The Bond

by Wayne Pacelle

  The U.S.-based Jorge Barreda Circus bought her, and she was shipped off in chains by boat to cross the Atlantic. After she was trained, almost certainly by forcible methods, the circus shuttled her from city to city to perform stunts before crowds that knew nothing of her sad travails. At some point, perhaps during transport to the United States or, later, in the circus, she sustained leg and foot injuries. Because the injuries were not properly attended to, they turned into a permanent disability. Babe was crippled—and no circus wants a performing elephant with a bum back leg. The circus cast her aside, and that’s when Cleveland Amory and the Fund for Animals stepped in, acquiring her and retiring her to Black Beauty Ranch on Valentine’s Day in 1996. Experts at the ranch knew that the injury might shorten her life span dramatically, but at least she’d pass that time in a loving and safe environment.

  Even with such bitter stories as the backdrop to Black Beauty Ranch, every visit leaves me feeling hopeful, knowing that, in a world filled with so much trouble and misery for animals, at least these creatures are safe. And as it turned out, that visit in summer 2008 was my last chance to see Babe. We lost her just a couple of years later. She died at the age of twenty-six, as a result of heart problems that began with her abuse as a circus animal. That is a premature death for an elephant, but at least the second half of her life was spent in the care of people who respected and loved her. And somehow this gentle creature seemed to love everybody back, despite some very bad first impressions of humanity.

  THE ANIMALS WHO FIND their way to Black Beauty have all experienced something frightening or hurtful in their lives, typically as a result of human neglect or cruelty. You can trace each animal back to a story of woe—to someone’s shabby, heartless conduct—and taken together these rescued animals are a chronicle of the threats and sorrows visited upon animals in modern society. Creatures valued for commerce one day are treated as disposable the next. They are among the world’s discards, long forgotten by the people who harmed them.

  But this sad story also has a flip side. Our human instincts can run in the opposite direction. Every animal at the ranch is there because of some act of human kindness. For as much selfishness and callousness as they knew in their former lives, here they found a deep reservoir of human charity and goodness. This is true as well of the many thousands of animal shelters and sanctuaries across America and the world. And although these havens do not alone remove the causes of abuse and neglect, every rescued creature is a kind of messenger—showing the good that comes when we open our hearts to animals.

  It would be so easy, in some ways, to “put down” such animals. It’s done all the time, and often without a second thought. There’s nothing in the law to prevent it, and strict economics do not argue for leniency. It’s costly to rescue, transport, and, most of all, to provide lifetime care for animals. Those watermelons aren’t free, and the price tag just for day-to-day operations at Black Beauty amounts to more than a million dollars a year. There is no end to the animals who need help, or to the help they need once they are rescued. From a certain perspective, all these works of charity are among the most impractical of human enterprises, and the only explanation for it is the bond of love and empathy that people feel for animals.

  After the visit with Babe, I went back to the main gate and properly greeted the manager, Richard Farinato, and the other dedicated staff of Black Beauty Ranch. I’d been coming here on and off for almost twenty years, showing people around, or being introduced to the latest residents of America’s largest and most diverse animal sanctuary. I walked a little ways from Richard’s office to see Kitty, Lulu, and Midge—the second-chance chimps inhabiting the large rectangular enclosure just inside the front gate. Before they came here, these chimps had lived in laboratories, kept in metal cages not much larger than their bodies. Kitty was used for breeding purposes, and Lulu and Midge in invasive experiments. But at Black Beauty, they now had a chance to extend their long, sinewy arms. They had the run of an expansive field house nearly three stories high, with trees, giant tires, ropes, swings for them to climb and play on, and sun and fresh air streaming in. Once they saw that a visitor was there to greet them, they meandered over, one by one, to get a closer look. Lulu walked over on all fours from the sky bridge—which connects her sleeping quarters to the main outdoor enclosure and which spans above the dirt road I used to get to Babe’s compound.

  Years ago, in this same place, I had met Nim Chimpsky—the chimp whose name was a play on the well-known linguist Noam Chomsky, perhaps the foremost theorist of human language structure. One of the most famous of the signing chimps, Nim had bounced around various research facilities, spending long stretches at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and then at Columbia University in New York, where for a number of years he was the subject of noninvasive language training under Dr. Herb Terrace. In his early life, Nim lived with people—watching television, sitting at the dinner table, and pulling snacks out of the refrigerator. He had many tutors through the years—a circumstance that undoubtedly had its emotional costs, as so many people passed in and out of his life. In spite of these challenges, he learned 125 American Sign Language (ASL) signs, and his nonhuman flirtation with human language was closely watched by academics from a variety of disciplines interested in whether the higher mammals could master one of the defining expressions of human culture. Whenever I came to Black Beauty, Nim Chimpsky typically greeted me and other visitors with a series of requests, usually for food, which always astounded me. The conclusions drawn from these language studies are, to this day, still debated––with the lead researcher, Dr. Terrace, concluding that Nim was unable to master syntax and the complex patterns of human speech.

  But I always thought that Nim did a lot better with English than we did with the chimps’ language and communication structures, and I was mightily impressed. His signing behavior provided plain evidence of meaningful thought and mental acumen, indicating that the differences in consciousness between humans and the higher mammals are ones of degree, and not of kind. In the last quarter century, scientists have decoded the genome of chimpanzees, revealing a 98 percent or so overlap with our own. When Nim threw things at a few of the people who came to see him at Black Beauty, or spit a stream of water at them with unbelievable precision from a considerable distance, and then ran around his enclosure with great glee, I wasn’t quite sure if this was the 98 percent human or the 2 percent chimp expressing himself. It was one of those situations where you’re not supposed to laugh, but you can’t help it. I always told people not to wear their Sunday best when coming to Black Beauty.

  Kitty, Lulu, and Midge are not signing chimps, and they are generally better behaved and less calculating than Nim, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2000 at the relatively young age of twenty-eight. They communicate with their eyes. Once assembled on the other side of the metal fixture that separated us, they stared back at me, their eyes darting around in the same way that our eyes do. There’s depth there, consciousness, something not far from personhood. And then there are the hands. They poked them out through the metal grating, seeking human contact in response. They possess the nimbleness of human hands, the gentle touch associated with our behavior. We talk with ours, and when they moved their hands in similar ways, it seemed so familiar.

  Richard Farinato, who was a zookeeper before joining the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and then becoming manager of Black Beauty for some years, was with me on this tour, and he did me a favor by doing some chimp playacting. Richard began to run back and forth and to make other movements to excite Midge, the one male in the group. It didn’t take much to get Midge going. He began walking on two legs, standing straight up, pumping his chest out with his hair standing on end all over his body, and making resonant hoots with his lips rounded and mouth open. He then made fast runs on all fours, including a lightning-fast scamper up a tree, before coming right back down. He picked up a giant truck tire, as if it were a normal car tire, and flipped it ef
fortlessly. He was showing off, and it worked. Unless you see it, it’s hard to comprehend the unbelievable speed and power of a chimpanzee—the males are five times as strong as a human adult, though their body weight is about the same. But the ladies, Kitty and Lulu, had seen it all before and displayed not the slightest interest in Midge’s showmanship. Then just as quickly as it started, he settled down. He was done, and clearly pleased with his performance.

  I wish these chimps didn’t have to spend their lives in an enclosure, but there’s no chance of releasing them successfully back into the wild. They’ve lived in captivity too long, their survival instincts have withered, and they are without family groups. But as captive settings go, this one is top-notch—and a dramatic upgrade from the significantly smaller enclosure that Nim and other chimps had once inhabited even at Black Beauty.

  There is a world of difference between how we care for chimps at Black Beauty and how research laboratories treat the hundreds of chimps under their charge. We’d looked into the latter problem, exposing in March 2009 the abuses of the animals at the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC), just about three hours southeast of the ranch, near Lafayette, Louisiana. There, working as a lab employee for nine months and recording images on a tiny, hidden camera, an HSUS undercover investigator documented how 325 chimps live at the facility, with many languishing in small cages for years on end. Karen, the eldest chimp at NIRC, was captured in Africa in 1958, and she’s been living in laboratories for more than half a century—since the end of the Eisenhower years. Karen and hundreds of other chimps at NIRC are used primarily for hepatitis research and are subjected to regular blood removal and invasive procedures, after being shot with a tranquilizer gun or stick. They live with constant anxiety—fearful of the people wielding guns and needles, whose presence signifies that something unpleasant or traumatic is about to happen. Several chimps, including Sterling, a twenty-two-year-old male, have gone mad as a result of their lifelong, unrelentingly boring, often solitary confinement—a situation that is particularly harsh for social animals who live in extended family groups in the wild. As a result, Sterling is a self-mutilator—or, as the technicians at NIRC say, capable of “self-injurious behavior”—severely biting himself and throwing himself against the walls of his enclosure.

  About a thousand chimps are kept in research facilities in the United States, and I am relieved that Kitty, Lulu, and Midge have been delivered from the wretched existence of a laboratory. Yes, they are confined at Black Beauty, but in an open-air enclosure. They are now a kind of family, and the humans who approach them are carrying only offerings of food and toys. I often wonder how these creatures could reconcile, if they were able to set their minds to it, the different lives they have known—the before-and-after circumstances that they’ve experienced, and the two faces of humanity they have seen.

  Animals are so intuitive, and it does not take long for any of them to realize they are in a safe place at Black Beauty—be they chimps, buffalo, or horses. But I still wish that the incoming animal residents at Black Beauty could read the sign hung from its front gate and have an added measure of assurance. It reads: “I have nothing to fear, and here my story ends. My troubles are over, and I am home.”

  THE GREAT MAN WHO gave them this home was Cleveland Amory. This author and humanitarian cofounded, with Marian Probst, the Fund for Animals. He was an animal rescuer in a category all his own, and he had dreamed for years of creating a wide-open place for homeless, abused, or neglected animals. Cleveland didn’t like it one bit when in 1979, the National Park Service announced plans to shoot burros at Grand Canyon National Park, on grounds that they were an invasive species and a threat to native vegetation. Cleveland and the Fund intervened, orchestrating a dramatic capture and airlift of the animals that many had thought impossible in the canyon, with its treacherous terrain and steep paths. He defied the skeptics and in the end, he and his hired cowboys net-gunned and then airlifted 577 burros.

  But this led to a second problem: he needed a place to put them. Fortuitously, the Fund for Animals had received a $600,000 bequest from a donor earlier that year, and Cleveland and Marian invested the money in a property in the small east Texas town of Murchison to fulfill their dream. Cleveland named the new sanctuary in honor of the horse whose story so captivated him as a child. The words that greet visitors to the ranch are drawn from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, which she wrote in the 1870s “to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.” The book turned out to have even broader appeal and became one of the best-selling children’s novels of all time and an enduring plea for kindness toward all animals.

  Cleveland Amory envisioned the Black Beauty Ranch as mainly a sanctuary for horses and burros, but he was not a man to turn away any animal in need. And when he learned of the plight of Babe and Nim and others desperate for a safe home, he opened wide the front gates at Black Beauty, like a modern-day Noah. By the time Cleveland passed away in 1998—nearly two decades after he established the ranch—this haven created for burros was home to more than a thousand animals of all sizes and species. During my visit, I checked in on the mountain lions and bobcats who were formerly kept as pets but given up once they became too difficult or dangerous. I saw a small herd of exotic deer from Africa and Asia, saved before they ended up as live targets at a Texas trophy hunting ranch. And—in keeping with Cleveland’s conviction that the ranch should always take in the downtrodden and sometimes the surprising—I was especially glad to see twenty-one prairie dogs, who faced gassing and poisoning by ranchers before they were plucked from their burrows and given new “digs.”

  When the prairie dogs rise from their dens here, they not only see burros, but also a wide range of other creatures not native to America’s Great Plains. Among the most unusual sights for them must be the more than a half-dozen ostriches. Some years ago, a boom in raising ostriches for meat and feathers in Oklahoma and Texas went bust, and Black Beauty ended up taking some of the castoffs from bankrupted businesses. The prairie dogs may find some comfort in looking out at the American bison, also native to the Great Plains. But they must feel befuddled when they see a water buffalo together with a “zony” (a mix between a zebra and a pony) and a one-armed kangaroo named Roo-Roo, who lost a limb because of injuries suffered while being forced to box. In all, there are thirteen hundred animals at Black Beauty. And Cleveland Amory is still in their midst: he asked to be buried at Black Beauty with his beloved Polar Bear, the scruffy, hungry stray cat he rescued on a frozen winter night in New York City and made famous in three of his best-selling books.

  After seeing the prairie dogs, Richard and I hopped in a truck and headed to some of the horse pastures. I had new residents to meet—two horses with quite a backstory. About half of all of Black Beauty’s residents are equines—Belgians and other big-bodied draft horses, athletic thoroughbreds, stout quarter horses, and even miniature ponies. The hoofed animals have room to roam, constrained only by a perimeter fence. Here the pastures rise and fall in the distance, the grass is thick, and landscape is sprinkled with trees. There’s plenty of rain in east Texas, and during much of the year the fields are rich and green.

  On our way to find the two new equine arrivals, we passed by the exotic deer, more than a dozen bison, and Omar the dromedary camel, who had formed an improbable friendship with Babe the elephant. They played together over the fence that separated them, with Babe often reaching over with her trunk to wrap Omar’s long neck in a hug—a sight you won’t see anywhere else and certainly won’t forget. Before long, we wended our way into the back pastures, driving off the dirt road and onto the grass. The horses cleared a path for us as Richard looked left and right to find Mari Mariah and Josie Sahara, two Arabians. “There they are,” he said. He steered in their direction and drove slowly toward the two gray-coated horses with black markings. We hopped out of the vehicle.

  Trucks and people at the ranch signify feeding and friendship, so nobody scattered—not even the wild mus
tangs or the wild burros rescued from public lands in the West and previously unaccustomed to human contact. I gave a few gentle pats to horses on the way, and then approached the two girls, who let me get right up next to them. I stroked the back of Mari’s neck first, and then gave equal attention to Josie, rubbing the coarse hair on her left side. They are mother and daughter, and they had perhaps the closest brush with death of any animals at Black Beauty—no small statement, considering nearly all of the animals here had some dangerous encounters with people.

  The pair of thoroughbreds had been purchased somewhere by “a killer buyer”—the people who collect horses for the meat trade—and had been shipped in a cattle truck to Cavel International, a Belgian-owned horse slaughter plant in DeKalb, Illinois. Mari and Josie were on the slaughterhouse floor with about two dozen other horses, organized in single file to be shot with a brain-penetrating captive-bolt gun, then hoisted upside down by a chain wrapped around a rear leg, and finally bled out after a sharp cut to the neck with a long knife. With their blood drained, they’d then move down the disassembly line, where their legs and head would be severed, their skin peeled away, and then their remaining body parts processed, shrink-wrapped, frozen, and flown to France, Belgium, or Japan. There, the meat would be carefully prepared before being served to high-end patrons. But just before that final, fatal series of events took place, a federal judge ordered the plant to suspend operations. Mari and Josie had seen the machinery of death, but then were turned around and marched alive out of that facility.

  A few years before, HSUS had launched a national campaign to stop this slaughter of horses. We knew it was a despicable business, with killer buyers purchasing horses at auction and often misrepresenting their intentions to sellers who assumed that their horses would end up in good hands. Once acquired, the horses would be loaded up on cattle trucks and sent straight to slaughter. The trip, sometimes more than a thousand miles, was a harrowing experience, in which stallions, mares, and foals were all bunched together in trucks too small for the adults even to stand. If they survived the transport, they would meet their end at the plant, with eyes bulging as these fright-and-flight animals witnessed other horses dying before them.