picture. The jaguar advised the TRIAD that human audiences are fickle and require ever more sensational or emotional stories.

  Well, the TRIAD thought, the fifth favorite topic for humans, at least in the developed world, is exercise. Let’s go with that.

  A flamingo explained that animals assisting humans got a lift from Michelle Obama, the First Lady, who urged people to exercise with their dogs. On a Google chat, she advised, “Get them out there and throw that ball and get them running.”

  “No doubt,” said the narrating flamingo, “Michelle speaks for all dogs, all right!”

  Six monk seals quickly emailed Michelle Obama declaring that they can exercise like the dickens anytime with overweight humans who love to tour the Hawaiian Islands. The seals wanted to be useful to humans as a way to find protection from local fishermen, “who saw them threatening their livelihood.”

  Back at the White House’s East Wing, the e-mail caused political consternation. “This could start a domino effect with all kinds of animals wanting to exercise with humans to receive some form of protection. Imagine squirrels tree climbing and romping with humans in millions of residential areas. Michelle, put your lawyer’s acumen to work. This problem cannot be droned away.”

  Michelle was cool and replied: “Just tell them we cannot interfere with livelihoods; my husband is big on jobs and, besides, how many votes do monk seals have anyway.” With broken hearts, the monk seals returned to their inflicted slaughter. Rating for Michele fell by 15 percent in the next 36 hours. “People will forget,” soothed her lady-in-waiting, “don’t worry.”

  Nonetheless, interest in this topic was kept alive for the moment by press notices, just appearing, of the death of the first professional dog walker. He was Jim Buck, age eighty-one, who walked in New York City. Because Jim Buck started his business, said one mutt who was reading the paper, he made it possible for millions of domesticated dogs to get out and walk, exercise, sniff, meet, and yap at other dogs, getting to be a little free, even with leashes, from their imprisonment while their masters were away at work or play. Buck started the idea in the early 1960s by himself, and soon people imitated him all over the well-to-do world.

  Slews of studies, said the spaniel to some dogs sitting around him, show that if owners walk their dogs, they’ll get their own daily exercise and live longer. The spaniel sent out a call for all the well-bred dogs of the world to give Jim Buck a twenty-onebark salute at the same designated time. Certainly, millions of curs in poor areas of the world could care less. They felt lucky to scratch out a meal from garbage scraps and they had to walk, run, jump, and hide from their tormentors.

  By the way, the death of dog walker Buck was not the only one that saddened the animal world at this time. The New York Times reported the passing of Donal O’Brien (1934–2013), a corporate lawyer by weekday and a champion of large-scale conservation of the bird world. The chief executive of the National Audubon Society, David Yarnold, said, “Donal was always urging Audubon to think the way birds see the world . . . He was passionate to the bone about birds.”

  In his obituary, the New York Times wrote: “He drove the [Audubon Society’s] efforts to identify thousands of ‘important bird areas’ around the globe, and to give people a global sense of the environment by highlighting the four flyways that take many species between the Southern Hemisphere and the North.”

  “He protected us in every way,” chirped a cardinal who was
watching this feature program.

  A wren said, “No bird was too small for his compassionate attention either singly or in our flocks, and he cared about the security of our long trips north and south.”

  “He did think like a bird; national and state boundaries did not matter,” the cardinal added.

  As these sad stories were being watched by different species, the TRIAD was strategizing. Seeing as animal cooperation had helped put over the story of factory farms, where the rooster had worked as an inside spy to help his fellow barnyard dwellers, it was thought another story, this one from a report in the New York Times, would go over well.

  A wholly unexpected coexistence had been discovered deep in the lowland rainforest of French Guiana. It is now known that a colorful beetle species, belonging to the Pseudomorphini Tribe, befriends and lives among ants. It’s a big beetle too. Having seen how ferocious ants can be in the Amazonian jungles, this is a discovery that did not go unnoticed among warring religious sects in human lands.

  In fact, one fight broke out in a sports bar showing the TRIAD series, and both fighters pulled knives out in their death-like grips. They dropped their weapons when other customers shouted at them to look at how lowly insects live amiably side by side.

  Still, even given some striking results, the TRIAD felt that a broader message of the need for cooperation to replace war and competition was not ripe for humans to absorb. Not yet, at least. It would be better at this point to do some summarizing and also to keep praising the humans who have helped animals.

  The TRIAD brought on the giant condor. She was a magnificent bird, a large female with a white downy collar, black-and-white plumage, and red eyes with jet-black pupils set in a featherless head.

  Overview and Underview

  “Oh humans,” cried the condor. “We condors owe our survival to your foresight and action that saved us from extinction. We therefore owe you our utmost candor, a condor’s candor. We need you and apparently you need us. That by now should be clear. But that realization cannot be elaborated enough at various levels. For both of us have to reach ever deeper levels of understanding.