Animal Envy

by Ralph Nader

  “How wrong you are to think that. Geese mate for life. You don’t think we miss each other?”

  Now a mallard came on the screen. “I, a mallard in Mexico, want to tell all of you that the damage from planes striking birds is far greater in a poorer country, where the airports are without up-to-date technology and far too close to natural surroundings.

  “And not only should we be talking about airports but also about what can be done to get the planes out of collision routes with birds. We birds are flying for survival, not for business or for killing in wars, for entertainment or to visit casinos.

  “Moreover, humans, our flyways can’t possibly keep up with your route and schedule changes, even were the eagles and hawks around all the time to give us warning. You fly too fast, don’t you know, and you are metallic striking against our feathered flesh. That’s no contest. Think about the broader morality here,” concluded the mallard.

  A million human pilots understood from their gut what the birds were saying and were not at all amazed at their intensity. Pilots never forget the sickening feeling of mass ingestion of birds and the immediate engine malfunctions.

  Lighter Fare

  The mongoose stopped sending up emergency bulletins and the TRIAD breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, there was a respite from the emergencies and the doom and gloom. Even the rather melancholy Owl had had enough. The three quickly programmed some less serious segments for this variety segment, first a story about an animal with a big role in the community and then some encouraging stories of human heroes who were helping the animal world.

  “Thanks, Mother Nature,” the Owl said. “Some lighter notes are being struck.”

  On to the screen came Stubbs, the honorary mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, a small village of some nine hundred people. Adopted as a stray kitten by the owner of a general store sixteen years ago, the deference given the cat became part of the local folklore.

  The cat spoke right up: “My name is Mayor Stubbs. That simple honor given me has, in turn, given my village national publicity. It led to other quirky actions by our village, such as our Moose Dropping Festival and Wilderness Woman Contest. All lots of fun, lots of participation, some economic benefit from tourists, and more publicity. You humans can think up all kinds of variations, including and beyond the feline imagination. But you rarely do this, to your loss.

  “Look,” purred Mayor Stubbs, decked out in a brightly colored sleeveless jacket, “let’s say you want to raise money for a good community cause. Can you beat an election for mayor with a half dozen animal candidates—say a cow, goat, dog, cat, vole, and a parakeet—vying for votes that cost the voter one or two or five dollars to make it count? Easy fundraiser, lots of laughs, brings the community together and gets publicity.

  “Suppose you gave your honorary mayor some of the duties that I have, lying lazily around Nagley’s General Store, for example. Train the past winners to pick the winner in a raffle or preside over the opening of any expected acrimonious public meetings to lower the tension. No end to ideas when you start working on your animal imagination.”

  Stubbs paused for effect and resumed after a sip of milk: “Here is a specific morsel for you to chew on. In Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, population one hundred, they elect animals as part of a fundraiser, charging a dollar a vote with the proceeds going to repair some historic buildings. This tiny hamlet raised twenty- two thousand dollars in its last election.

  “Why, in 2011, a dairy cow named April defeated four dogs, a rabbit, and a cat in Eastsound, Washington, to raise money for a local learning center.” Stubbs summed up: “I think this fundraising idea is the cat’s meow. It’s better than a lottery, at least the money stays right in town and there are no rakeoffs and administrative expenses. There couldn’t be. Too many local eyes watching.”

  Feeling good about herself, Stubbs pounced off the stage to be rewarded with bits of Alaskan salmon.

  Humans Have a Good Side

  Now came stories about humans saving animals in dire circumstances or in other ways aiding them.

  On the screen appeared a startling picture of a flaming house. This was a reenactment of a real event. The owner escaped but rushed back in to pull his schnauzer from certain death and bring him out just before the house collapsed.

  Another video feed showed a raging wildfire consuming a neighborhood of homes near the Oakland hills. A woman escaping her burning house saw her cat perched in a tree that was beginning to burn. She clambered up the tree to save her cat and, as she was coming down, she fell, striking her head fatally as her cat scampered to safety.

  Then came a video of a seventeen-year-old going in the middle of the night to a illegal dogfighting club where the abused canines were caged in filthy conditions inside a barbed wire fence. The young man cut through the wires, ran about four hundred yards, and then let loose with dog sounds that aroused the dogs, who quickly realized they could escape along a path where he placed good-smelling dog food. By the time the guards woke up, they had no more dogs to abuse.

  Next on the slate was the story of a marine scientist who is mobilizing his peers to push politicians to create a large marine sanctuary off the Hawaiian Islands. What is desired is a place that is half the size of the United States, off limits to any and all fishing and other disturbing activity to marine life.

  When the dolphins, sharks, salmon, halibut, pollock, whales, sea lions, seals, and walruses who were watching found out about this, they were overjoyed. At last they would have an area of the ocean where they could escape the slaughter. The only problems that humans would cause them there would be from drifting pollution and shipping. It would be a sanctuary for the ages for the marine animal world.

  Watching these stories being shown and narrated stunned the animals. They never knew. How could they? It was before the Human Genius came up with the software app. Only the insects were sour, knowing that it is a rare human who would risk his or her life to save a beetle or mosquito, not to mention a despised flea or moth.

  “Even though they sacrifice enough of us to learn how to save themselves from any number of illnesses or dangers,” cried the silverfish.

  A significant story came on about humans helping birds. It talked about a mission already accomplished. It concerned the Caura tropical forest in southern Venezuela.

  The Caura is a relatively pristine area of several thousand square kilometers inhabited by some 3,500 indigenous peoples, members mostly of the Y’ekwana tribe. Until recent years, the tribe sustained itself off the land and from the pure waters replete with luscious fish. An ecologist from the United States did his doctorate research there and, in that process, came across the most wondrous birds he had ever seen. Indeed, few naturalists had ever seen them.

  He decided to photograph them, calling them by their native names, and encouraging the natives to preserve their survival, just as gold prospectors and other miners and merchants started moving into the area. To raise money to help with this preservation, he produced color pictures of the birds on high-quality note cards and postcards for sale. He also compiled recordings of the bird songs, which were sold to support this project. As part of this effort, funds were gathered to supply teaching materials for the natives’ schools.

  Two of the birds were invited on the screen for their response.

  “I, the long beaked jajahia,” said one, “wish to thank humans for learning about us so as to protect us from the one predator we cannot adjust to, the marauding human. We hope the pictures will convey the beauty of our plumage and our graceful shapes so as to secure a place in the hearts and minds of humans, especially bird lovers.”

  “I, the long-tailed onawani,” said the other avian, “want to introduce some of us who coexist so peacefully, sometimes playfully, in the deep jungle forest.

  "There is the stately hocahocama’awai, the curved neck mano, the parrot-like kudimawani, the owlish-looking kokamaa, the cozy julia kulimawai, the cautious saamacosawani, the rust-red salisalimosoi, and the innocent-lo
oking kuadekuodemawani. The Caura is a bird-watchers’ paradise because just about every sighting registers as a new entry into the watchers’ handbooks.

  “We are songbirds,” the onawani continued. “Humans have found no uses for us other than to watch us, hear us, and, we have to recognize, take us as pets. Please know that we do not do well in captivity, your own specialists say, tapping into their knowledge of songbirds in the Amazon. So, if knowing us leads to awareness, we can continue to provide for ourselves, lay our eggs safely, raise our little ones, and give you the beauty of sound, including recordings for you.”

  With that the birds flew away while the human audience was voicing their awe and wonder as one picture after another of the rare birds came on the screen. The TRIAD was so pleased that they awarded their bird discovery scout the Order of the Fine Feather right on the stage.

  This was the latest innovation, one, by the way, thought up by a peacock, who had observed the positive audience response when the INSECT TRIAD had received an award. The peacock’s idea was to start giving awards to outstanding humans, chosen by beneficially affected animal species, to acknowledge that they had many friends in the human world who were not getting much acknowledgment from their own peers, but were well respected by subhumans.

  They now began another award presentation, this time to a writer who was raising awareness of animal capabilities. This human had emerged from the prestigious New York Times where columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote a brilliant piece titled “Are Chicks Brighter than Babies?”

  Oh, how happy, deliriously happy our billions of chicken friends are going to be, writes Kristof, when they learn that humans are finally discovering that “poultry are smarter and more sophisticated than we give them credit for.” Humans have been hoodwinked for years about poultry, using derogatory words like “birdbrains” for them, simply because they do not understand chicken language and its nuances.

  Here is Kristof writing: “For starters, hens can count—at least to six. They can be taught that food is in the sixth hole from the left and they will go straight to it. Even chicks can do basic arithmetic, so that if you shuffle five items in a shell game, they mentally keep track of additions and subtractions and choose the area with the higher number of items. In a number of such tests, chicks do better than toddlers.”

  As Kristof’s words filter down to chickendom, the joy is building up fast. He was expressing what they had known but couldn’t communicate to humans; not that it would make much difference to their executioners, but it might have made their life less packed and racked on top of each other in their filthy pens if the idea that they were quite intelligent was more widely recognized.

  One chicken on the Delmarva Peninsula in the U.S. jumped on top of a dung pile and chirped: “Glory be, we may have a savior from the worst of our daily misery.”

  Another chicken from Arkansas, a reddish-brown matronly looking hen, looked up from her regular egg-laying to say: “Wait, there is more from Kristof. He’s saying we know how to ‘delay gratification if the reward is right.’ A little theoretical, but nice to hear so we can imagine some brighter future for our chicks or their chicks or their chicks.”

  “We can also use different calls to warn about ground predators and birds of prey, and we prefer chickens we know to those we don’t, according to the latest research,” said a pompous rooster in Wisconsin. He added wryly, “Where did they get that obvious brilliant discovery?”

  Millions of chickens cackled uproariously at humans finally discovering how they lived and survived. “If this is poultry science, they have a long way to go to understand us chickens. Think what we know about them that is yet to be discovered,” clucked a pullet in a Connecticut barn, laughingly. He concluded, “Kristof has discovered that we ‘multi-task’ with our right eye looking out for food, while our left eye watches for predators and potential mates.”

  “I’d call that triple-tasking,” needled a free-range chicken outside Burlington, Vermont.

  The chicken world, always liking a nuanced joke, jumped up, flapping their wings in wild hilarity. Chicken caretakers jolted from their stupor, wondered what was going on.

  “Nothing,” said one chicken-raiser at a giant poultry farm, “they’re too dumb to be thinking anything, Bubba. Go back and snooze.”

  Happy as the chickens were, the geese were even more elated, for Kristof singled them out for special praise. He liked their faithfulness as mates and how they would endanger themselves to protest when their mate was taken away for slaughter. In his enthusiasm, he even avowed how a goose he saw on his family farm in Oregon carried corn kernels back to “his wife,” mothering her in the nest.

  He added that he never met a philandering goose, a recognition that led to geese honking triumphantly over North America, fully knowing that such virtue may reduce geese fighting but does little to save any goose spouse from human “harvesting or hunting.”

  Not only did Kristof get a lovely award but to the world’s birds, October 20, 2013, was known forever as Nicholas D. Kristof Day, no matter that he admitted “hypocrisy,” writing he’s a chicken eater, but from now on he would no longer lift a fried wing or a braised breast from a wretched chicken “factory farm.” The next segment of this in-praise-of-humans series concerned environmentalists, who were rallying around the watermen of Chesapeake Bay, the ones who, in their white work boats, were scraping together a living by oystering and crabbing. It is a wonder there are any left. The heavily polluted and harvested bay has been struggling to come back from becoming a “dead zone” for some years now, helped along by efforts by environmental groups and lawmakers.

  Still the oyster population, according to the Washington Post, isn’t even 1 percent of its “historic numbers . . . Baiting crab pots and tonging oysters,” isn’t anything like it used to be in the fertile days of the more pristine bay. But there are some 5,200 licensed watermen, eighty of whom are certified to lead land-lubbing tourists to see just how the meals they have when they sit down inside the Inn at Pirates Cove got from the bay to their plates.

  The crabs and oysters who were watching found the story puzzling. Even though they know most of their fellows would not exist without being “seeded” by the state or the watermen and waterwomen or without oyster sanctuaries being demarked, they couldn’t understand why the boaters, with their crab cages and oyster tongs, would go to all that trouble for a meager living when they could join other humans at desks and make much more money than these fisher folks did. Sure, they knew how delicious they tasted to the humans who savor them, and how these humans were sometimes the discoverers of a hidden pearl, but for ocean’s sake couldn’t they find different foods, and so spare the bay inhabitants?

  One crab, scuttling out of its cage, called for mercy, but to no avail. An oyster, still in the deep, responded: “Don’t waste your time griping. These watermen and -women love what they’re doing, even if they stay poor. We’re their adventure.”

  Whereupon another crab, yet to be crabbed, added: “So long as they continue to breed us crustaceans, they’ll assure our posterity as long as we taste good and are real meaty.”

  A baby crab nearby muttered, “I just wish they’d leave us alone.”

  There was less of a love/hate relationship between the animals and humans in the next segment, which focused on the world of acrobatic horses/ponies and their young riders, caretakers, and close pals.

  Pippi and and her human, Emy, are the same age: fourteen. Emy has been riding since she was two years old. She and her horse are inseparable. Pippi came on screen and said: “You want to know how close we trained horses can get to humans? Go watch the horse shows. Come into the stalls. Watch how our riders bathe and groom us, hug us, and are completely absorbed by us.”

  Phunny, a very fast jumping pony, wanted in on the conversation: “I’m a steeplechase race pony. My rider and caretaker, Colin, is only ten years old, a fifth grader, but you wouldn’t want a better partner. He trains with me almost every day up and do
wn the hills. When we horses get that close to humans, they know how intelligent we are. To all humans, I say: ‘The more you enjoy life by being with us, by doing things together with us that are fun or useful, the better you’ll care for us, and the closer our and your intelligence will come to mutual understanding.’ OK, I got to go for another run with Colin.”

  The human audience needed no prompting to relish this horse/pony show. Humans almost innately love horses. It’s been said that police on horses breaking up unruly crowds and riots have never had anybody deliberately harm their horses.

  Up comes Uriel and Nezma. Uriel is a seventeen-year-old acrobat. “Nezma is a really smart guy. He’s super curious, and he’s awfully nice,” Uriel told the Washington Post. As Nezma knows, he’s more than that.

  “Watch me,” said Nezma, “with Uriel performing highspeed backward and sideways vaults. Can you do this?” Nezma teased the bewitched human watchers.

  Uriel and Nezma were in the Washington, D.C., area to perform in Odysseo, a horse show staged by a Canadian company. After showing his stuff, Uriel looked straight at his vast human audience and remarked: “I’ve been an acrobat all my life. Working with horses has opened me up to a whole different world. I love the friendship. That’s my favorite part.”

  “Wow, not the glory and the fame,” whispered the Elephant to the Owl, “but ‘the friendship.’”

  All over the world, horses leapt up and whinnied with pride and excitement. It didn’t matter that they were wild horses, about to be rounded up for slaughter, or tired, bruised workhorses trudging with their peasant owners, as they continued ancient farming ways for meager existences, or sleek racehorses pampered beyond belief in the Kentucky horse farms, or ponies as beasts of burden carrying their masters and being whipped a little here and there to increase their gait; the pride of this venerable species knew no bounds.

  Ratings rose sharply. The TRIAD sensed that they were getting better at what they’d been doing, going beyond what humans have called talking heads to action stories with background shots of what’s going on that is described by the animals on the screen along with their human friends.