The Bond

by Wayne Pacelle

  We made our case against this cruelty and the betrayal of these animals to Congress, which in 2005 voted to bar the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from funding inspections at horse slaughter plants—effectively shutting down the plants because a slaughterhouse cannot operate without federal meat inspectors. We won the vote, but the USDA, which often acts as an agent of agribusiness and the slaughter industry, came up with a scheme to allow the slaughter plants to pay the federal government’s inspectors, in a fee-for-service arrangement. With the USDA now looking the other way, the plants kept operating, and HSUS sued to stop this clear disregard of the will of Congress. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled in our favor and ordered the plants closed. It was this merciful intervention that had spared Mari and Josie and the others. Just weeks later, the Illinois legislature banned horse slaughter in the state, and the plant was finally and permanently shuttered. And just two months earlier, we secured a separate victory in federal court, upholding a Texas law to ban slaughter in that state—an action that forced the closure of the only two other plants in the nation. As it happened, one of the two Texas plants was in the town of Kaufman, just a half hour from our Black Beauty facility.

  Many of the animals at Black Beauty have been through harrowing ordeals, but I don’t think any of the others have been marched onto a slick, bloody concrete floor at a slaughterhouse and somehow emerged alive into the light of day. Mari and Josie were very lucky girls. In the pasture, on a cool but sunny day, I whispered to them that we were happy they were here, and that they needn’t worry anymore about their safety. This was their permanent home, I said, and all of the people here were their friends.

  ANIMALS HAVE ALWAYS TUGGED at my pant leg, in one way or another. I’ve had an instinct to draw closer to them, watch them, learn about them, and sketch them. An interest in animals, and a concern for them, has been a big part of my emotional outlook for as long as I can remember. My childhood dogs—Pericles, Brandy, and finally Randi—were among my best friends. On the athletic fields across the street from our home, I’d throw the ball for hours on end to Brandy, a retriever mix. She’d have kept at it for the entire day if I’d kept throwing, and I could have watched her run the ball down and drop it at my feet for just as long.

  I had a protective instinct toward animals—all animals, not just the ones I knew well and loved—before anyone gave me any moral guidance on the subject. The books I read as a boy about animals did not spark my interest in them, but rather fed an interest that seemed to be there from the start. Children’s publishers, writers, and illustrators have for decades understood the connection that kids have with animals, and animals are everywhere in their works. Dr. Stephen Kellert, a Yale professor who has studied human attitudes toward animals and nature, found that “animals constitute more than 90 percent of the characters employed in language acquisition and counting in children’s preschool books.” Along with books, TV shows featuring animals were my favorite diversions. I never missed an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the first in a long line of nature programming that’s become so much more popular, widespread, and authentic today.

  I never had a gift for drawing or art, but I filled sketchbooks with my renderings of animals—deer, moose, wolves, and any others that caught my interest. I had all our encyclopedias dog-eared to the entries for animals, and I had much of the information memorized. I knew the major mammals and birds of every continent, as well as the marine mammals, such as seals and walruses, who lived on the margins of the land masses. I’d anxiously await the arrival of the latest National Geographic; I wasted no time in scanning the subjects teased on the cover and turned to the spread featuring an animal species. Almost at once, my imagination would take me to a distant place.

  I knew animals were different from humans—but different in good ways. They had surprising and beautiful forms: the lowered, shaggy enormous heads of American buffalo; the bizarre elongated noses of anteaters; the powerful, muscular frame of the grizzly. They were either fast like pronghorn antelopes, or slow like the three-toed sloths of South America. They were fragile-looking like white-tailed deer and Dama gazelles, standing on champagne-glass legs, or they were sturdy and stout like rhinos and hippos. They were small but possessed with a strong internal motor, like hummingbirds, who are the only birds able to fly backward. Or they were prehistorically large like African elephants and blue whales, whose languid movements in the water belied the long distances they traveled in a day. Classes of animals like monkeys came in so many novel and distinct forms and species—from the lemurs of Madagascar, to the gibbons of Asia, to the New World monkeys with their prehensile tails.

  Truly, I was dazzled. The world was a kaleidoscope of unbelievably interesting creatures—depending on your worldview, the gifts of the Creator, or the finely honed works of natural selection. The baleen whales feed on krill, the tiniest of sea creatures, yet these marine mammals grow larger than any other animals ever to inhabit the planet. Wolverines are solitary and no larger than a medium-sized dog, but they have been known to drive larger predators, even a bear or a pack of wolves, from their kill. The small Arctic tern makes an annual, winding, nonlinear trip from the Arctic to the Antarctic and then back again, a staggering forty-four thousand miles—by far the longest migration of any animal on the planet.

  That the animals were different from us was no reason to diminish their worth, to deny them comfort, freedom, or the respect due a fellow creature. We have so many remarkable and distinguishing attributes as a species, including our language and our ingenuity. But animals, sometimes humbly and sometimes grandly, have distinctive attributes of their own that command our appreciation. At least in their physical characteristics, some animals made us look plodding, cumbersome, and a bit inelegant, with our less impressive musculature and patchy hair. I loved them all the more for the strange, unique, and often beautiful traits that set them apart from us. This is a feeling common to most of humanity, across time and culture, and captured in the enduring words from the Old Testament that all creatures sing their Maker’s praises and are dear to Him for their own sake.

  Growing up in Connecticut, my parents took me a couple of times each year to the state’s modest, unaccredited zoo—the Beardsley Park Zoo in Bridgeport. There, I made the rounds to see all of the creatures, but I spent the most time gazing at the wolves I had studied so much in books from the National Geographic Society. Occasionally, we’d head to the Bronx Zoo in New York City, and even though I was a die-hard baseball fan I’d always choose a visit to the animals over a game at Yankee Stadium. A couple of times we even trekked several hours farther to the Catskill Game Farm—a drive-through safari park I especially liked because the animals were not in cages and freely roamed the grounds. I later learned that this facility was an awful place that mistreated its animals, procured them from disreputable sources, and sent “surplus” animals to exotic animal dealers and even captive-hunting operations. I also learned as an adult that the animal scenes on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom were often staged: for instance, a bear would be dropped in a rushing river and then saved in an exciting made-for-TV rescue. There’s often a hidden story to the places and people who trade on the public’s fascination with animals, and I’ve learned that skepticism about motives and methods is usually in order.

  I felt a bond with animals in an intense way, and it had all sorts of expressions in my childhood—my love of pets, reading, drawing, gazing at their exotic forms. I guess that’s not surprising given where I’ve ended up professionally—as president of the Humane Society of the United States, and fully engaged in the cause of protecting animals. But even as a teenager, I also realized that my passion for animals was not a peculiar or unusual interest. So many others I knew, including family members and friends, shared my instincts. I rarely ever came across anyone who said he or she disliked animals, and most everybody I knew had a pet, along with a general benevolence toward other creatures.

  And today, as I scan wit
h a wide lens the many expressions of the human-animal bond, I see it everywhere in our culture. Some 170 million dogs and cats are living in American homes, compared with 65 million just thirty-five years ago. The pet product and services industry generates more than $45 billion in annual sales. There are nine million horses in the United States. More than seventy million wildlife watchers take to the forests, fields, and waterways each year to see animals in their native habitats, and they spend billions in the process. There are more than ten thousand organizations devoted to helping animals in the United States alone. We now have a television network dedicated entirely to animals—Animal Planet, which does for animals what MTV did for pop artists, giving them a regular presence in our homes and in our daily consciousness. Animal books like Marley and Me often sit on the best-seller lists alongside political memoirs and self-help blockbusters. There is something universal about the bond we have with animals—an instinct to have them in our lives, to be near them and to care for them.

  But this bond is just part of the story in our relationship with animals. There have always been countervailing forces that trump or negate the positive effects of the human-animal bond. Even today, despite organized efforts to protect animals and the environment, human activity inflicts harm and death on animals to a degree that was once impossible, much less conceivable. We slaughter upwards of fifty billion domesticated animals for food every year in the world, with an ever-growing share confined for their entire lives on factory farms.

  Other human actions pose a threat to thousands of species and billions of individual wild animals, including habitat destruction and fragmentation; increasing volumes of carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, toxins, and animal waste released into the atmosphere and environment; overfishing and floating plastic and tangled fishing lines in the oceans; the introduction or release of nonnative species on land and in freshwater lakes and rivers; and direct killing or trapping of wild animals for a variety of trade-related purposes. Some frogs and other amphibians are now born without limbs or with other deformities, and scientists blame chemicals and endocrine disrupters introduced into the environment. In some areas of the world, such as Angola, Mozambique, and parts of the Congo, once-rich forests are now nearly empty of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and even birds, as a result of poverty, civil war, and the bush-meat trade. The animals of Southeast Asia are being collected in extraordinary numbers to meet the demand for animals at live-animal markets and for trinkets and other wildlife products in China. Because of these human actions, some experts believe we are now moving toward the greatest extinction crisis since the last Ice Age—the sixth extinction crisis in our planet’s history, but the first one with unmistakable human fingerprints on it.

  Our contradictory impulses toward animals are a central theme of this book. And it’s fairly clear that these opposing impulses—our concern and fellow-feeling for animals, and our capacity for complete disregard—have always been at work for good and ill. The contradiction is sharpest in our own time, and becomes more untenable as our power over the animals and their world reaches the outer boundaries. Never before have we known or cared so much about animals, and never before have we been so callous or ruthless in the things we do to them. Humanity cannot go much farther along both paths at once. We have to choose one way over the other, and it’s my hope that this book will help to move us all in the direction of kindness, mercy, and life.

  PART I

  A Special Bond

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Ties That Bond

  I’LL NEVER FORGET AN encounter I witnessed, as a teenager, between my mother and a mouse. I was in the dining room, Mom was in the kitchen a few steps away, and we were chatting about nothing in particular. I was doing most of the jabbering, and as I looked toward the kitchen doorway I was the first to spot the tiny intruder. I was surprised but gave no audible reaction. But when Mom caught a glimpse of our visitor, she let out a sound none of us kids had ever quite heard before—a gasp followed by a piercing shriek. I guess the mouse had never heard such a scream either, because in an instant the creature scurried across the kitchen floor and disappeared into the tight space beneath the stove.

  By then Mom was standing on a chair, just like in a cartoon. Not yet able to exhale, she whimpered, “There’s a mouse!” I ran into the kitchen just as she stepped down from the chair and rushed out. I can still recall her wide-eyed expression of fear as she dashed by me and then ran up the stairs to her bedroom. I got my bearings, and then followed to calm her, as well as any thirteen-year-old could manage.

  Mom’s reaction was not exactly proportional to the threat. The mere sight of the mouse triggered some deep-seated fear, planted not by any incident in her own life but ages earlier by the experiences of our human ancestors. I imagine the little guy was pretty scared himself, running for his life once he found himself out in the open.

  Rodents, snakes, and certain other species have this effect on us. Many people have a conditioned fear of snakes in particular, even in areas without poisonous species. Younger children rarely exhibit such fear, but often by age five or so become more wary. Primates react much as we do. They don’t have chairs to jump on, but they get up those trees in a hurry.

  Large predators, of course, elicit a similar instinctive reaction in people. An experience of my friend and colleague Katherine Bragdon has stayed with me because it still seems so completely irrational. Katherine and I have run a number of political campaigns for animals, including a ballot initiative in Oregon in 1994 to ban the use of hounds in hunting bears and mountain lions. Critics of the ballot initiative—mostly leaders of sport hunting organizations—shamelessly played off people’s fears, arguing that if the initiative passed, mountain lions soon would prowl the suburbs and stalk children in school yards. In debates with our opponents, Katherine and I countered that hunting with packs of dogs was unsporting and inhumane. We also pointed out that killing two hundred or three hundred mountain lions annually, out of a statewide population of twenty-five hundred, did little to further reduce the very slight risk of an attack—in fact, there was no record of any mauling in the state’s history. Statistically, a person in North America had a far greater chance of being struck by lightning or a falling tree, or killed by a bee sting, than of tangling with a mountain lion.

  Even so, just a few weeks before the big vote (which we won), Katherine confided that she and her boyfriend had been hiking in the Cascade Mountains when she was suddenly overcome by the fear of a lion attacking her. She had been swimming in a natural pool in a forest and suddenly felt terrified. She had not spotted a lion, or seen or heard any evidence of one nearby, but nonetheless believed that a big cat was on her trail. For a time, Katherine couldn’t move. Eventually, she shook off the paralysis but not the fear, and she led her boyfriend on a panicked run back to their cabin. All the while, she banged sticks and yelled loud enough to ward off any lion in the vicinity or, for that matter, probably every other living creature within earshot of her clattering. When she made it back safely, relief washed over her. Even though she knew as well as anyone that the chance of such an attack was remote, and had herself made that case a hundred times before, a primal fear had trumped all reason.

  Maybe Katherine was channeling the fears early hominids had of saber-toothed tigers or other large predators. These may be the same kind of fears that today lead people in some areas to exaggerate the threats posed by wolves or grizzly bears, and to urge their eradication. In the case of my dear mother, her rodent sighting had triggered an innate fear response. After all, seven hundred years ago the Black Death decimated Europe, setting off a series of political, cultural, and perhaps even genetic aftershocks still being felt today. Likely the greatest pandemic ever, it claimed the lives of some 150 million human beings—one-third of the entire population of the continent. Rats had a lot to do with its spread, and in such an environment, avoiding rodents was a distinct evolutionary advantage. We humans are programmed not to forget it.

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sp; None of this is to say that these coded, fear-based reactions must dictate our behavior. Although some people want to kill wolves and mountain lions, there is also a powerful movement to protect such creatures. The federal government has reintroduced predators in parts of the West, and there have been well-organized and often successful efforts, like our 1994 Oregon campaign, to restrict the hunting of wolves, mountain lions, and bears.

  In other words, our fascination with wild creatures has two sides. If fear is one face, kinship is the other, and our instinct to draw more closely to animals is the basis of the human-animal bond, inspiring our attachment to pets and our preoccupation with wildlife. This bond is not, however, merely a contemporary concern or the product of an affluent society, though it’s certainly true that the humane movement was born in the midst of staggering exploitation of animals in the industrial era. Long before that, the same feeling of connection that inspired the humane movement was at work in the world. It can be traced across human history and detected even in such ancient practices as hunting and animal sacrifice—as antithetical as these might seem to any sense of kinship. Our bond with animals has taken many forms, both violent and benevolent, but it’s always been there. Animals are not just in the backdrop of our own story, but at the center of the whole drama, and how we treat them is one of the great themes of the human story.