Books and Beasts

WE'VE MOVED!

2012-07-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

I am happy to announce that Books and Beasts is moving!

We will now be part of the all new alexwashoe.com

If you have enjoyed the blog, I hope you will continue to follow us at the new location: BOOKS AND BEASTS.

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you there,

Alex Washoe

What we talk about when we talk about turtles

2012-03-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

When I was young, I loved the library. I would check out as many books as I could find and bring them home. I would read just about anything -- history, biography, science, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction -- but what I loved most was books about writing. I soon learned that the 808 section of the Dewey Decimal System was my home -- and especially 808.3. I would check out everything I could find. I had the old Writer's Handbook volumes published by The Writer Magazine, with their articles by famous writers. I had Dean Koontz’s book Writing Popular Fiction long before he was famous. Every month I got Writer's Digest, and for my birthday each year my parents would buy me the new Writer's Market. I could spend hours on my bed just leafing through that book, marveling at all the different kinds of publications and imagining what I might write for them.

(It may just be the rosy glasses of hindsight, but I remember WD as a very different magazine back then than it is today. Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column on fiction and Judson Jerome wrote about poetry. Those columns seemed almost inexhaustible to me. Nowadays, when I break down out of nostalgia or boredom and buy an issue, it just seems shallow and commercial -- filled with ads for their seminars and editing services -- and recycling the same advice I read as a kid, in much less entertaining fashion. I'd like to think that, for someone coming to the magazine fresh today, it's as exciting and valuable as it was for me. But somehow, I don't believe it.)

One year -- I must have been in the sixth of seventh grade, what would be called a tween today -- my family spent a week at a lake house that belonged to a friend of my mother. This isn't the place to get into my mother's "special friendships" and the weirdness that entailed for a young boy. It's enough to say the house belonged to someone she knew from the tiny private airport where she worked. She worked there to pay for her flying lessons. My mother was a pilot. In the mid-seventies in South Carolina my divorced mother was a college student (in philosophy) and a pilot. I remember that we flew out to the lake in a small seaplane. It could seat six people I think, but there was only my mother, her boss from the airport, and my brother and me. We came in low over the lake, and when the pontoons hit there was a jolt, then a hop, another jolt, and we were gliding smoothly across the surface of the water.

(The seaplane reminds me of my father, who was not with us, because my father was a water skier -- pontoons look like big skis -- and when he was young he could start off sitting at the dock and ski all around the lake until he finally let go of the rope and glided easily into shore -- never once going into the water. That was on a different lake.)

That summer I had a lot of books with me. I had Forester's Aspects of the Novel and a big Writer's Handbook filled with articles by writers who, even then, were mostly a decade in the past. I sat out on the deck of the house and read watched the lake. I read about point of view and characterization and plot. And every couple of pages I would lay the book down -- or just hold it with one finger marking my place -- and daydream stories in my head.

That summer, for some reason, I was thinking of sea turtles. Aquatic turtles that lived underwater. In addition to my writing books, I almost certainly had books with me about wildlife and books about dinosaurs. Those were my other obsessions. I was imagining a novel about turtles. It didn't seem at all odd to me that you could write great literature -- serious literature -- and it could be about animals. I loved Watership Down. I don't remember what the turtles in my imagined story were doing, but I have images of them swimming deep down beneath the water -- beneath blue green water, and on the sandy bottom there were old bottles, sunken boats (the lake wasn't big enough for ships), and the ruins of collapsed piers.

When I was even younger, my parents and I were walking on a pier one day -- I think this might have been at Myrtle Beach -- and it collapsed underneath us. It's one of those events that I don't so much remember as I remember others remembering it. But I think the sense of it stayed in my bones, because I dreamt once of swimming underneath a low pier, being trapped underneath it, and finding that I could miraculously breathe through the water. I've never been really comfortable in deep water.

To this day, books about writing are my favorite books. Last year I kept John Gardner's The Art of Fiction by my bed and read a couple of pages every night before I went to sleep. I know Gardner's book almost by heart, but I found it very comforting, as if an old friend was talking to me as I fall asleep. Fiction, he says, should be like a vivid, unbroken dream -- first in the writer's mind, and then in the mind of the reader. Like a seaplane, I imagine, coming in for a landing on a large, still lake on a summer evening, racing to catch up with its reflection, and merging with it. Like a turtle paddling down to the sandy bottom. Like discovering you can breathe underwater.

5 Perspectives on Point-of-View

2012-03-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

1. There are infinite shades of POV

“Basically, there are three choices for POV – first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient.”

If you read a lot of advice on writing – in books, magazines or blogs – you’ve probably heard something similar to that a thousand times. Often, the advice giver will go on to admit – grudgingly – that there are a few other variations. (Like second person, if you’re feeling really pretentious and affected.) And they will tell you that omniscient viewpoint is “old fashioned”, out of date – and anyway, too fraught with peril for any beginning writer to consider. So pretty, much, your choices are first person and third person limited. In fact, third person limited with multiple viewpoint characters – with the POV shifts scrupulously divided by chapters, or possibly scene breaks (but never ever ever happening within a scene!) is pretty much the default for big suspense novels, epic fantasies and the like.

This is a lot like telling a painter there are only three colors: red, blue and yellow. In a way, that’s true. And you could produce some interesting paintings (or at least comic books) using that idea. But you would be severely limited. There’s an entire world of things you couldn’t render realistically – and you’d have a hell of a time representing perspective or depth.

POV is sort of the same way. We could think of third person (limited and omniscient and all the “in-between”), first person, and second person as primary POV’s. They’re at the corner of the of the color triangle. Between them, though, are all the shades of the spectrum – as Mr. Spock used to say, “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”

A lot of people who should know better – editors, agents and even other writers – will make it sound like there are rules for POV. As with anything in writing – or art (or business or love or life) – there is really only one rule: YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT WORK.

In Moby Dick, which is arguably the greatest of all American novels, Herman Melville starts in first person (“Call me Ishmael.” An opening that is not quite as clear cut as it seems – notice he doesn’t say, “My name is Ishmael”, does he?) Then, about a third of the way into the book, once the voyage of the Pequod is underway, Ishmael’s first person voice pretty much disappears, and we find ourselves in something that looks a lot like old school omniscient – complete with long essay-like passages about whaling, whale anatomy, metaphysics, and other topics – then at the end of the book Ishmael’s voice returns to wrap up the story. No explanation, no apologies. Just try getting that past your writing group.

William Faulkner, in the story “A Rose for Emily” uses the voice of the town – a sort of collective “we” – to narrate the events. More recently, Stephen King, in Salem’s Lot has passages in which the town itself is the POV, and we jump rapidly through different locations and characters to see what is going on. Peter Straub picked this technique up from King and expanded it brilliantly in Ghost Story, where the town sections gives us a grisly overview of what is going on everywhere – something none of the characters could know. Ghost Story, like most of Straub's work, is a wonderful example of the range and power of effects that can be achieved by experimenting with unusual POVs.)

2. A Memoir by Any Other Name is Still Not a Novel

You could write a long essay – or a book or a PhD thesis – on how it is that third person limited came to be the default POV in American fiction in the twentieth century. To be brief, I don’t think it’s an accident that this kind of fiction coincides with the rise of memoirs as a major literary form. The twentieth century, in America and the Western World, at least, was a time when a lot of people who had never had a voice – never been able to tell their stories – finally got the chance. There was an incredible release of political and social energy there. And it re-shaped the arts. We became convinced that writing was about “telling your story”, and that the most important element of art was “self-expression”. I am skeptical about that, to say the least. I understand the importance of telling certain stories, and of speaking things which have long been forbidden or repressed. But we lost something along the way.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the novel as a form corresponds historically to the rise of liberal democracies and multi-cultural societies. As Jane Smiley (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel) has pointed out, one of the most powerful effects of the novel is that it allows us to experience other lives, other times, and other points of view. It expands our sense of what it means to be human. The novel – as opposed to older forms like poetry and romance – was frequently about the part of society that had been left out and forgotten. It was about women, common people, even slaves. The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century in America, which Lincoln only half-facetiously credited with starting the civil war, was not that it was another polemic against slavery – it was that for the first time in popular culture it presented slaves as whole people with complex inner lives. Once readers have made that leap – once they had glimpsed that possibility – it was damnably hard to go back.

The great eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists had a kind of ambition to encompass the entire world – or at least the whole of a certain society – within their work. Think of Tolstoy sweeping across Europe in War and Peace or of Dickens scandalizing London by showing the hidden connections between all the social classes. That’s how the novel works. The defining characteristic of the greatest novels is not “self-expression” – its empathic imagination.

To be fair, I should admit that I’m not really fond of memoirs as a form. I seldom read one that doesn’t contain a dog or a scientist. The difference between a great memoir and a great novel is the difference a good home movie and the Sistine Chapel.

3. Third Person Limited is Just First Person in Drag

Henry James once remarked that, for any work longer than a short story, the First Person point of view was “barbaric”. That might be (as John Gardner has suggested) going a bit far – but there’s point to be made. First person is tailored to certain kinds of stories – Raymond Chandler and his descendents for instance made it the standard for private eye fiction – and most mysteries still use it. This kind of fiction depends heavily on voice. There are mystery series that I read not because I care that much about the plots, or who-dunnit, but because I like the main characters, appreciate her (these days it often seem to be “her”) voice, and like spending time in that world.

Outside of mysteries, Huckleberry Finn is the classic example. It is, ultimately, Huck’s voice that we remember, his peculiar take on the world. The same could be said of contemporary writers like Robert B. Parker. I’m not sure I could remember the storyline of any given Spenser novel all the way through, or could separate the scenes in my mind by what book they came from. But who cares? I can pick up any one of his books, read the first paragraph, and I’m hooked. I’m seduced by the voice. That is the power of first person at its best.

The drawbacks though are serious. First person makes it very hard to achieve any kind of real scale. The first person narrative is limited in scope.

Third person limited (note that adjective) has the same drawbacks – and lacks both the immediacy and the voice of first. Its strength is that it can take us deeper inside a character than any other viewpoint (except that omniscient can do that too, and still have the greater scope at its disposal). Seeing through the character’s eyes gives the writer the opportunity to explore perception, to color the world by the character’s thoughts and feelings. This can be very effective – and this kind of subjectivity has been the obsession of twentieth century literature. The problem with it – I believe – is that it traps us in a world where nothing is ever true – just “perceived”. And where our viewpoint – the writer’s, the character’s, human being’s – is all there is.

This is probably the place to say that I’m really tired of the whole “unreliable narrator” shtick. We get it. People don’t always tell the truth – even to themselves. How you see much of the world depends on where you stand. It’s possible that we’re all crazy. Yep, we get it. It’s been done. Like photo-realism in painting, it’s an interesting experiment – once or twice. Then …

4. You don’t need God to be Omniscient

Many critics believe that omniscient viewpoint in fiction lost favor in part because of the breakdown in our religious world view – the onslaught of science, philosophy and skepticism broke down the old certainties, and it was no longer possible to be quite so confident that there was an over-riding truth, or even an objective reality. Maybe POV is all there is. This was a revolutionary idea in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (and apparently still is, at least in Hollywood, which explains why Phillip K. Dick is the only science fiction writer a lot of people can name). It is an idea, I think, that has pretty much run its course.

Science shows us that, while it may never be possible to find absolute certainty about the world, it is possible to grope our way to better and better approximations of it. Some things are true independent of belief. (If you step off a twenty story building, you’re going to fall – no matter what your deeply held personal convictions are.)

I don’t see why fiction can’t reflect this. What if our omniscient viewpoint was not God, but evolution? Or Deep Time? Or just the ecological web of life itself?

Step out in your yard for a second. Close your eyes. Listen past the traffic noises and the neighbor kids playing. What do you hear? Find the sounds of life going on around you. What are the concerns of the songbirds in the trees? The rats tunneling under the fence? The opossum sleeping in the back of your garage with her babies in a pouch? Where are they in our fiction?

When we limit our ideas of POV, we don’t just limit our style. We limit the kinds of stories we can tell. We limit whose stories we can tell.

As an everyday person, I’m small. Selfish, impatient, opinionated. But as a writer, as a Novelist, I should be more. I should contain multitudes.

5. Don’t Use POV to cheat your reader

I said above that first person was the most common POV for mysteries – where-as large scale suspense novels are often written in some form of third person – usually with multiple viewpoint characters. There’s a reason for that. And it has to do with the difference between mystery and suspense.

Imagine a group of characters standing around a table. On the table is a box. If none of the characters – or the reader – know what’s in the box, it’s a mystery. Mystery is basically an intellectual effect. We wonder and think about what could be in the box. First person, or very close third person, works beautifully for mysteries because the reader doesn’t know any more than the narrator and can learn everything as the narrator does.

Suspense, however, is an emotional reaction – it’s akin to tension, anxiety and fear. Whereas mystery comes from what we don’t know – suspense comes very often from what we do know.

Back to the box on the table. If none of the characters knows what’s in it – but the reader knows it’s a bomb and it’s going to go off in two minutes – that’s suspense.

It’s also called “dramatic irony”. The literary term for when the reader knows something the characters don’t. And it can be extremely powerful. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to achieve in first person or close third person.

Historical novelists can use this to great effect. You can show us, Abraham Lincoln, for instance talking to his advisors about his plans for the future, on the day before he goes to the play at Ford’s Theater. If this is done well, it can be incredibly poignant. A young wife is planning a romantic dinner for her husband’s homecoming, but we already know the husband is dead. Or a character who is stressed and freaking out about his small problems, while we’ve been shown a larger perspective and can see just how shallow his concerns really are.

I’m a big fan of dramatic irony. I tend to think that in any plot that isn’t specifically built around “who killed Roger Rabbit” – a mystery in other words – that withholding information from the reader is cheating, and the suspense you create by doing it is cheap and unfair. (Even in the mystery, there is a sense that the writer should “play fair” – that the information to solve the problem should be there, if the reader can only discern what’s important.)

The worst examples of this kind of thing are often found in those big suspense novels we mentioned earlier, with their third person, multiple-character viewpoints. I’ve read too many novels where the writer actually puts us into the head of the villain early on in the story and “cleverly” – by misdirection or outright deceit – hides the person’s true identity from us. (Are you listening Dan Brown?) As soon as I realize this, I lose all faith in the writer and in his story. He cheated. How much more effective would it have been to simply reveal the villain to me – while hiding it from the protagonist – and generate real suspense out of that knowledge?

POV is one of the most important – and infinitely flexible – tools in the writer’s arsenal. The ways in which can be told, the voices and perspectives and combinations that can be used, are as rich and varied as the rainbow. I’m not suggesting that you don’t use the primary colors. I’m just telling you that there’s a whole spectrum to paint with. And the only way to learn that spectrum is to read – as widely as possible – and start experimenting with mixing the colors yourself.

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

Rin Tin Tin and the Mystery of the Missing Oscar

2012-01-05T13:48:00.000-08:00

Rin Tin Tin

Way back in 1929, when the Academy of Motion Picture Artsand Sciences was brand new, they organized the first Oscar presentations. The members of the Academy voted on the (then short) list of awards, including best actor and actress. When the votes were counted, the winner for best actor was Rin Tin Tin.

It really wasn't surprising. Though it's hard to imagine today, Rin Tin Tin was the biggest star of his era. Rinty, as he was known, helped to turn Warner Bros. from a small, struggling studio into the huge industry leader it became. He was so famous -- and so beloved -- that when he died in 1932 radio broadcasts all over America were interrupted with the news. In 1929 there really was no other clear choice for Best Actor. There was Rin Tin Tin, and there was everyone else.

But (according to Susan Orlean, in her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend) the Academy was worried that if they gave the first ever Best Actor award to a dog, no one would take their new organization seriously. And so, they gave it to the runner up, a German silent film actor named Emil Jannings.

Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel" (1930)

(Who? Emil Jannings was a German actor, well known to silent film audiences. He starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Jannings had a thick German accent, which effectively ended his career in Hollywood once talkies came in. During World War II he starred in Nazi Propaganda films and was reportedly close with Joseph Goebbels. If you've seen Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds, Jannings is portrayed as one of the German actors in the climactic theater scene. You can find his Wikipedia page here -- and in the spirit of full disclosure, it was me who added the information about Rin Tin Tin to his biography.)

Taking into account the times, and the youth of Hollywood, the decision is understandable. But over the years, the Oscars have become an institution, one that is devoted to celebrating and preserving the history of Motion Pictures. And now, it seems only fitting that one of the greatest movie stars of all time -- Rin Tin Tin -- should finally get his due.

The folks over at The Dog Files (a great blog -- if you're not familiar with it, check it out) have started a petition to do just that. They are calling on the Academy to include in the live Oscar ceremony a montage honoring animals in film, and then award (re-award) a posthumous Best Actor Oscar to Rin Tin Tin.

As my friends could tell you, I can go a little overboard on the subject of pop culture injustices (Why aren't the Monkees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?) But this, I really believe, is a cause whose time has come. So I would like to call upon all my readers to sign the petition -- and if the spirit moves you, maybe write directly to the Academy of Motion PictureArts and Sciences.

Let's get Rinty back his Oscar.

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area. Currently at Birdland West, CSI: Pigeon Town, an avian murder mystery.

Best Of 2011

2011-12-29T11:57:00.000-08:00

Photo Courtesy of Animal Planet

This time of year everyone is coming up with their "Best Of" Lists, so not to be outdone, here at Books and Beasts we're offering our choices too. If you follow the blog, you know that I've reviewed a lot of books and a few movies -- I'm pretty selective in what I include, so everything that I covered is there because I thought it was worth checking out -- even the books I had problems with. However, even among the best, a few stand out. So here are my choices for the best animal related offerings of the past year.

1. Best Fiction -- Again, I've reviewed a lot of great novels and short story collections and all of them are worth your time. However, there is one novel that stands out this past year among all the rest. Possum Summer, by Jen K. Bloom is a wonderful children's book that will speak to child in the heart of every reader. It's the kind of book I loved when I was a kid, and still do. You can read my review of it here, but you might as well save yourself the time and just rush out and get it. Not to be missed.

2. Best Nonfiction -- Same caveat, all the books I've reviewed are important, useful and entertaining (in different combinations, depending on what they were). But if I have to pick one that most affected me this year, it would be Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean. Wonderful portrait of the dog so famous that when he died they broke into radio broadcasts around the country to announce it. You can read my review here, but please, get this book, and pass it on to all your dog loving friends.

3. Best Movie -- This one's easy. (I haven't seen War Horse yet, but as soon as I do it'll show up here on the blog). The best animal movie of the year -- and one of the best I've seen in a very long time -- is Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Yes, it's true, I love it in part because I'm a geek, and there are scenes of Apes running wild through the city and attacking helicopters. But this is much more intelligent, thoughtful and accurate movie than I ever expected. The writers obviously did extensive research on chimps raised in captivity, and Caesar -- played by Andy Serkis in a performance that would be nominated for an Oscar if there was any justice in the world -- is the most realistic chimpanzee character ever captured on film. (Sorry, Cheetah.) Emotionally, technically, and intellectually the best movie of the year.

The Worst -- I don't usually include a section on "worst" in my blog -- I prefer to use time and space pointing out what's best, and what's important. But one blog post I wrote this year Tears for Elephants has drawn more hits than anything else I've written. It's about the sad fate of elephants in Hollywood, including the ones who starred in Water for Elephants. I gave that book an enthusiastic review, because I think it's great -- but I boycotted the movie, sadly, because I think it could have been great too. There have been a number of movies this year -- including Hangover 2, Zookeeper, and the new We Bought a Zoo, that made the unfortunate choice of using exotic, wild animals -- a practice that contributes to the abuse, over hunting, and endangerment of these creatures. You can see my thoughts about it in earlier reviews, but it only makes my Best Movie choice even more notable. The totally CGI apes in "Rise" are wonderful creations.

4. Best TV Show -- I haven't reviewed this one yet in the blog, but it's too good not to include. There are lots of great nature and animal shows on TV, but this one is the best if you're an animal lover -- especially if you're a dog lover -- absolutely if you're a Pit Bull lover. It also happens to be hands down the best reality show going: Pit Bulls and Parolees on Animal Planet. (This is the new favorite show of my canine housemate Lulubelle Dawg, who was also a big fan of Meercat Manner back in the day.) In this day and age, just the idea was audacious. Let's take two of the most stigmatized groups we can think of, and then let's make an honest, sympathetic, non-sensationalized show about them. If you've never seen it, the show follows Tia, the woman who runs Villalobos ranch, a rescue facility for pit bulls. She is helped by her daughters -- who have had difficult lives in their own ways -- and by the parolees she takes on as volunteers. I don't know of another show on television that deals with second chances, heartbreak, triumph and joy more often. Oh yeah, and there are Pit Bulls! What more could you want?

Well, those are my choices for 2011. I'd love to hear your thoughts or picks, whether you agree with me or not. And I look forward to continuing to bring you reviews and information about the wide world of "Books and Beasts".

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

The Hummingbird at the Center

2011-11-16T06:29:00.001-08:00

I've been doing NaNoWriMo this month (if you don't know what that is, check it out -- it's like the literary equivalent of a marathon, held all over the world every November) and it's been taking up a lot of my time. But it has also forced me to confront the problems inherent in novel writing -- and in writing my novel in particular -- that you only see when you are into the work itself.

Anyone who has looked through the reviews on this site probably has some idea of what those problems are. Non-human characters, point-of-view, how far we can extend fiction (and more importantly, our empathic imagination) out from the human center of consciousness and still tell something recognizable as a story, something that human readers will be interested in.

In October I tried a little experiment over at our sister blog, Birdland West -- I published a short piece of fiction, more of a sketch than a story, that attempted to do some of the things that attempt to do some of things that I'm interested in. In a very small way. Let me share just a piece to show you what I mean:

"The hummingbird hung motionless, except for its furious wings, above the feeder. The red plastic -- a human would have called it red -- glowed like a beacon in the bird's vision, reflecting parts of the spectrum no mammal could see. Light glinted off the bird's feathers which broke it apart like millions of tiny prisms, throwing flashes of green and red. (Again, green and red as humans would see them -- with their primate color vision, recently recovered in evolutionary time, and so limited as compared to the bird's). The hummingbird poised above the feeder.

"Almost no one noticed. The writer -- who lived in the house attached to the yard where the feeder hung -- was uncommonly aware of the sounds of the bird's presence -- the high pitched, fast sound, like a telegraph key -- but the weather was growing cold and the doors and windows of his house were shut. Besides, he was preoccupied with work (or with the distractions that kept him from working). And he was thinking about a young woman he had recently become interested in and what seemed like the impossibility that she could be interested in (old, fat, unsuccessful) him. He didn't hear the hummingbird's approach or sense it hovering over the feeder in the bush at the front of the yard."

[See the whole piece here]

Now, not focusing on quality for a second, but just on what it attempts, the idea of this piece was just to capture a moment in a neighborhood, with the hummingbird as the focal point. It clearly has an omniscient viewpoint, it's totally outside the consciousness of all the characters, but it has access to all of them. It also tries, at least I intended to try, to put the "non-human" world on equal footing with the "human" -- or even better to erase some of the artificial boundary we draw between the two. The humming bird and (if you read the whole piece) the dogs and birds and squirrel are not treated, I hope, as background for the humans, who as usual are preoccupied with their own lives and barely see. That's the problem with being in the third person limited -- the "inside" pov -- it traps us in human perspective, in human concerns -- and unless we write about characters who are uncommonly aware of the natural world, of the greater context, much of it is lost. And even if our characters are hyper-aware (try talking to me sometime in a yard full of birds) we're still getting the human pov -- the hummingbird as seen by a person, not as a thing into itself, a center of action and awareness no less important than the human. That's the same as colonial writers -- say Joseph Conrad -- who despite their great talent and insight into human begins, could never quite get out the white European perspective, and who therefore couldn't represent Africans or other colonized people as subjects in their own right. Even when they are viewed sympathetically, they are viewed as objects of someone else's consciousness. The truly revolutionary power of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin (despite the fact that it has been a flashpoint in arguments about representation almost since it was published) was not it's overt polemic against slavery, but that for the first time African American slaves were presented as real, feeling characters with interior lives -- as subjects of their own experience. It was that radical shift that made it impossible for many white American to ignore, and changed forever the way they thought about slavery.

I'm not saying that my little hummingbird has the world-shifting power of Stowe's characters. I haven't accomplished that yet. But this is one of my deepest goals as a writer. To de-center fiction, perhaps just slightly, from the fixed human pov. To shift the focus even for moments away from our human concerns. To set them in broader contexts -- ecological, evolutionary, cosmological.

As the poet Mary Oliver says, "Meanwhile, the world goes on."

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

Remembering a Legend

2011-10-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend

We're all familiar with celebrity tragedy stories these days. Brandon Lee dies during the filming of "The Crow" -- Heath Ledger on "The Dark Knight" -- and the stories become not just front page news and fodder for tabloids, but eventually the stuff of legend. We might think this is a new phenomenon, fueled by our modern media. But it is really as old as Hollywood itself (and maybe even older -- look at public furor created by Conan Doyle trying to kill Sherlock Holmes).

In 1932 another Hollywood legend died. He was as big in his day as any movie star has ever been; the news of his passing broke into radio programs across the country. The United Press bulletin read:

"Rin Tin Tin, greatest of animal motion-picture actors, pursued a ghostly villain in a canine happy-hunting ground today."

As Susan Orlean recounts in her wonderful new book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend:

The story was soon floated on the great raft of legend. It was rumored that Rin Tin Tin had died at night; that he had died on the set of Pride of the Legion during a rehearsal; that he had died while leaping into the arms of Jean Harlow ... that he had collapsed on Lee's front lawn and Harlow had raced over to comfort him, where she "cradled the great furry head in her lap, and there he died."

She goes on to recount how, following his death an hour-long tribute was broadcast on radios stations around the country " Last night a whole radio network and thousands of radio fans paid homage to a great dog ... a gentleman, a scholar, a hero, a cinema star -- in fact, a dog which was virtually everything we could wish to be."

That's the way legends are remembered.

In his day Rin Tin Tin, who was found as a puppy by an American soldier, Lee Duncan, in the ruins of a burned out kennel, starred in twenty-three "blockbuster" silent films, was credited with saving Warner Brothers from bankruptcy, and won the heart of a nation. His career suffered a set-back with the advent of talkies but he went on to star in serials as well. He was without a doubt one of the greatest stars of his era. Over the decades to come his descendents would star on radio and TV -- twenty years later his grandson rescued both his owner, Duncan, and the family name from the edge or ruin when he starred in the The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (a show I remember from re-runs as a child) which climbed the ratings faster than any other show in the history of television.

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend is one of those wonderful books of popular history that captures not just an individual but an entire era of American life -- in this case, several years, from the great age of silent films to the golden age of television. And Rin Tin Tin, in one of his incarnations, was a star in all of them.

Lee Duncan was a man with a troubled family history, who spent part of his life in an orphanage, and struggled with human relationships all his life. But he believed in Rin Tin Tin with an unfailing faith, and the world came to believe too. As the years went on, others would take up the legacy, inspired by devotion to the symbol of courage and friendship and unfaltering love. Orlean captures that feeling powerfully in her book -- those of us with memories of Rin Tin Tin from our childhood will find them flooding back, and those who don't remember will discover him all over again.

More than anything, this book made me long for Rin Tin Tin's return. Our world could use a hero like Rinny again -- if only to remind us of all the things we might wish to be. (I can see Rinny as a Search and Rescue dog working at today's disaster sites, as a police dog finding bad guys on a TV cop show, or even as a canine astronaut exploring space -- the possibilities are endless.)

Perhaps nothing sums up what Rinny meant to generations of movie, radio and TV fans better than a poem that Lee Duncan wrote after the star's death -- something all dog lovers will understand:

A real selfless love like yours old pal

Is something I shall never know again

And I must always be a better man

Because you loved me greatly, Rin Tin Tin.

The world is better for the enduring legacy of Rinny, and for Susan Orlean's wonderful book that keeps it alive.

###

Readers interested in books about dogs might also like to check out my earlier reviews: "Born to Bark", "A Brace of Dog Memoirs" "Goodbye Alpha Dog", "Two Dogs in Search of a Master", "A Nose for Justice", "Whatever Happened to America's Dog?" and "Scent of the Missing".

You can also enjoy my recent article "Crazy Flickers" over at 10,000 Birds. They have a great site, well worth checking out even if I wasn't included. And "Change of Seasons" at the Seattle Mariners Baseball Blog SoDo Mojo.

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

Born to Bark

2011-09-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

Born to Bark by Stanley Coren

"For Christmas the woman who would become my wife bought me a dog -- a little terrier. The next year her Christmas present to me was a shotgun. Most of the people in my family believe that those two gifts were not unrelated."

Stanley Coren is the author of a lot of books about dogs, including How Dogs Think, How to Speak Dog, Why We Love the Dogs We Do and The Intelligence of Dogs. He is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and often appears on tv shows (Oprah, Dateline, Good Morning America to name a few). He is known as an expert on dogs and their behaviors. But what the public didn't really know, until now, is that Coren had a very special teacher.

The teacher's name was Flint. And Flint was a Cairn Terrier. Born to Bark is the story of Coren's friendship with Flint, and of all that he learned.

"If you could read the genetic code of a terrier it would say, "bark-eat-bark-dig-bark-chase-bark-grab-bark-hunt-bark-kill it (if it is little furry and moves quickly)-bark-growl-bark-tug-bark-shred-bark-ignore sounds from two-footed creatures-bark-bark ...."

Coren takes us back to his earliest memories -- the dogs of his childhood and what he learned from them -- to show us how he was prepared for Flint. But as those of us who are true dog lovers know, though you may have many dogs in your life, and though you love them all, there is usually one dog (if you are very fortunate, two) who stand apart -- soul mates is a silly phrase, but I don't know any other way to describe it. And for Stanley Coren Flint was the dog.

But Born to Bark is also more than just a memoir. It is also chock full of Stanley Coren's observations about dogs -- their behavior, their history, and their special value to humans.

"In a way, I had blundered inadvertently into what today is known as pet-assisted therapy. In North America the number of pet assisted therapy programs was under twenty in 1980, but by the year 2000 more than one thousand such programs were in operation. We probably owe the origin of using dogs as part of psychotherapy to Sigmund Freud (funny how often that name comes up when a psychologist is writing or talking), who often had one of his dogs with him during therapy sessions. He first noticed that the presence of the dog seemed to be beneficial for patients ... He thought that this might be due to the fact that patients often worry about whether what they are saying might seem unacceptable ... However, nothing the patients ever say will shock the therapist's furry companion ...."

This is the common theme running through all the dog memoirs I've been reading lately. The power of the human/canine bond to heal (and the healing can run both ways). There is something about this story that never gets old. I have my own version of it. Whether it is the simple love that animals provide, the discipline involved in training, or the requirements of focusing on another creature outside of yourself, this involvement often lifts people out of their selves in way that other relationships can't do. (But its possible we have an unfair sample here -- the memoirs are almost universally about the times when this process works, because it's the successful "rescues" who go on to write books.)

The virtue of Coren's book, and the reason that it makes a good cap to the other dog memoirs I've reviewed, is that Coren is a trained psychologist, a specialist in canine behavior, and a professional communicator, so his self-consciousness about what is going on and how it works allows him to frame the story of his relationship with Flint in a broader context.

I would recommend Coren's earlier books to anyone interested in canine behavior and intelligence. But I would recommend Born to Bark to anyone.

###

Readers interested in books about dogs might also like to check out my earlier reviews: "Goodbye Alpha Dog", "Two Dogs in Search of a Master", "A Nose for Justice", "Whatever Happened to America's Dog?" and "Scent of the Missing".

You can also enjoy my recent article "Crazy Flickers" over at 10,000 Birds. They have a great site, well worth checking out even if I wasn't included.

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

A Brace of Dog Memoirs

2011-09-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

Behind every so-called coincidence lies a series of connections, some small, some large, that if traced back far enough, lead inevitably to the great source of meaning and purpose in this otherwise senseless universe, namely, dogs."

-- Susan Conant All Shots

I don't like memoirs very much. As a rule. I think the rise of the memoir form goes hand in hand with the narrowing and impoverishment of fiction in the twentieth century, and I'm sure I'll have more to say on that in the future. But, for the moment, I can be as much of a hypocrite as the next guy, and I have to admit that there is one form of memoir that I avidly devour.

The dog memoir.

Not that there's anything special about them, in the literary sense. They have all the faults of memoirs in general -- self-centeredness, over-sentimentality, and a kind of near-sightedness that distorts reality like a fish-eye lens.

But they have dogs in them.

And that makes all the difference. At least to me.

The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once promulgated the law that "Ninety percent of everything is crap." He was probably being generous, but that does mean that even in the least literary of literary genres there must be something worth reading. So I wanted to mention a couple of memoirs that I've read lately that stand out from the pack.

Until Tuesday by (Fmr. Captain) Luis Carlos Montalvan is -- in addition to being a dog memoir -- the story of an Iraq war veteran struggling to deal with the physical and mental scars of his service. And it is a story told with remarkable restraint, and almost no self-pity or sentimentality. Montalvan suffered traumatic brain injury as a result of an explosion and suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. He recounts how difficult it was for him to return to day to day life:

Before Tuesday, I caught glimpses of snipers on rooftops. Before Tuesday, I spent more than an hour in my apartment working up the courage to walk half a block to the liquor store. I took twenty medicines a day for everything from physical pain to severe agoraphobia, and even benign social encounters caused crippling migraines ... Before Tuesday I couldn't work. I drank whole bottles of rum in one sitting to escape, but still lay in bed, unable to shut my eyes. And every time I did, I saw terrible things ... After one grueling therapy session I went to a coffee shop, opened my laptop, and saw the face of a suicide bomber from Sinjar...

Tuesday, of course, is a dog. A beautiful Golden Retriever who stares out of the cover of the book with intelligence and a hint of a smile, holding a set of dog tags in his mouth.

Bad Dog, by Martin Kihn, also has a dog on the cover -- but in this case in extreme close-up that makes it hard to identify the breed. (Bernese mountain dog). Hola is a not just another breed -- she's a very different kind of dog than Tuesday. She tackles people, chews up furniture, runs after busses and chases drug dealers. (An activity which can be very dangerous for her owners.) She has no training, no socialization and definitely no manners.

Her owner is also a different breed. Marty (Martin Kihn) is a high functioning alcoholic who has been a TV writer and a management consultant, but is rapidly on his way down, about to lose his job and his marriage. Oh yeah, and he has to something about that dog too.

"Is it just me," I ask my ninety-pound copilot, framed in the rearview mirror like a hairy Andy Warhol Marilyn, "or is everyone losing their minds?"

I'm sorry to say, she seems to be sorry to say, it's just you.

"Did we miss our turn? I can't see the signs."

And I, she says, can't read....

There are few guarantees in life like the one I will make to you now: you will get lost. Very lost. So far from your destination you'll be looking out the window as darkness descends, watching street signs change into another language....

And that, really, is what these two books -- so very different on the surface -- have in common. They are about getting lost. And they are about relationships. In both cases, about the unique relationship between a troubled man and a dog.

But two very different dogs.

Tuesday was born to be one of the most highly developed dogs in the world -- an assistance dog for the disabled -- and he began his training when he was three days old, long before his eyes opened...

Very different:

At a certain point, without announcing it even to ourselves, we gave up. I gave up. We'd had our idea of what a pet should be, and we'd been baited and switched. We'd been had by the dogs of the gods or vice versa. She was housebroken; she seemed happy; she didn't actually bite people, with a single exception ... What I know now is that settling for a dog who is housebroken and doesn't draw blood is like settling for a child who can talk.... And I might as well admit that the exception was my wife.

What Luis Montalvan finds in Tuesday is a companion and a best friend. With Tuesday at his side he more and more braves the world, meets people, goes back to college, begins a new career. As someone who has had a service dog I, I was deeply moved by the description of Tuesday. Their friendship and partnership portrays the human-canine bond at its best.

Martin Kihn's story is funnier, more acerbic -- with many more rough edges. His humor is usually trained directly on himself (and sometimes, lovingly, on Hola) and if he's not always devoid of self-pity, at least he knows it, and makes it funny. Hola is a wild dog, and a dog that many of us will recognize (hopefully in somewhat gentler terms). When his wife leaves him, Kihn is forced to take drastic action. That action is to enroll himself and Hola in training classes for the American Kennel Club's Canine Good Citizen program -- a way for dog's to attain certification in the basics of civilized behavior. It seems impossible for Hola -- and for Kihn -- in the beginning. And as any dog trainer will tell you, training the dog is easy; it's training the people that's hard.

Both of these books succeed -- on my terms -- by being books about a person and a dog in an equal relationship. These aren't books of cute dog stories, or inspiring life lessons learned from furry teachers. These are real stories about life with real dogs.

As different as they seem on the surface, Until Tuesday and Bad Dog make good pack mates. If you love memoirs (I know you're out there) or you love dogs -- as I do -- these are great books to curl up with. Make sure to have some treats handy.

Readers interested in books about dogs might also like to check out my earlier reviews: "Goodbye Alpha Dog", "Two Dogs in Search of a Master", "A Nose for Justice", "Whatever Happened to America's Dog?" and "Scent of the Missing".

You can also enjoy my recent article "Crazy Flickers" over at 10,000 Birds. They have a great site, well worth checking out even if I wasn't included.

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

Hail, Caesar!

2011-08-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

I'll spare everyone the suspense and tell you upfront that I loved Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But that was almost a foregone conclusion. For months now I've been pestering friends about going to see it -- and meeting almost universal skepticism. To which I responded with something like, "Apes running through the city, attacking helicopters. Do you understand? Apes. What's not to love?" As someone who has watched Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong at least twice a year since it came out, I was going to love this movie, even it was just a bunch of CGI scenes spliced together with no plot or substance to support it.

Fortunately for all of us, that's not the case.

The first Planet of the Apes movie came out in 1968, when I was five years old. The final movie of the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes came out in 1973. In between came Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. There was a short lived television series in 1974(which starred Roddy McDowell and Mark Lenard, Star Trek's Sarek) and an even shorter lived animated series Return to the Planet of the Apes in 1975. For geeks of my generation, it is impossible to overestimate how big a part these movies played in our lives. In a time before Star Wars, when the only Star Trek was the original series in re-runs on television, and when big budget science fiction movies were almost unknown, Planet of the Apes loomed large.

And for me, at least, the two that loomed the largest were the last two (possibly because I was a little older when they came out). I've never been overly fond of the first movie, with Charlton Heston, or the second, with it's weird underground mutant bomb worshiping cults. But starting with the third movie, when the Chimpanzees Cornelius and Mira return to earth in the 1970's, I began to get really interested. "Conquest" tells of the revolt of the enslaved apes -- all of whom are Mira's descendants, we must assume -- and "Battle" picks up about ten years later with Apes in control and Caesar trying desperately to find some way for them to co-exist with humans.

You can't re-watch the movies now without seeing the heavy-handed racial allegory everywhere. The various directors were determined to make their relevant political statements at the time, and the result is that the old moves feel dated in a way that has nothing to do with their basic ideas. Only "Battle", which is mainly a full out action melodrama, escapes this overt politicizing.

Even as a kid, I knew enough about apes (I read about Jane Goodall, and Diane Fossey, and Washoe and others in National Geographic, for instance) to know that the portrayal of the different ape species was all wrong. Gorillas were the heavies, the military complex. In the real world, of course, gorillas are peaceful vegetarians who's aggression is mostly bluff and bluster. Orangutans, bearing almost no resemblance to their real ancestors, were the administrative class -- Church and State, which didn't seem to be very separated in the first movie's world. And the Chimpanzees were the counter culture -- scientists, hippies, war protestors -- naturally, in the late nineteen sixties in the United States, they were the heroes.

The reality of course is that chimpanzees are Machiavellian political animals who scheme and deceive and go to war almost as well as humans -- capable of the full range of goodness and badness that we are. In any multi-ape society they would most likely be on top -- the gorillas would be the hippies. But of course, the old Planet of the Apes movies weren't really about apes at all.

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes", directed by Rupert Wyatt and written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, is a whole different species. Being a creature of its time, it has its axes grind as well, but it does so for the most part subtly, letting the characters and the story carry the message. And it is (oh frabjous day) that rarest of mass media beasties -- The Well Written and Scientifically Plausible Science Fiction Movie.

And in this movie, the apes really do take top billing. (Despite the heavy hitters in the "human" cast -- James Franco, Frieda Pinto, and John Lithgow) it is Andy Serkis -- behind the motion capture and CGI -- as Caesar (along with the other apes) that carries the film. A couple of chimps in the movie show the battered old faces you see in sanctuaries and Nature documentaries -- the Orangutan Maurice is cool (he has a background in the circus, and like Caesar, he knows how to sign) and the one gorilla in the film -- perhaps a little too Kong-like despite his normal size -- is very impressive. Some of the films more moving scenes -- and important points -- are carried in the non-verbal interaction of the apes. Serkis, who was grossly cheated out of Oscar recognition for his role as Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings", again deserves the highest accolades for this performance. (In an interview with NPR he explained how much the technology of motion capture has advanced since he played Gollum.)

Director Wyatt and the rest of the team behind "Rise" deserve the loud praise for their decision not to use any actual apes in the film. They recognized that the issue of apes in entertainment is a serious ethical problem, and they made the humane choice. The film doesn't suffer from it at all. This is a fact that other filmmakers should take note of. (I wish the makers of Water for Elephants, Zookeeper and "The Hangover" had made similar kinds of choices.)

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is not a perfect film. I'm not overly fond of the "there are some things science is not meant to delve into" trope. (Interestingly, it is Frieda Pinto who gets to voice those sentiments in "Rise" -- perhaps so her Indian beauty and exotic accent can lend them portent). I would like to see a serious movie that tackles the question of Uplift -- to borrow David Brin's term -- in all it's implications, without resorting to disaster/horror movie form. I'm also not fond of end-of-the-world stories. I would rather see stories about how we might grapple with and even solve our problems -- about the possibilities of the future -- than about how we will inevitably destroy ourselves. In this case, though, those are minor quibbles about a very good film.

It seems that I seldom see movies any more -- no matter how much fun they may be while I'm watching them -- that can stand the weight of serious thought. "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is a movie both to enjoy in the moment, and to ponder afterwards. That is a pleasure too rare to take for granted.

(Attentive viewers, who are familiar with the original movies, will see that the filmmakers have subtly set the table for the sequel. If it rises to the same high standards as this film, I can't wait.)

On the question of animals in entertainment, interested readers might like to check out my previous postings Tears for Elephants and A Sad Digression.

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

The Chimpanzee in America

2011-08-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Washoe (photo courtesy of Friends of Washoe website)

A few years ago I had the opportunity to travel over to Ellensburg, WA and visit the Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute. The remarkable center, founded by Roger Fouts, is the home to a very special family of Chimpanzees. Their matriarch, Washoe, was the first non-human ever to learn a human language -- American Sign Language. (Other language experiments had been done with chimps -- but those had all used some form of invented symbolic language, not a real human language like ASL.) Even more amazing, Washoe and her companions passed on the language to her adopted son, Louis.

Next of Kin by Roger Fouts

The center is not open to the public on a daily basis, but they have special educational events called Chiposiums where visitors can come in and learn about chimpanzees and see the chimps who live there. Washoe had been one of my heroes for many years, and I can say, without any exaggeration, that Roger Fout's book Next of Kin changed my life. So it was an enormous pleasure to finally see her, in the flesh (and fur). The day I visited it was Louis who was most active, displaying for the guests. But Washoe was seated high up in the common play area, watching everything that went on like the dignified matriarch she was. The whole afternoon I had a hard time speaking to anyone without crying.

That experience became even more poignant the following year, when Washoe died. (Not long before another of my non-human heroes passed on -- Alex the Grey Parrot). I think it is safe to say that Washoe's death affected me more than that of any "celebrity" I can remember. If it had been up to me, she would have been given the Nobel Prize, or at least the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (I can hear the howls of protest from less enlightened primates even as I suggest it.) The medal is supposed to be given to those who "have made an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors." It is hard to imagine who deserves it more than Washoe who, despite having to live most of her life in one form of captivity or another, stepped across the species divide in a way unprecedented in the history of life on earth. Not honoring her with our highest award only shows the intellectual poverty of our species.

So I come to a book like The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll with certain predispositions. I've read a lot about chimps, both in the wild and in captivity, and I know how tragic their stories can often be. Fauna Sanctuary is in rural Quebec, and it is run by Gloria Grow. It is home to chimpanzees rescued from the biomedical industry. Actually "rescued" is a little too kind a word -- most of them were retired by companies that had exploited them for decades and no longer had any use for them. Fauna Sanctuary was created to be a home for them, and hopefully to help them heal.

"Binky stares at me, and I stare back. I am immediately, hopelessly entranced ... the only chimps I've seen before have been in zoos, where they do everything they can to ignore their human visitors. But Binky holds my gaze. What's more, he returns it. With most primates, looking an individual in the eye is seen as a threat. Not so with the chimpanzee ... We are simply two great apes considering each other, sizing each other up, perhaps wondering what the other is thinking, much like two perspective roommates...."

This is Westoll's first encounter with one of the chimps at Fauna, as he arrives on his first day of volunteering there. A trained primatologist turned full-time writer, Westoll is drawn to the chimps for many reasons. He "is surprised at Binky's beauty, his lack of any visible signs of distress." Gloria Glow explains:

"Binky is the luckiest one here," she says. "He had three whole months with his mother before he was taken." Gloria reaches up and gently strokes his enormous fingers. Binky keeps he eyes on me. "He's only recently started pulling out his hair."

And so begins the terrible and beautiful story of the chimps at Fauna Sanctuary. Of:

·         Binky -- tough on the outside, but sensitive and funny underneath.

·         Regis, who loves to paint and listen to music, and suffers from anxiety that only his friend Jethro can calm.

·         Jethro, the peacekeeper.

·         Rachel, abandoned by her owner when she became too old to keep, she enjoyed wearing filly dresses and taking bubble baths -- "now she is very fragile".

·         Yoko, intense, passionate and loyal.

·         Petra, highly intelligent, watchful, always learning.

·         Spock, raised as a human child, prefers female companionship, likes to drink out of a hose.

·         Maya, Spock's foster sister, spends hours peering into treat bags and investigating their contents.

·         Chance, nervous and cautious, "doesn't like peppers on her pizza".

·         Tom, Fauna's most famous resident, "can fit five apples into his mouth at once".

·         Sue Ellen, the elder of the group, creates very intricate nests for herself to sleep in.

·         Pepper, who lived a lab, barely seeing the light of day for twenty-seven years, loves to eat kale and pick tomatoes in the garden.

· And Toby, who loves to groom his friend Rachel and wear a scrunchy on his wrist like a bracelet.

Along the way, Westoll gives us a good (albeit, tragic) history of chimpanzees in America, and the horrific uses they've been put to. But it is ultimately these chimps, so beautiful and damaged and individual, that stay with me and haunt me.

Like Billy Joe.

"Of all the chimps that lived at Fauna, Billy Joe had the most difficult time rediscovering what it meant to be a chimp. Before he was sold to research, Billy was forced to work in the circus, and when he was under the big top he taken on car rides, fishing trips and regular excursions to Diary Queen ... Billy was dependent on humans for all his social and emotional needs. According to Gloria, Billy thought he was more human than chimp.

In the lab, he was hostile, uncooperative, and aggressive. One day, while recovering from surgery, Billy chewed both is thumbs off. At Fauna, his troubles continued. He rejected the other chimps, much preferring to interact with humans, and eventually the other rejected him ... they severely beat him a number of times. That is why he chose to isolate himself."

Billy was a very large chimp, and could be frightening to humans when he displayed aggression. His teeth had all been knocked out when he was young. But

According to Gloria ... Billy had a heartbreaking way of negotiating with his human caregivers in lieu of violence. "He would start doing handstands or lips flaps, just like in the circus ... As if he were saying 'If I entertain you, will you not hurt me?'"

Experts diagnosed Billy as suffering from a recurring depression, "the result of a species-identity disorder" resulting from his fostering by humans as a baby. During Billy's last days, Gloria's responsibilities forced her to leave him.

"I stayed with Billy as long as I could," says Gloria ... "I held him, hugged him, gave him a kiss goodbye. Then everyone told me I had to leave."

That was the last time she ever saw Billy alive.

If wise beings survive on Planet Earth, we will someday look back on the human treatment of Great Apes -- and especially, I'm afraid, of chimpanzees in North America -- as one of the most terrible crimes in history. Equal to the Genocide of Native Americans or the African Slave Trade or the Holocaust. But we will also remember the people who stood against that evil -- Roger Fouts, Jane Goodall, Gloria Grow and others -- the way we remember Oskar Schindler or Harriet Tubman.

If you are not fond of books that you have to read through tears -- tears of sadness, tears of rage, tears of triumph and gratitude -- then The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary is probably not for you. This is book filled with darkness with and light. With suffering and redemption. With cruelty and compassion and incredible courage. It is a book filled with many heroes.

And a few of them are human.

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

What the Barn Swallows Know

2011-08-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

Bird Brain Genius by Ken Korczak

As a bookseller (and as a writer) I have watched the changes sweeping the publishing industry with interest. The rise of ebooks, and of readers like Kindle and Nook, have not been kind to small sellers, but I still find myself excited by the whole knew frontier opening up for online publishing. No one seems to know exactly where it's going, and that is always thrilling. And scary. As the old Chinese proverb/curse says, we live in interesting times.

The upside of the new formats is the rise of independent publishers, many of them aimed at very specific niches -- erotic paranormal romance or zombie apocalypse fiction -- with their own enthusiastic audiences. Those who don't spend a lot of time online, or haven't really looked at what's out there, might be surprised. A new publishing industry is sprouting up, full of diverse voices and perspectives.

The down side is that this new zone, as yet, has very little structure and often lacks the experience, quality control, and filtering that big traditional publishers provide. In many cases, authors are publishing themselves -- something that has always been an option, but which online sales and marketing, and now ebooks, have made incredibly easy. The problem is that these books may never have benefited from professional editing and the kind of feedback that authors traditionally receive on the way to print. (Or its electronic equivalent.)

A really good example of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this new paradigm is Bird Brain Genius by Ken Korczak. The book is available on Amazon Kindle, which is where I stumbled across it. Korczak provides a little back story -- he says that he witnessed the central events when he was working as a newspaper reporter in 1984, and that it was so unbelievable that neither his editor, nor any of the non-fiction publications he sent it to would publish it. Finally, he decided to expand it into a short novel. He makes a point of saying that he no longer cares whether anyone believes it or not, "It's just a great story."

And that, at least, is true.

Bird Bran Genius, set in the farm country of Minnesota, concerns two eccentric, white-trash twins, Cadmus and Buford Dziekonski, who own a failing farm and who happen to be mathematical idiot-savants. The brothers are not good farmers, and their farm, like most of the farms around, is in trouble. None-the-less, Cadmus becomes obsessed with a pair of barn swallows -- who he names Sabik and Bellatrix -- who have built their nest across from the brothers' front porch. Watching the birds -- and "contemplating complex temporal-spatial equations based in chaos theory" -- Cadmus begins to create a bizarre intellectual game.

... he visualized a three-dimensional grid in the large yard that opened east of the farm house. To that he added four-dimensional space-time continuum factors, which only he could grasp effectively. Cadmus' imaginary grid was rectangular, some 75 yards wide by 50 meters high. It was about 50 meters deep. Within the grid, Cadmus further visualized internal cubical sections, and assigned numerical values to each one of them. He also gave them colors to add more variables. After some practice, his powerful imagination could easily and automatically project this mental grid out into the wide space east of the farm house. Sabik and Bellatrix spent much of their time passing through the imaginary grid as they hunted for insects and returned to their nest where the hungry offspring eagerly swallowed the insect victuals. Cadmus soon became absorbed in his game. He noticed that each time Sabik and Bellatrix passed through his mental grid and intersected the individual values assigned to it, they returned to the nest with a specific score. Sometimes Sabik flew through the grid in a way that earned a very high score. At other times, his score was low, at other times middling. Bellatrix did the same.

And so, Tumulus is born. A game based on keeping score of the bird's passages through the imaginary grid. When other people from the town find out about it, they flock to the brothers' farm each evening to listen to Cadmus call the game, complete with its own arcane lexicon and dramatic flourishes.

"Here comes Sabik ... OH! He enters warbling into Purple Sector 9! MOOLTANNA! A good one! He's down, flicks-back, an astro-turn ... WAIT! YIKES! He flickbacks DOUBLE and comes in for a brood roost vigorous! Terrific score, Sabik!! 389 debens!"

The game becomes such a hit that the townspeople begin betting on it, and soon hundreds and hundreds of dollars are changing hands over every round, even though Cadmus and Buford remain innocent of the gambling. Cadmus is concerned only with calling the games, keeping his statistics, and with his growing unease at what the statistics suggest. For the scores of the two birds are steadily increasing. The birds' performance at Tumulus is improving -- as if the birds understand the game, as if they are deliberately competing. Buford, for his part, totally rejects that possibility, and becomes obsessed with finding the hidden mathematical artifact that must be skewing Cadmus's data.

Around this story is the bleak picture of traditional farm life dying. Family farms are being foreclosed, and generations of tradition are disappearing. There is also a sweet, remarkably innocent and romantic love story between the brothers' niece Minerva and the Farm AG agent, whose job it is to foreclose on the Dziekonski farm.

This is a very compelling story, with something of the flavor of Mark Twain's "What Stumped the Blue Jay". It is in the sketching of the colorful characters, the description of the town, the playing of the sentimental and wistful romantic subplot -- and most of all in describing the intriguing mystery of the game of Tumulus -- that the book's strengths lay.

But, unfortunately, it has flaws too. What this feels like, more than anything, is the first draft of a good story by a good writer. I mentioned earlier the lack of structure and feedback that comes from self-publishing, or publishing outside the traditional mold. And this book definitely shows that lack. It has all the kinds of mistakes that every writer makes in early drafts -- punctuation, grammar, shifts in tense, slips in point-of-view, awkward phrasing, and elements of the story that haven't quite jelled. The kinds of things that a few good readers and a good editor help whip into shape. It's a testament to the strength of the story, and the author's raw talent, that the book is still engaging despite these problems.

As it stands, Bird Brain Genius is fun, interesting little story whose lack of polish will, unfortunately, stop a lot of readers from getting through it.

With a little editing and little development here and there, it could be a very good book.

Where the Birds Is

2011-07-27T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Art of Bird Finding by Pete Dunne

"Whether you know it or not," writes Pete Dunne in his new book, The Art of Bird Finding, "you are a bird-finding machine. Under the shell of your modern veneer, stripped down to raw sensory receptors, Mr. and Mrs. Homo Sapiens are genetically to pick up the clues that say: LOOK! LOOK! BIRD HERE."

That's a comforting thought on frustrating days when I can barely make out any of the tiny songbirds flitting about my yard. Much less identify the birds I can hear but never quite locate at the park. Most of us think of ourselves as bird-watchers, although more often the goal seems to be bird identification. But whatever we're looking for (pun intended) the first step is seeing the birds in the first place. And Dunne's wonderfully succinct new guide is devoted to helping us do just that.

As a birder, I probably rely too much on my camera. I'm not fond of binoculars -- mostly because I've never learned to use them effectively, and Dunne has some helpful hints here -- but I found that his discussion of the pros and cons of binoculars applied equally well to how I use the camera.

Think of the advantages that are diminished or nullified when you bring your binoculars up to your eyes. Right off the bat, your view of the world is reduced by about ninety-five percent. Good binoculars offer a field of view of about eight degrees of arc. Your eyes, with birder-enhanced peripheral vision, give you between 100 and 180 degrees of arc. You bring binoculars to your eyes, you've just thrown away your greatest bird-finding advantage -- your ability to perceive the whole world in front of you.

I know I've found this to be true of my camera. In fact, I've found that even though my distance vision is diminished without glasses, standing on my deck bare-eyed I am able to watch the entire yard, watch for the slightest motion or movement. For me, it is these moments of stillness and receptivity that are among the most rewarding parts of birding.

Pete Dunne is one of the most prolific and talented bird writers around -- his books include Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion, The Feather Quest, and the wonderful collection of essay/stories about raptors The Wind Masters. The Art of Birding shows all his usual strengths. For almost anyone, at any level, this book is a valuable trip back to the very beginnings of bird watching, a refresher course on what and where to look, and a guide to shifting our perspective.

Yogi Bera once said that the secret to baseball was just to "hit it where they ain't". The secret of birding then might be described as "look where they is". And Pete Dunne will show us how.

(Books and Beast readers might also want to check out the latest post at Birdland West -- "A Flock of New Books for Birders" featuring the best of recent books on birdwatching, gardening and related topics.)

Writing for the Birds

2011-07-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

(The photos in this blog post -- except for book covers -- were taken by me, copyrighted by me, and can only be used with permission.)

I am standing at the living room window in the early morning (when I should be writing) sipping coffee and watching the yard come to life. There is a bird feeder in the cherry tree by the deck, and every few seconds a tiny black-capped chickadee darts from a bush by the sidewalk, undulating in a quick wave, up and down like a dolphin swimming in the sea, and lands unerringly on the tiny plastic perch of the feeder. They never seem to miss, even when the feeder is swaying in the breeze. And I never get tired of watching them, trying to imagine the very different world they inhabit, only a few feet away from me.

The legendary science fiction editor John W. Campbell used to tell his writers (who included such future luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein) to write an alien character "that thinks as well as a man, but not like a man". My little songbirds, who don't share a common ancestor with me for something like a hundred and eighty million years, are as alien in their way as anything in science fiction. Attempting to see through their eyes (which are sensitive to a much wider range of the spectrum than mine) stretches my imagination to its limits.

A Foray into the World of Animals and Humans

I get some help from Jakob von Uexküll -- a German baron born in 1864 -- a biologist and physiologist, with a deep interest in animal behavior--whose work would become the foundation for the imposingly named field of "biosemiotics" -- literally, the study of the signs and symbols of life.

At first glance, none of this -- chickadees or and old German scientist -- seems to have any relevance to the art of writing (or reading) fiction, but Jakob von Uexküll introduced a concept called the umwelt (um velt) which is invaluable not only in understanding my avian neighbors, but also in the creation of vivid fictional characters.

Imagine the chickadee again. The umwelt is the bird's subjective world. "We must first blow," Uexküll writes, "in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature, to represent the world which it alone knows ... When we ... step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed ... Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together. A new world comes into being."

The chickadees, for instance, can see in the ultraviolet -- they see patterns on plants and animals which are totally invisible to me. They can very likely see the polarization of sunlight and detect directions from it. They may even -- we know this is true of other songbirds -- be able to perceive the magnetic field of the Earth. And what's more, they live in a world much more three dimensional than my own. Where movement, for me, generally takes place on the surface of the world, chickadees are free to move in any direction. They can fly.

To get into the soap bubble of another creature, we must look at a few important elements. What are they capable of perceiving? What is most important in their lives? And how do they act upon the world? These elements define the creature's umwelt or "self-world", and they are the levers which allow us to step into that world.

Chickadees eat insects, seeds, berries. They live in trees and they are, at least in this area, pretty much protected from predators. They are too small and fast to be worth a hawk's time, they don't spend enough time on the ground to fall victim to cats very often. As a result, they are bold, curious, almost fearless. I have leaned over the rail of my porch and looked down into the eyes of a chickadee looking back at me over the distance of a few feet. I am important in their world now because I take care of the feeders, but often the activity of humans, even very close to them, barely registers at all. We are unimportant, mostly nonthreatening, and hence invisible.

I have watched chickadees and hummingbirds share a single tree in my yard. To us, it looks like they share a small space, but I suspect that their umwelts barely overlap. The hummingbirds are interested in syrupy sweet nectar, from flowers and feeders, which in turn fuels their constant hunt for insects. Small, incredibly fast, as maneuverable as dragonflies, and fiercely territorial, they are solitary where the chickadees are social, and so aggressive that Ancient Aztec warriors took hummingbirds as their symbol, and wore their bright feathers into battle. As focused as the hummingbirds are -- they live always on the thin line of survival, where every calorie can be the crucial difference -- I wonder if the incidental chickadees even register on their perception -- any more than songbirds downtown register on the perception of busy humans.

From the outside -- the perspective of an omniscient narrator, perhaps -- these creatures inhabit the same world. But within their individual soap bubbles, what exists and what doesn't, what is important and what is not, what they care about and what they don't, those worlds could be totally different.

The same is true of our fictional characters. I am fond of the omniscient perspective, the view of the Elizabethan novelist who wanted to show us all the levels of society and how they interacted, even when they were oblivious to each other. In modern terms, it's the perspective of the ecologist, who can see how so many living things share the environment, even when they never perceive each other. But as writers, we also have to be able to draw close, to get inside the soap bubbles, and see the world as the individual sees it.

Imagining ourselves into the minds and lives of other creatures -- human, alien, or animal -- is the ultimate creative act. It can be argued that the most important contribution of fiction -- and especially of the novel -- to human culture is exactly this, that it allows us to step outside our own limited experience and see the world from other viewpoints, in other times and places. That it broadens and deepens our sense of fellowship with other creatures. As storytellers, as readers, and as a civilization this is something we desperately need.

So we can fly with the chickadees.

Possum Summer

2011-07-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

Possum Summer by Jen K. Blom

I love possums. And I do realize that not everyone does. ("They look like rats," is what most people say -- a comparison that isn't really fair to possums or rats.) When I started volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitation center a couple of years ago, the possums quickly became my favorites. Sure, the baby squirrels and raccoons are cuter -- but raccoons are hooligans and squirrels can't be trusted. Give me a quiet, civilized possum any day.

At my volunteer orientation the trainer said something that really stuck with me: If you see a possum by the side of the road, you should always check, even if it is obviously dead. Possums are marsupials -- mothers carry their young in a pouch, like a kangaroo. So a female possum that's been hit by a car, for instance, could still have live babies in her pouch. I have, more than once since then, pulled my car over to side of the road and braved traffic to check on the body of dead possum. So far, I haven't found any babies.

So when I heard about Jen K. Blom's new novel Possum Summer I knew I had to read it. The heroine of the book is eleven year old P (short for Princess, a name she hates), and she does find a baby possum. When she takes her dad's cattle dog out into the woods without permission the dog kills a possum, and P rescues the surviving baby. Feeling responsible for his mother's death, she makes a promise to raise him until he is able to live on his own.

But P's not allowed to have pets. Her father , who is serving in Iraq, believes that every animal on a farm must pull its weight. Still, P is a girl who believes in keeping promises, no matter what. She's already working hard to keep her promise to her father, to take care of the farm while he's away. So there's no way she's going to let her new little possum friend -- who names Isaac -- down.

In a time when children's fiction seems to be increasingly full of heavy grown up problems on one side and vampires and other supernatural creatures on the other, Possum Summer takes us back to an earlier kind of children's book. It's the kind of book that I would have loved as a kid and it's a pleasure to discover that I can still enjoy it very much.

P's world is the farmland of western Oklahoma, and she is the kind of stubborn, tomboyish heroine we expect. The tone reminds me strongly of books like Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. (Even Charlotte's Web -- although none of the animals talk.)

This is the kind of children's story where the children inhabit a world almost entirely their own. Where every adult is peripheral and long summer days go on forever. (The adults are so peripheral here that their story threads are all pretty much left hanging -- which doesn't seem at all wrong.)

Indeed that sense of childhood timelessness is so strong in Possum Summer that P and her farm feel more than a little anachronistic. Though she is surrounded by the modern world, she is not of the modern world. (I must admit that I have a hard time believing there is a twelve year old anywhere in the developed world who doesn't have at least a workable knowledge of the internet). Her best friend is a computer geek, but P herself is never even seen watching TV. Her room, we are told, is littered with books, but she doesn't tell us what they are, and we never see her reading them. She does have a wonderful Lookbook -- a journal in which she writes and sketches about her day's adventures. And her passion is totally for the farm, the animals, and the Oklahoma countryside.

But in the best children's fiction that world of childhood is never totally undisturbed. The tensions and dangers of the adult world run just beneath the surface like one of those peaceful, pleasant dreams where we feel a constant tug of dark anxiety. In the case of Possum Summer it comes from the financial problems of farmers, an outbreak of rabies that is threatening local animals, and above all from P's father, who has been injured in Iraq and whose relationship with both his daughters is severely strained. Much of the strength of P's character comes from her struggle to measure up to her father's standards -- to keep the promises she made to him -- and at the same time be true to her own nature, which is very different from his.

I have to say, since this an animal-centered blog, that for animal lovers Possum Summer is both wonderful and heartbreaking. The beauty and harshness of life get equal weight. There are a couple of emotionally wrenching scenes and a climax that is, literally (at least for me) breathtaking.

Ultimately, everyone has to leave the world of childhood. Not all at once, but in a series of steps, each of which can carry a heavy price. Possum Summer is about the time in one girl's life when she takes several very large steps toward the responsibilities of growing up. She meets them in the end with courage and unfailing love.

(Note: Possum Summer is also wonderfully illustrated by Omar Rayyan. If I had seen his drawings of the baby possum Isaac when I was young, I would have fallen in love with the species years before. You can check out more of his delightful work here.)

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

The Rise and Fall of the Animal Planet

2011-07-07T09:08:00.000-07:00


Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance, by Jason Hribal

On May 5, 1922, in the small town of Sedro-Wooley, Washington, an elephant named Tusko escaped from the Al G. Barnes Circus ("famed throughout the country" according to promotional posters) and went on a rampage through town. At least that's the way the papers described it.

Tusko had thrown his trainer and stormed from the animal tent half an hour before show time, while he and other Barnes elephants were being cleaned. His leg irons had been removed in the process. Rumors at the time suggested that the inspiration for his escape was either a severe beating or an aromatic heap of fermented moonshiner’s mash that the hungry Tusko had infiltrated. “At once,” the Courier-Times reported, “two other elephants were mounted and a score of keepers and attendants went after the big brute.” (J. Kingston Pierce, Historylink.org essay number 5270)

Tusko was pursued by circus folk on other elephants and by townspeople "tipping back bottles of ripe 'moon' to heighten the excitement. Differing accounts suggest that Tusko's escape was set off by either an unusually severe beating or a "heap of fermented moonshiner's mash" that Tusko got into. Or both. Either way, he raised quite a ruckus, scared many of the town folks and became one of the most colorful pieces of folklore the small town of Sedro-Wooley can lay claim to.

Beneath the folksy retellings and funny anecdotes, however, the story also offers us a glimpse into what the life of an elephant with a traveling circus -- of which there were hundreds in the early part of the twentieth century -- must have been like. And what we glimpse is not pretty. (You can see my previous posting on elephants in entertainment "Tears For Elephants" here.)

There are many stories like Tusko's (he escaped several times in his career, until it was finally deemed too risky to keep him in the circus, and he was sold to a zoo). And they aren't just historical. Try Googling "tiger escape zoo" and you'll be surprised by how often this happens.

In his ambitious new book Fear of the Animal Planet, historian Jason Hribal has collected a lot of these stories -- ranging from recent events like the escape of Tatiana the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo in 2007 to historical accounts of the life and death of the famous elephant Jumbo, who lived in a zoo in England before being acquired by P.T. Barnum. What the stories have in common is they all concern escapes and attacks -- "fighting back" in Hribal's view. His book is subtitled "The Hidden History of Animal Resistance" and if it did nothing more than collect these stories it would be an incredibly persuasive book. The details of these animals' lives, outbreaks, and deaths have a power that is hard to ignore. (Tatiana was supposedly being taunted by several young men at the zoo who threw things at her, and despite being loose in a zoo full of people for twenty minutes or more, she seemed to go after only those specific targets, ignoring everyone else.)

Unfortunately, that's not all that's in Fear of the Animal Planet, and I'm sorry to have to say that the book as a whole is deeply flawed. I wanted to love it and I am in sympathy with its basic idea. But the presentation is marred by dogmatism, philosophical sloppiness, lack of documentation and a persistent tendency to attribute thoughts and feelings to other creatures as if they were facts in situations where it is simply impossible to know what they were actually thinking. And above all, I think the whole project is crippled by an unnecessary anti-scientific bias that robs it of its richest vein of support and credibility.

Hribal asserts -- you can't really say he argues, because the book doesn't present an argument in any sustained sense -- that these behaviors can be seen as acts of conscious resistance, and that they are comparable to the kinds of resistance that humans mount against oppressive and abusive circumstances. I, personally, think that's a defensible position, but defending it effectively would take either a lot more or a little less than Hribal does in this book.

Fear of the Animal Planet doesn't present an argument -- it takes its own position as axiomatic -- because ultimately it is neither history nor philosophy -- it's a political polemic. And as such, it becomes two dimensional and ineffective. Those who already agree with Hribal don't need the book, and those who don't will be so turned off by his flat rhetoric that they won't respond to the book's most effective element: the stories themselves.

To start with, there is almost no documentation or attribution of sources. There is a brief paragraph at the end of the prologue that spells out, in a general way, the materials that were consulted. But this purports to be a work of history and the lack of detailed documentation and citing of sources is a serious flaw. When one is dealing with little known events and burdened by a controversial thesis, it's best not to give critics another reason to not take you seriously.

Let me look at just one passage that I think represents fairly well my problems with the book. This is from the story of Jumbo, a world famous elephant who eventually became the star attraction of P.T. Barnum's circus. Hribal does a very good job of recounting Jumbo's life and showing us how he became the best known captive animal in the world.

Modern biologists call this developmental period: musth (Hindi word for madness). And they define it as a phase of glandular secretion, higher testosterone-levels, and heighten sexual arousal. In other words, this is a case of over-active and uncontrollable hormones; otherwise known as "heat". One would have hoped the fields of natural science would have moved beyond the 17th century and biological determinism. But to no avail. Non-physiological factors -- such as captivity, poor labor conditions, brutal training methods, or the grind of the entertainment industry -- do not matter. Intellectual maturity and independence of mind are not considered. Rebellious attitudes and vengeful emotions do not exist. Freedom, or the desire for autonomy, is something an elephant could never imagine. Agency is a non-concept.

There's so much wrong with this paragraph that it's almost impossible to know where to start. In general, it sets up a straw-man labeled "science" and whacks away at it without ever once addressing real scientists, real studies or real points-of-view. The recognition of the effects of adolescence is not "biological determinism" -- we recognize all those factors, for instance, in human adolescents -- we even take them into account in explaining their behavior -- and yet we still hold them culpable and responsible for their actions. We recognize both the physiological effects of puberty and "intellectual maturity" (not usually a condition of adolescence), "independence of mind" "the desire for autonomy" and agency. In fact, understanding the effects of biology on behavior is no more determinism than recognizing environmental effects of "poor labor conditions" "brutal training methods" and so on. Apparently social sciences are okay, but biology is too totalitarian.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

The fact is that the image of science that Hribal sets up throughout this book is just wrong. It might be true that a hundred years ago (or as he says in the 17th century) the view he is attacking was the prevailing view among scientists -- although as far back as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, to name just two, there were prominent scientists who were interested in the thought and emotions of animals. Darwin wrote a whole book about it. It certainly isn't true today. The study of animal cognition and animal emotions has exploded in the last couple of decades, and scientists now openly debate questions of intention, thought, desire, and agency when discussing non-humans. Just off the top of my head I could suggest half a dozen (or more) scientists and philosophers -- Mark Bekoff, Jane Goodall, Roger Fouts, Temple Grandin, Irene Pepperberg, Daniel Dennett, Frans de Waal -- who's work bears directly on these questions. Not all of them would agree with Hribal, for sure, but all of them hold a much more nuanced and receptive view of non-human intelligence than Hribal allows for anywhere in his book. And all of their work -- and much more from this rich vein of scientific inquiry -- could have been used to bolster and support Hribal's thesis. But he never even tries.

Let me go on a little bit with the story of Jumbo from the book:

But Jumbo was no scientist, and he certainly did not see himself as a machine. Resistance was his new thought. He flew into terrible rages. He tried repeatedly to escape. He hurled himself against the enclosure.... [Italics added by me]

The problem with this passage -- and it's common of the technique throughout the book -- is more subtle, but also more dangerous. I have written a lot about point-of-view in fiction -- and how traditional points of view can and cannot accommodate non-human consciousness. I think anyone who has read anything I've written in this blog knows I believe in animal agency and consciousness. But Hribal is not writing fiction here, he's writing history -- a serious historian simply does not attribute thoughts and feelings to a subject where no decisive documentation exists. To say that Jumbo's actions strongly imply those kinds of feelings is fair. To just insert them into the story as facts is intellectual dishonesty. Speculation (or mind reading) should be clearly distinguished form historical fact.

Consider it in another context. A historian writing about George Washington would be scrupulous not to attribute thoughts or feelings to the man where they couldn't be supported. And would likely be even more careful when writing, for instance, about someone from another culture whose ideas and preconceptions were likely to be very different. But Hribal, writing not just about another culture, but about other species, feels free to gives us their thoughts and feelings in declaratory sentences with no qualifications and no objective support. Not just as a writer -- but as a lover of animals -- I find that very disturbing.

Hribal draws no distinction between the responses to captivity of a highly social herbivorous creature like an elephant and a mostly solitary predator like a tiger. He attributes exactly the same motives, thoughts and reasons in each case. He doesn't seem to be interested in how their unique biological and evolutionary history shaped their different kinds of perceptions and responses. (This, I guess, is "biological determinism".) A tiger's view of the world would be as different from an elephant's as an elephant's would from a human's. This is similar to a historian writing about incidents in widely divergent societies and times as if everyone involved shared the ideas and perceptions of the dominant culture. When we do it to humans, we call it imperialism. It is, ironically, the very failure Hribal attributes to science -- not trying to understand different species and animals as individuals, but simply projecting our own values, responses and feelings on them.

I don't usually write negative reviews. I prefer to focus on books that are worth praising. But Fear of the Animal Planet is too important a book to ignore. When I first received it from the publisher, I was excited. I was hoping for a book that would really engage in an intelligent, thoughtful way with the complex questions it raises.

Sadly -- despite the importance of the stories it collects -- this is not that book.

Goodbye Alpha Dog: A Review of Dog Sense by John Bradshaw

2011-06-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Dog

John Bradshaw

Roscoe P. Whippet

My dog Roscoe and I had a very unusual relationship. At least, it seemed that way in light of many of the books I was reading about dog training. Sometimes, on a walk in the woods, we would come to a fork in the trail and I would start down one path only to realize that Roscoe wasn't coming. Looking back, I'd see him sitting in his prim upright posture, staring down the other trail. When he sat like that he looked like piece a of Egyptian statuary. If it was a leisurely morning, and I didn't have to be anywhere, I would usually go back and take his path. But on some mornings I had to be at work, and couldn't spare the time. On those days, I would squat down beside him and look down the trail at his level. I couldn't really see what he saw, of course, our eyes were too different. But I knew that, being a whippet mix and a sight hound, he relied on his eyes more than most dogs. I'd scratch his chest and just be there with him for a minute. Usually I'd talk to him. "I know, Buddy. We can't go that way today because I have to get to work, but we'll come back soon, I promise." It didn't really matter what I said. That wasn't the point. I felt like I was acknowledging his preference. I was letting him know that he was heard. Almost always, after a couple of minutes, Roscoe would get up and go with me.

The consummate Sight Hound, Roscoe always loved a view.

Many dog trainers would tell you this is all wrong. You should never, they say, let a dog flaunt your authority. You should always make sure that the dog knows that you are Alpha and you make all the decisions. The reason for this (they say) is that dogs, being essentially wolves, are pack animals and it is in their nature to respond to the pack leader, the Alpha -- and if they don't see you as a strong alpha they will attempt to usurp that role themselves. That's just the way wolves are.

Except it isn't.

I personally have never been comfortable in the "alpha" role. It isn't in my nature. And it wasn't in Roscoe's either. I spent many, many hours with him at the dog park and watched him interact with other dogs. He was a rescue dog, and I suspect he was never properly socialized as a pup (one of the many things we had in common) because he never quite knew how to get into the game other dogs played. He wanted to, but he often ended up hanging out on the edges. There was one thing he was very clear about though: He didn't want to play any dominance games. I never once saw Roscoe try to dominate another dog, and I often saw him make it clear that he wouldn't tolerate being dominated. He had exactly the same attitude toward people.

It just never made sense to me that we would bring these animals into our homes, our lives, if all of our interactions with them were based on always maintaining our vigilance and dominance because at any sign of weakness they would revolt. That seems more like being the overseer of a slave plantation than a loving pet owner.

My most profound moments with dogs -- both as a dog owner and when volunteering in a shelter -- have never been about dominance or control. They've always been about mutual respect.

John Bradshaw -- author of Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet -- says that the dominance model rests on two misconceptions. First, it is simply not true that dogs are just like wolves -- they are descended from wolves, but they have tens of thousands of years of domestication and intensive selection behind them, and it has profoundly altered not just their appearance, but their behavior. And secondly, our whole understanding of the nature of wolf packs is wrong.

Until fairly recently, almost everything we knew about wolf packs was based on observing wolves in captivity. These were essentially artificial collections of wolves that had been forced to live together and could not leave. Therefore, they worked out their relationships any way they could, and that often involved fighting for position in the faux pack. But as scientists have been able to study wolves more in the wild, it turns out that's not at all the way real wolf packs operate. Wolf packs are families. And the same is true of other canine species as well -- Bradshaw also looks at rest of the canine family such as jackals, coyotes and African wild dogs in an attempt to re-create the common "social tool kit" that they inherited from the common ancestors. He concludes that the most striking traits they all share are high sociability and adaptability -- traits that allowed wolves to become dogs and dogs to become man's best friend.

Typically, a solitary male will pair up with a solitary female ... In many species the young leave or are chased away when they are old enough to fend for themselves, but not so in wolves ... the pups may stay with their parents until they are full grown.

Funny, I don't remember ever hearing that from Caesar Milan.

Outside of primates and some bird species, canines are the most social animals on earth. In fact, domestic dogs show a genius for social interaction, and have adapted so well to life with humans that they can read our social signals better than any other creatures. Even young puppies have been shown to pick up on subtle signals, like following a person's gaze to the location of a treat. No other species reads us that well -- not even our nearest primate relatives. (Sometimes, not even our human relatives.)

Chimpanzee Politics

It seems likely (to me) that the whole "Alpha" model says more about primate politics than it does about canines. In our typical fashion, we have projected our own dominance models onto dogs. (For more on the political heritage we share with our simian cousins, check out Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal).

But, no matter what wolves are like, dogs are not wolves. They are the descendants of wolves, in the same way we are descendants of our hominid ancestors. Using modern genetics and the wealth of recent studies on cognition and behavior, Bradshaw rebuilds our vision of who dogs are today. Intelligent creatures with their own special talents -- extremely sensitive ears and noses for instance -- and their own limitations -- they have very little sense of time, they have trouble connecting what's happening now to past or future events, and recent studies show that they can probably feel love but not guilt. (One of the many reasons why punishment is not a very effective way to shape canine behavior.)

I may not be the most objective reviewer -- ask anyone, I'll read just about anything about dogs. But canine evolution, cognition and behavior are among my favorite topics. I've read everything that I can scrounge up on these subjects, and still I found new facts and new insights on almost every page of Bradshaw's book. Dog Sense is one of the most accessible, entertaining and comprehensive overviews of these subjects you're going to find. And for anyone who cares about dogs, it's a fascinating, fun book to read. It opens up new possibilities for our relationship with our closest animal companions.

I just wish that my buddy Roscoe was still around, and that somehow he could read Dog Sense. It would all be old news to him, of course. He was trying to teach me these things his entire life. But he'd be glad to know that we slow humans are finally beginning to get it.

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(You might also be interested in my review of The Loved Dog by Tamar Geller, Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz, and the collective review "Whatever Happened to America's Dog". And for more on the legendary Roscoe P. Whippet, see the "About" page on our sister blog Birdland West.)

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle by Thor Hanson

2011-06-16T07:38:00.000-07:00

(Note: The bird photographs in this blog posting were taken by me, are copyrighted by me, and can only be re-used with my permission.)

Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, by Thor Hanson

"The true mystery of the world," Oscar Wilde said (sounding, unintentionally I'm sure, like a Zen teacher), "is the visible, not the invisible." I think about that idea almost every time I watch birds. A chickadee starts in a bush on the front edge of my yard, darts skyward, and then flies straight through the middle of the cherry tree -- through the close set branches, the thick spring leaves -- and out the other side. It's something we see every day. In fact, all too often, it's something we don't see at all.

And yet, it's a miracle.

Black-capped Chickadee

Forget, for a moment, the wonder of flight itself. Think simply about what it takes for the chickadee to fly at full speed through that tree. The precision control to fly through such tight spaces, avoiding all obstacles. The speed with which eye and brain must process information, even in flickering, constantly changing light. It's a feat that should take our breath away in awe. Every time.

And the magic of birds is closely tied up with the secrets of their most distinctive feature: feathers. Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about feathers apart from the birds themselves, but Thor Hanson, a conservation biologist and author (his previous book was The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda) has. And the result is his new book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle. At the risk of overusing the word, I have to say that the book itself is a kind of miracle too: an enjoyable, well written popular science book that is not only neck deep in real, hands-on science -- from chemistry to evolutionary biology to acoustics and paleontology -- but also manages to take us to the quirky, off-beat places where the human fascination with feathers lives. It's a delightful trip, and if I wanted I could probably write an easy, intriguing review just by listing some of the fascinating nuggets you'll stumble across in this book. I'll try to resist that impulse.


Bird feathers can create color in two different ways, by pigment and by structural properties that effect the refraction of light. Much of the vibrant blue of a Steller's Jay's color, for instance, is due to the refractory properties of the feathers, not just to pigment.

Hanson begins where all things in biology begin -- with evolution. In 1861 a quarryman in Germany uncovered what would become one of the most famous fossils in the world -- the ancient winged creature that scientists named Archaeopteryx. When that fossil made its way to England, it sparked one of the most heated debates in the history of science. On one side, Sir Richard Owen, Director of the natural history at the British Museum, the man who coined the word "dinosaur" and a staunch believer "species were created and altered only by the hand of God." On the other was "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Huxley. On the Origin of the Species was only two years old, and the debate over evolution was front page news. Owen flatly denied that Archaeopteryx was any kind of intermediate step, claiming that it was "simply the earliest known example of a fully formed bird." But Huxley was not convinced. He undertook an ambitious study of avian anatomy, and answered Owen with a series of papers and lectures that showed Archaeopteryx similarities to both birds and reptiles. "But he went further," Hanson writes, "identifying a small dinosaur ... Compsognathus longipes that resembled Archaeopteryx in everything but the feathers .... " There at the very beginning of the debate, Huxley laid out the basis for what most scientists now believe is the inescapable conclusion -- birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and specifically, of a class of bipedal dinosaurs called Theropods.

But the debate goes on.

A young Cooper's Hawk.

Hanson introduces us to Dr. Richard Prum, whose theory of the development of feathers, derived from his knowledge of how feathers grow, has become the framework for modern ideas of feather evolution. To Xing Xu, a Chinese paleontologist who has uncovered some of the most important links in the story of birds (and feathers): Sinosauropteryx prima, the first fossil that showed, definitively, evidence of proto-feathers (dinofuzz) -- Caudipteryx zoui, also a theropod dinosaur, but with distinctive feathered hands and tail -- and many more. And we meet the dissenters, like Alan Feducia, a professor at the University of North Carolina, the de-facto leader of an increasingly marginalized group who call themselves BAND (Birds are Not Dinosaurs).

Tiny songbirds, like these bushtits, are constantly faced with the dual challenges of staying warm and staying cool.

But evolution is only part of the story. Just as fascinating are feathers as they exist today, in all their diversity and wonder. From insulating down to sensitive facial feathers that can read air currents with amazing accuracy to aerodynamic flight feathers as sophisticated as anything humans have designed. Feathers are the most efficient insulating material in the natural world, far outstripping the abilities of skin, hair or scales. For instance, a Golden Crown Kinglet, Hanson tells us, one of the smallest of songbirds, can survive in places where night time temperatures get as low as 17 degrees below zero (-27 C), and devotes the vast majority of its feathers (7 percent of its body weight) to insulation. "The difference between the outdoor air temperature and the cozy space inside a kinglet's feather coat could be as large as an astonishing 140 degrees (Fahrenheit) ...." He goes on to note that hundreds of bird species live at least part of the year above the Arctic Circle, that Penguins incubate their eggs unprotected in the middle of the Antarctic winter, and that the Bar-Headed Goose flies over thirty thousand feet high in its migration over the Himalayas. "At that altitude, the air temperatures and wind chill often combine to dip below -80 degrees Fahrenheit ... Like Kinglets, these birds rely on feathers to insulate their bodies against the elements."

There is much more to Hanson's book, and I can't possibly go into everything. (The flip-side of feathers' insulating power is that birds, whose metabolic rates are much higher than mammals, have had to develop elaborate cooling systems to keep from overheating.) He also shows us some of the ways humans have co-opted bird's feathers -- from fashion to the design of airplane wings to quill pens.

Feathers is a book almost any bird person will love.

Check out my most recent posting Newcomers: Birds of Spring at our sister blog, Birdland West.

You can read more about the evolution of feathers in the recent National Geographic Article, here.

A girl and her Sloth

2011-06-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C CLARKE AWARD 2011

There's a blurb by William Gibson ("Very *very* good!") on the front cover of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, and that seems appropriate. Even though Zoo City is tagged as urban fantasy, we are definitely in Gibson-like terrain. If it's not quite cyber-punk, it's the fantasy equivalent.

Moxyland

Which isn't surprising. Beukes' first novel , Moxyland, was clearly the great-grandchild of Virtual Light or Pattern Recognition. Set in a South Africa that could be today -- or could be a future so near that it's out of date before you finish the book -- it features hackers, streamcast blogs, 'sponsorbabies' (nanotech implanted living advertisements), revolutionaries hiding out in the inner-city 'Sprawl', corporations that are indistinguishable from the government .... Charles Stross called it, "The larval form of a new kind of science fiction munching its way out of the intestines of the wasp-paralyzed caterpillar of cyberpunk." Which seems like a very cyberpunk kind of praise to me.

China Town

This kind of fiction is as much a descendant of Raymond Chandler as it is of science fiction. Neo-noir plots set on the fringes of society (but always involving the decadent and degenerate rich). You could digitally re-master China Town, adding mutants and high tech hackers, giving Faye Dunaway a chic haircut and computer plug in the back of her neck, and it would all work just fine. It's never been about the plot. It's about the mean streets (or the mean paths of cyberspace) and the hard-edged, damaged-but-untarnished hero who's honest eye shows us the world we've made for ourselves. Chandler himself complained while trying to write the screenplay to The Big Sleep that he couldn't keep the plot straight. And really, we could care less.

The Big Sleep

One thing's for sure: Beukes is a good writer, with a sharp feeling for character and world building. Zoo City, where the fringe of society survive on the borders of the law, is a place the police only come heavily armed and the respectable citizens don't come at all (or don't admit when they do.) It is set in an alternate version of modern day Johannesburg, which shares our history -- but only up to a point. This world also experienced (sometime in the last decades of the Twentieth Century, apparently) something called "The Shift". There are hundreds of different explanations of what it is and what it did, but the world is unmistakably different. And the same. Africa is still Africa, torn by civil wars, plagued by AIDS, and South Africa, though far from perfect, is the haven the refuges flee to. Zinzi December, is a former journalist and former junkie (she doesn't seem very proud of either) sent to prison for killing (or causing the death of her brother), who now makes her living finding lost things and writing stories for 419 scams. Those are the kind familiar from your junk e-mail box, lamenting the sufferings of poor orphans and misplaced Nigerian royalty and promising great rewards to anyone kind enough to help (by sending money). Zinzi is very good at tugging the heartstrings of the gullible.

Virtual Light

The most visible effect of the Shift is the appearance of 'the animalled'. All over the world, those who commit acts of deadly violence -- it doesn't seem to draw a distinction between deliberate murder and accidental manslaughter -- are gifted or cursed with a mysterious animal familiar. They just show up, shortly after the incident. No matter where the person is. Even in prison. And they aren't necessarily local animals. Even their type seems to be random, although some claim that they reflect hidden aspects of the person's soul. Zinzi has a sloth.

Along with the animal comes a special power or mashavi -- magical or psychic depending on your point of view. Zinzi for instance, can find lost items. In fact, she can see the threads that connect a person to the things he has lost, writhing around him like umbilical cords or tentacles. It's not always a comfortable gift, but it allows her to function as a low-rent detective.

I won't even try to summarize the plot. Just like a novel by Chandler or Gibson, the plot is complicated, perverse and isn't going to stick with most readers very long. It might not even hold up if you think about it too closely. As I said before, plot has never been the point of this kind of fiction. It's ultimately Zoo City, it's inhabitants, the strange world of the animalled, and the glimpses we get of the effect of the Shift on the wider world, that are fascinating here. And they are very interesting indeed. Beukes approaches the whole idea of her magical world with an almost scientific attitude -- she offers us multiple theories that never quite completely explain what has happened.

Pattern Recognition

I sometimes think that the biggest difference between science fiction and fantasy is the direction in which they face. Fantasy, even urban fantasy set in the present, is always looking backwards at the past. Science fiction looks forward, toward the future, sometimes with hope, sometimes with fear -- usually with a mix. If that's true, then Zoo City, despite its magic powers and mysterious animal familiars, is firmly in the science fiction mindset. It's a portrait of a society dealing with change that comes too rapidly and that no one really understands.

I must add a word of warning about the book's ending. It is over-the-top violent and bloody and many readers (lovers of animals, humans included) might find it disturbing. It's not uncommon in this type of story, for the ending to be the weakest point of the book. Part of the problem is main characters who are essentially observers, and who in the end don't really have much effect on the events they witness. A bigger part is just what I keep saying -- the plot doesn't really matter, and when we get down to the business of tying up all the loose ends (or more often, not tying them up) that becomes a little too obvious. Gibson often suffers from that problem too. (As did Chandler). In the best cases though -- and Zoo City is certainly one of the best -- the ending doesn't override the pleasures that come before it.

Gibson is right. Zoo City is very good.

If you enjoy Books and Beasts, you might also enjoy our sister blog, Birdland West, which focuses on birds and wildlife around West Seattle, in Washington State.

Brute Strength

2011-05-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

Brute Strength by Susan Conant

In the first three pages of Susan Conant's new mystery, Brute Strength, we are introduced to five dogs (three of them Malamutes) and one cat. If that seems to be lot, get used to it -- it's going to be that kind of book. Not long after, at a dinner party, there are no less than ten (human) characters present, most of whom we've never met, or only briefly, before. And as we learn about them Conant is also setting up the book's various plots and subplots, foreshadowing trouble to come, and slipping us clues. It's a lot to take in and it's a tribute to Conant's skill that she handles it so smoothly. It works, like everything else in this book, because the narrator, Holly Winter, is likable and funny and interesting. We sense right away that it's not the plot that we're here for, it's Holly.

For instance, after witnessing an argument between her upstairs neighbor, Rita, and Rita's boyfriend -- both psychologists -- Holly reflects on the difference between their view of the world and hers:

Rita, for whom psychotherapy is a religious vocation ... believes in the power of her chosen form of prayer. For once, I refrained from saying anything about dog worship, the Sacred Animal, God's woofing, furry proof of celestial design and thus of boundless, bounding, leaping, panting love in this otherwise bleak universe ....

And just like that, if you're anything like me, we know we are in the hands of a kindred spirit. For Holly Winter, nothing comes before her dogs. Which is as it should be.

A little later, Holly meets a new neighbor who is wearing the well known "Dog is my co-pilot" sweatshirt.

I owned the t-shirt version, which I'd ordered from Bark, a publication accurately self-described as "the modern dog culture magazine". Because I was afraid that the co-pilot slogan would give offense, I was selective about where I wore the t-shirt. The precaution was ridiculous in that anyone offended by the sentiment would be even more offended by me, unless, of course, I took the time to explain the genuineness of my reverence for all creatures great, hairy and woofy , but the time required would have been days or possibly even weeks, and besides, the average person who hates your t-shirt isn't going to be interested in listening anyway. There's a lot of religious intolerance in the world, isn't there?

I've been a casual fan of Susan Conant's Dog Lover Mysteries for many years. I haven't read them all, and I haven't read them in strictly chronological order, but I've enjoyed every one that I've read. And I also don't remember much about the murder mystery plot in any of them. There are certain mysteries that we read for plot -- for the cleverness of the killing and the brilliance of the deduction -- and there are some that we read for action and suspense. Then there are mysteries that we read because the mystery is really an excuse to hang out with someone we like. These are my favorite kind. I also don't remember much about the plots of Robert B. Parker, Virginia Lanier, or even John D. MacDonald. What I remember are the characters and their world.

When it comes to the mystery, Brute Strength may be the most casual who-done-it I've ever read. Holly is so concerned with her daily life, her dogs, her family and various sub-plots that she doesn't even realize there's a mystery going on until very late in the book. I found it amusing that we, as readers, understand that victims are piling up long before the characters do.

But none of that matters. What is delightful here is Holly's steady stream of observations about life, literature, her friends and neighbors, Cambridge, and of course dogs, dogs, dogs. Holly is a columnist for Dog's World magazine, and the book often has more the feel of a first rate columnist than of a mystery. I may be a little prejudice since we have so much in common -- she's a dog writer who trains malamutes for obedience competition (a task sure to bring snickers from anyone familiar with the breed) and she's currently researching an article on recent studies in canine cognition.

I wonder if she reads my blog?

Susan Conant has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and she's good at it. Brute Strength has the comfortable feel of a well loved, often played with dog toy. The low key suspense is generated by what we know that the main characters do not -- there's a killer nearby who's already struck twice and who has increasing reason to be worried about Holly. The final confrontation packs an unexpected emotional punch and Holly is able (as a writer should) to tie several of the story's themes together.

But I'll leave the final verdict to Holly's beloved Malamutes, who (if they could read) would be sure to throw back their heads and give an enthusiastic "Woo-woo-woo! This one is fun."

If you enjoy Books and Beasts, you might also enjoy our sister blog, Birdland West, which focuses on birds and wildlife around West Seattle, in Washington State.

Two Dogs In Search of a Master

2011-05-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

With all the exciting new technologies at the movies these days -- CGI and 3D being the most obvious -- I think it might be time to revise my personal list of "Books I'd Love to See Made into Movies". No one in Hollywood is beating down my door for recommendations, but it seems like a cool way to kick off the Summer Season, so in the next week or so I'll share some of my selections -- why I love the book, and why I think it could be a great a movie. Today, my number one choice:

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

Everyone knows Watership Down, a great book which was made into a movie years ago -- and could be remade today, beautifully I think. But the Richard Adams novel I love -- one of the books that has had a tremendous influence on me -- is The Plague Dogs. It is the story of Snitter and Rowf, who escape from a medical research facility where they have been involved in horrifying experiments, and flee into the wilderness seeking freedom. Rowf has never known anything but the labs, but Snitter was once the beloved companion of a "true master". Early in the book, while they are still in the labs, they talk about humans and masters:

"A dog stands firm," said Rowf sharply. "A dog never refuses whatever a man requires of him. That's what a dog's for ...As dogs we're born to suffering. It's a bad world for animals -- "

"Rowf, you owe them nothing -- nothing -- they're not masters ... Rowf, we're going to escape! Both of us, through that door -- "

"There might be something worse through that door," said Rowf ....

"Think of the whitecoats, Rowf -- what you told me -- peering down into the tank and watching you. They aren't masters, believe me; I've had a master -- I know. If we could only get out of here we might find a master -- who can tell? -- a proper pack leader. Isn't it worth a try?"

Snitter has his own tragic past. He is convinced that he killed his beloved Master, and after that his owner's family sold him off for medical research. That guilt -- plus the effects of the experimentation he went through in the labs -- weighs heavily on Snitter's mind. He struggles at times for sanity.

But the two dogs do escape, and with the help of a fox, they learn to survive in the wild. Meanwhile, the human world is up in arms. The owners of the laboratory play up the threat of contamination, and a young reporter eager for a big story labels the two canine friends "plague dogs". Soon all sorts of people -- some friendly and sympathetic, some definitely not -- are searching for Snitter and Rowf.

The Plague Dogs is an exciting, suspenseful adventure story that will hold any reader's interest. But it is also much deeper. The book sits astride a curious divide -- between "realistic" novels about animals and the great fantasy tradition of talking animal books (of which Watership Down is one of the best). Snitter and Rowf are fully realized characters, who think and communicate with each other eloquently (as does their friend the Fox). Yet from the human's point of view the behavior and condition of the animals is starkly realistic. Miraculously, this seam never shows. In the world of the book (as perhaps, in our world) the realities seem to fit. Adams has taken the conventions of the talking animal story and used them to create a novel that is part adventure story, part passionate broadside against the abuse of animals and the blindness of humans.

But it is finally Rowf and Snitter who hold us. Maybe the two greatest canine characters in all of English literature. Richly imagined beings -- scarred but noble -- with complete inner lives who also never fail to convince us of their dog-ness. Adam's gift in rendering two such heart wrenching heroes makes this book great. Their peril -- and through their eyes and hearts the peril of the entire animal world in the face of man's blindness -- drive us along through a terrifying, exciting, heart breaking and ultimately triumphant book.

(One of the thought experiments I like to use when thinking about animal characters is: If the descendants of these animals some day become literate, and can look back on our portrayal of them, how will they feel about it? I think most dogs would love Rowf and Snitter as much as I do.)

The Incredible Journey

The Plague Dogs, because of the way it combines all the threads of animal writing , is the heir not only of Watership Down (a heroic fantasy in animal guise), but of The Wind in the Willows, The Incredible Journey, and the "realistic" dog stories of the mid-twentieth century (Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, Lassie Come-Home, etc.) -- and, more indirectly, the tradition of "social issue" novels that goes back through Sinclair Lewis to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Richard Adams has never really received the place he deserves in modern literature. And The Plague Dogs is his greatest work.

Animated Movie Version

The Plague Dogs was made as an animated movie in 2004 (originally released in the UK and in a heavily edited version in the US -- see it here and here), but I think its high time it gets the full feature film treatment. Done right -- by a Director who would flinch from neither sentiment nor horror -- The Plague Dogs could also be the best animal movie ever. I would be there on opening night to see it.

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Traveler

And for anyone who loves Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, Richard Adams is also the author of several other very interesting books. Notably: Shardik, a fantasy about the great hunter Kelderek who pursues the nearly divine Great Bear Shardik "across the length and breadth of a fabled world"; Maia, a more human focused (and wonderfully exotic) epic fantasy, set in the same universe (apparently) as Shardik; and especially for Books and Beast readers, Traveler, a delightful retelling of the life of Robert E. Lee from the perspective of his faithful horse. I encourage everyone to search these books out.

Shardik

If you enjoy Books and Beasts, you might also enjoy our sister blog, Birdland West, which focuses on birds and wildlife around West Seattle, in Washington State.

Tears For Elephants

2011-05-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

(My review of Water For Elephants -- the book -- can be seen here.)

A few years ago the animal advocacy group I volunteer for was organizing pickets of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, which comes annually to Everett Washington. They don't come to Seattle anymore. Some people attribute this to protests, although the circus claims that its only because the Event Center in Everett is a more economical venue. I was very conflicted when I first heard about the protests. I remember my father taking me to the circus as a kid and being totally captivated by the magic of the big show. (I've always had a weakness for spectacle). But I know that Ringling Brothers has a long history of being cited for problems with its animal handling, and that the very issue of keeping elephants in captivity -- much less training them to do circus acts -- is problematic.

I decided that I wanted to investigate for myself.

The first person I talked to was the PR director for our organization. She once worked for PETA and was now involved in coordinating the circus protests. She gave me a lot of background information on Ringling Brothers, including an undercover video taken of training in the circus (which I've never been able to watch more than a couple of minutes of). But I was still conflicted -- there was still a little kid in me who didn't want to give up the dream of the circus (and who loves having the chance to see elephants in person, whether it be in circuses or zoos). So I contacted the local PR people for Ringling Brothers and managed to wrangle a press pass to talk to people inside the show. I went up on the first night that they were open, and was treated very well. Ringling Brothers goes to great lengths to make local press feel comfortable. (A large part of the press section of their website is devoted to issues about animal welfare, litigation and stressing their role in elephant conservation). I was given a trainer to show me around, take me backstage and see the elephants waiting for the show. They seemed to be at ease even with all the excitement around them. The trainer talked about her love for the animals -- which seemed genuine -- and how she had given up a previous career to train for this one -- "run away and join the circus" she joked. She reminded me P.T. Barnum (known as a reliable source) said the two pillars on which the circus rests are clowns and elephants, and that following that mandate the company had established the world famous Clown College as well as a Center for Elephant Conservation -- a 200 acre facility in Florida devoted to "conservation, breeding and understanding". (You can see Ringling Brothers' description of the facility here.) She told me that she had never seen animals mistreated, and that his particular unit of the circus, which she had been with for a long time, had never had an animal death since she had been working there. It was a very impressive presentation.

And it was mostly untrue.

It turns out that this very same unit had a big cat die on their previous stop, under what the papers described as "suspicious" circumstances. And that this unit, and Ringling Brothers as a whole, had an unusually high rate of animal attrition as well as a checkered record with Federal inspectors. They were also involved in court cases and litigation, which they usually managed to keep tied up in the court for many years.

So much for the magic of the Circus.

I thought about that experience though, when I heard that they were going to make a movie out of Sarah Gruen's book Water For Elephants. I love the book -- which deals openly with the subject of animal abuse -- and was excited about the idea of it being a movie. But I was also disturbed. As a rule, I'm really uncomfortable with the use of exotic wild animals in entertainment. It promotes their being kept in captivity and creates a whole constellation of problems. A few years ago I refused to see the movie Speed Racer (which the Geek in me really wanted to see) because of reports from the Humane Society that the chimpanzee used in the film had been struck and beaten on the set. Using Great Apes in entertainment is a practice that I oppose, so even the directors' choice to use a real chimpanzee was upsetting.

What I hoped, when I first heard about Water for Elephants, was that they would do something really innovative, like creating CGI elephants (and other animals) instead of using real ones. With today's technology it could be done convincingly and could be used to add to the dark and romantic atmosphere of the story. That's not what they decided to do.

Once again, I was prepared to put my misgivings aside. I have a great respect for Sara Gruen and I know that she is passionately devoted to animals and their welfare. (There's a wonderful picture of her on her website playing with Thai, the elephant "star" of the movie.) When the movie came out I looked up the reviews from the American Humane Society, which monitors the use of animals in films and television. They gave the film a rating of "Outstanding" and certified it as "No animals were harmed". So I told myself I should just stop worrying and enjoy the movie.

Now, reports are surfacing about the company that trained Thai, the elephant in the movie. KTLA in Los Angeles -- as well as other sources around the country -- are reporting on undercover video released by Animal Defenders International. (You can see the KTLA report here.) The organization which trained Thai is called "Have Trunk Will Travel", and according to its website it is a privately funded organization that uses the proceeds from giving elephant shows, rides and providing elephants for movies to "care for elephants and provide for their future". The video shows elephants -- including baby elephants and including Thai -- being hit with a "bull hook", a long, sharp pointed "tool" which is used on elephants (and which, ironically, is shown disapprovingly in Gruen's book) as well as with electrical shocks.

The bottom line is that there simply is no way for these animals to be kept, humanely, in captivity. And there is no way they learned such unnatural behaviors as standing on their heads without questionable training techniques. The public needs to know this. We need to know when we support these activities, when we go see movies that use exotic wild animal like elephants or Great Apes, we are supporting a tradition that is rooted in cruelty and suffering.

The Humane Society does a great job of monitoring the treatment of animals on movie sets. But perhaps it needs to go much further. Perhaps they need to monitor and certify trainers, and refuse to give their designation to movies that don't used certified trainers. Perhaps, they need to simply accept that some animals cannot be humanely used for entertainment, and that giving a "No Animals Were Harmed" designation to any film which uses these animals is unacceptable. With today's technology, it is doubly unnecessary.

I, for one, will not go see movies, or live performances, with elephants or Great Apes in them again. No matter how much I want to believe in the "magic", the reality is too sad.

I'm done.

If you are interested in learning more about the horrendous history of exotic animals in entertainment, a good book to star with is Visions of Caliban, by Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall. This book is about chimpanzees, not elephants, but the sections on the use of apes in movies is must reading. It reveals the heartbreaking fate of many animals, including the orangutan who "starred" with Clint Eastwood in Every Which Way But Loose. Animal lovers should definitely read it.

Water for Elephants

2011-05-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Being in the used book business, I have a different perspective on bestsellers. I have learned that I don't have to rush out and buy the hot new novel because sooner or later it will show up on my sorting table. A few years ago, while I was waiting to run across a copy of Sara Gruen's novel Water For Elephants, I found, totally by accident, her first novel Riding Lessons. I had just finished reading Jane Smiley's book Horse Heaven, which I loved, so I was excited about the possibility of another great horse novel. Riding Lessons was nothing like Horse Heaven -- Gruen's debut book is essentially a romance novel set on a horse farm, with some family drama thrown in. The horses are a very real presence and the book was enjoyable. I felt, toward the end, that the main character's handwringing and soul searching went on a bit too long, and the outcome was predictable, but I liked the book. And I kept looking for Water for Elephants.

Of course, everyone knows by now that Gruen's second book was a smash hit -- a bestseller around the world that has recently been made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. (I haven't seen the movie, though I plan to, so I won't comment on it here.) After Riding Lessons, I expected to like Water For Elephants -- after all, it had a depression era circus setting, lots of animals including Rosie the Elephant. How could that not be appealing? But Water For Elephants is a different class of book entirely -- it is magic. The unusual setting is richly evoked, the characters are eccentric and engaging, both sharp edged and appealingly vulnerable. I can't easily think of another example of a writer who has made such a leap between her first and second books. Going from Riding Lessons to Water for Elephants is going from romance to Romance. We're in the world of doomed love and haunted heroes now and the mysterious and menacing backdrop of the traveling circus is the perfect setting.

Sophie's Choice, by William Styron

Because of the archetypal love triangle at its core -- the naive young hero, the sad beautiful girl with secrets, and her charismatic, demonic husband -- Water for Elephants reminded me of Sophie's Choice. Of course, the darkness surrounding the characters in Water is not the all-encompassing darkness of the Holocaust, as it is in Styron's masterpiece. (And Marlena is not Sophie, one of the richest characters in modern literature -- Marlena is the least realized of all the characters and for good reason -- she's not the books true heroine.) The darkness here is the depression, the poverty of the country through which the circuses travel and the constant threat of failure which hangs over their heads. And also, unspoken but keenly felt, the darkness of the human relationship to the animals on which they depend. Animals are everywhere in Water for Elephants, as atmosphere and background, as metaphor and reflection on human behavior, and (at least in one magnificent case) as characters.

The hero of the novel, Jacob, is a young veterinary student who has flunked out of (or quit) school after the death of his parents and who lands quite by accident in the traveling circus. The show's megaerie includes horses (which the love interest, Marlena rides in the most popular act), a yak, a polar bear, an orangutan -- all of which become Jacob's charges. But it is shortly after Jacob joins that the show's owner, Uncle Al, buys out another foundering circus and acquires Rosy.

The elephant looms against the far sidewall, an enormous beast the color of storm clouds ...at least ten feet tall at the shoulder. Her skin is mottled and cracked like a scorched riverbed from the tip of her trunk all the way down to her wide feet. Only her ears are smooth. She peers at us with eerily human eyes. They're amber, set deep in her head, and ringed with outrageously long lashes ....

Her trunk reaches out to us, moving like an independent creature. It waves in front of August, then Marlena, an finally, me. At the end of it, a fingerlike protrusion wiggles and gasps. The nostrils open and close, snuffing and blowing, and then the trunk retreats. It swings in front of her like a pendulum, an enormous an muscled worm. Its finger grasps stray pieces of hay from the ground and drops them again. I watch the swaying trunk and wish it would come back. I hold my hand out in offering, but it doesn't return.

It's interesting that Gruen lingers longer over the first meeting of Jacob and Rosie than he does over Jacob's meeting with Marlena. And indeed, it is Rosie as much as the girl that Jacob will remember tenderly in his old age. Rosie, too -- maybe in truth, only -- is Jacob's lost and tragic love.

Today we are so used to images of animals -- to photographs and nature programs on TV and even IMAX documentaries in larger than life size -- that remembering what it was like in the time period Gruen writes about is very difficult. In Depression era America, most people had seen, at most, grainy photographs or drawings of exotic animals. Orangutans and polar bears and yaks were almost mythological. And bringing a creature the size of Rosie -- with the imposing presence of a full grown elephant -- to small town America (America before TVs or even radios were common) would have been like touring a dinosaur today. Only more so, because we've all seen Jurassic Park and a hundred other convincing, lifelike simulations of dinosaurs. P.T. Barnum often said that the circus rested on two legs, clowns and elephants. That's what the people wanted.

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The description of Rosie reminds me first of Joseph Conrad. There is in that monolithic image, something of the impenetrable otherness that Conrad saw in Africa and Africans. The "other" is always the point at which the empathic imagination fails. The greatest of writers -- think of Tolstoy -- reached the furthest. In War and Peace Tolstoy depicted the interior lives of hundreds of characters and even horses. Conrad's empathy failed when it approached Africans. Melville could stand in awe of Moby Dick, be frightened and enraptured by the whale, but couldn't imagine its world. Even Faulkner, who alone among great modern writers had a powerful empathy for nature and how the destruction of nature was linked to the destruction of Native peoples and the subjugation of blacks -- even Faulkner couldn't see Old Ben as anything but "other". What a different story "The Bear" might be if Old Ben's perspective were included.

But we notice something in the description of Rosie. The monolith is not just standing mute. She reaches out. She gestures at each of the main characters. We feel that she wants to understand them. To make contact. And Jacob responds. That response -- much more than the entertaining but predictable love triangle between August, Marlena and Jacob -- is the heartbeat of Water For Elephants.

Ape House by Sara Gruen

In her next novel, Ape House, Sara Gruen chose to write about Bonobos -- in many ways the most human of non-human primates, and made the decision to include the Bonobos as fully fledged characters.

I have a review of Ape House, and more about Water for Elephants, coming soon.

"How the Dead Dream" (Lydia Millet Review/interview Part Two)

2011-04-28T16:10:00.000-07:00

(You can see the first part of my review of Lydia Millet's books, especially Love in Infant Monkeys here)

How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet's most recent novel, is described as being "the first book of a trilogy dealing with extinction." It is a very accomplished book, full of a sense of pity and awe that at moments almost overwhelmed me. Ms. Millet was kind enough to answer some questions for our blog, and I asked her about taking on a topic of such size and complexity:

The series isn’t only about extinction, but it circles the idea. The second and third books come out this fall and next — they’re called Ghost Lights and Magnificence — and they continue with the same people from How the Dead Dream, along the same chronology, but have different protagonists. In Ghost Lights, the one coming out soonest, the connection with extinction is fairly abstract; this is mainly a story about a devoted father who discovers his wife’s infidelity and takes off into the jungle to get away from her. In Magnificence the connection comes into clear focus again: that same wife, who was unfaithful, inherits an old mansion full of taxidermy mounts.

I also asked her about her background, and what it was that brought her to such an unusual theme:

I’ve been obsessed with animals always, and with extinction for at least the past twenty years since I became aware of the extinction crisis. Since roughly 1996 I’ve worked in endangered species advocacy, in one way or another, after doing a graduate degree in environmental policy and economics. So it was inevitable I would write about these matters. It took me a while to get there because the task is a hard one and delicate to negotiate.

How the Dead Dream is the story of T., a young man who grows up with an almost fetishistic attachment to money and becomes a successful real estate developer. He is expert at the art of making himself useful to those around him, and yet he lives at some remove from all of them, not really connecting. T. seems unaware of his isolation, however, until one night on the way to Las Vegas he runs over a coyote on the freeway. He stops to see what he has hit, and unwittingly opens himself to an experience that will change his life.

He willed himself not look at her legs, to try and ignore what was back there bleeding ... He looked only at her face and her side to see if she was still breathing. But despite the fact that he was not looking, as he sat beside her, he imagined the shock from the ruined legs coursing through her body, what must be the blind surge of pain as the end closed in ... She was dying in the smells of asphalt, exhaust, and gasoline, no doubt also the smell of her own blood, and him, and other smells he could not know himself.

The fullness, the terrible sympathy!

Had he felt this before, he wondered? Maybe when he was a boy? Animals died by the road and you saw them all the time, everyone did. You saw them lying there, so obvious in their deadness, sad lumps of dirty meat; you saw their limp furry masses thrown up like flowers along the yellow stripes, the tumbly asphalt edges. You saw the red insides all exposed. You though: that is the difference between them and me. My insides are firmly contained.

Reading that passage, I couldn't help but remember a similar point of realization in my own life. A few years ago I started volunteering at a wildlife rehab center and one of the animals I worked with most often was the opossum. I often had to handle and clean up after the older opossum, and I also learned to tube feed the tiny babies (opossum are marsupials, so they don't have the same kind of nursing instincts that other mammals have -- you can feed baby squirrels, for instance, with a syringe which they will eagerly suck on, but opossum have to be tube fed). In our orientation, the trainer mentioned that mother opossum that are hit by cars, often have babies still alive in their pouches, and that it's important to check the pouches, because the babies can be save. A few weeks later, I passed an opossum who had died in the middle of the road, and with the lesson still fresh in my mind I pulled over to the side, watched for traffic, and ran out to check the body. It turned out to be a male, but getting so close to the dead opossum, a member of a species I had been coming to know and feel some affection for, suddenly made me think about all the animals we see dead in the city, which we so easily pass by -- each in its own sense an individual, with an individual life that matters to it.

T., in Millet's novel, has a similar experience:

And were I to lie on the side of the road dying, it would be nothing like that. No one would drive around me: the cars would stop, tens upon hundreds of them; there would be lines of stopped traffic for miles as they removed my body, flashing their red and blue lights of crisis and competence.

Presently he realized that her flank had ceased to rise and fall ... Where was the ambulance? No: he was all she had. All her lights, her rescue workers.

It was just a coyote. No one would fault him for leaving.

And yet he felt confused.

"Good girl," he whispered.

I asked Lydia Millet about her own relationship with animals. Did she have many pets growing up? What did she think were the most important lessons she'd learned from relationships with animals.

Growing up, I had cats, birds, fish, guinea pigs, mice and one large rabbit. What I’ve chiefly learned from my pets: There’s a language barrier between us. My pug dog is indifferent to my remarks about the gold standard and medical marijuana. I’m willing to live with that, but what about when I talk to her about her food issues? Bad breath? There I wish we could communicate better. Frankly the thing worries me.

Indeed, this theme of otherness -- of the wall of non-communication that separates us from animals, is a theme that runs through Millet's work. In How the Dead Dream and even more explicitly in the stories in Love in Infant Monkeys (her 2009 story collection which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) there is always a certain opaqueness to the animals -- its hard even to call them characters -- but also a kind of realism which is rare in fiction. It seems that in most fiction animals are either part of the setting, just there as backdrop like the family pet on a sit-com, or they are used metaphorically and allegorically (as for example in much magic realism, or The Life of Pi by Yann Martel). I never get that impression from Millet's animals. Even when they are already dead, as the Pheasant shot by Madonna just before the beginning of the story "Sexing the Pheasant", they have a sense of integrity and independence -- that is, they are there in their own right, and whatever it is that humans are trying to make of them never quite encompasses them -- they are unknowable, but also not co-opted.

About why animals have become so important in her fiction -- and what about our relationship to them most captures here imagination, Millet says:

Partly the unknowability of animals’ interior experience, partly a sense of the deep privilege of still living in a world with that unknown difference all around us, that abundance of being. I fear a future in which the world is so impoverished of wild creatures that all that remains is a truncated version of us — us and our toys and our machines, the things that we’ve made and nothing else. That hovers over me as a likely and terrible prospect.

That fear also reverberates in her work. I asked her What she thinks about the possibility of introducing non-human points of view into fiction? Can we get outside our own projections well enough to really try to imagine their worlds? Is the problem or representing animals in fiction more difficult than the perennial issues of human writers representing different races, nationalities, genders?

Far more difficult. There have been some noble literary tries at this, to write from the supposed POV of an animal, and the effort shows — Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, for instance, almost succeeded in crafting a viable elephant POV, it had some moments of inspiration and certainly there was insight there (Gowdy’s such a talented writer), but also in some particular aesthetic ways it cringingly failed, as has, so far, every such attempt. I think the trouble is twofold: One, we don’t know animal language and so we can’t in most cases even presume to elaborate the nature of their subjectivity. Two, exactly what is fascinating about nonhuman animals is their not-us-ness in its infinite variety. So you can make them into us, when you write about them — as in many children’s stories, a convention I love. Or you can try in literature to evoke them as narrators, but in most cases that second, loftier project will fail. It will fail precisely because it promises the impossible and so can only deliver the unbelievable. A writer may, in writing say a chipmunk narrator, create a thing that passes for being an imagined rendition of chipmunk, but the likelihood that such a creation will succeed in suspending disbelief, be subtle and complex, and also produce an enticing simulacrum of chipmunkness is highly remote.

As a writer -- and as someone who works and lives closely with animals -- I don't want to believe that Millet is right about that. I also suspect that this perception of "unknowability" is tied in a way that is not immediately obvious, to the fear which she expressed before, that fear of the loss of otherness and being trapped in a world entirely of our own making.

Of course, it was partly because of my own preoccupation with these questions that I began "Books and Beasts" in the first place. So I will be returning to them again in the very near future.

Related Posts:

Love in Infant Monkeys (Lydia Millet review Part One)

Questioning Point of View

Love in Infant Monkeys (Lydia Millet review/interview Part One)

2011-04-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet

I believe I was in high school when I first read about Harry Harlow's famous studies with infant monkeys. In the classic experiment, the baby monkeys were raised in isolation, and they were given a choice between a surrogate mother made of wire and one made of terrycloth. In one version of the experiment, the "soft" mother offered no food while the wire one did. In the reverse version, the terrycloth surrogate offered food and the wire one did not. What Harlow found was that the monkeys always preferred the soft mothers, even when they didn't give food, and they only chose the wire mothers when they needed food. These experiments were considered landmarks in the study of infant imprinting and are still referenced in psychology texts today. They are one of the studies that everyone with an interest in psychology knows about, but often without being intimately aware of, or giving much thought to, how they were conducted. They've become part of the background of psychology, something taken for granted and often cited, like a metaphor whose literal meaning we have forgotten.

The truth of Harry Harlow's experiments is a little harder to take. In the fifties and sixties he conducted numerous experiments on the effects of total and partial isolation on the behavior and mental states of rhesus monkeys. These were infant monkeys taken from their mothers soon after birth. In addition to the often cited "surrogate mother" experiments, Harlow and his students also kept monkeys in total isolation for extended periods of time. This isolation produced monkeys with extreme psychological disturbances, including catatonia, repetitive stereotyped movement around their cages, and self-mutilation. (You can find a video of Harry explaining his most famous experiment on YouTube . The "mad scientist" feel is hard to miss. You can also find a detailed and surprisingly uncritical description of the experiments at a site called Adoption History Project . There's a somewhat more critical description on Wikipedia -- but the reference notes to that article show that similar experiments in the effects of deprivation and manipulation of maternal bonds were still going on with rats and mice, at least as recently as the 1980's and '90's).

Harry Harlow called his most famous paper, first published in Scientific American in 1959, "Love in Infant Monkeys". He is quite open about his reasons for performing these experiments on his chosen subjects:

The first love of the human infant is for his mother. The tender intimacy of this attachment is such that it is sometimes regarded as a sacred or mystical force, an instinct incapable of analysis. No doubt such compunctions, along with the obvious obstacles in the way of objective study, have hampered experimental observation of the bonds between child and mother ... it is difficult, if not impossible, to use human infants as subjects for the studies necessary to break through the present speculative impasse. . . . Clearly research into the infant-mother relationship has need of a more suitable laboratory animal. We believe we have found it in the infant monkey.

Lydia Millet borrowed Harlow's title -- and Harlow himself -- for the central story of her 2009 short story collection -- "Love in Infant Monkeys". This collection, which was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, is situated at "the rare intersection of wilderness and celebrity" (according to the jacket copy). Each of the stories is built around the encounter between a famous human and an animal -- some very tenuous, some intimate -- and as a collection the stories show an impressive range of style, technique and point of view. It has the titillation of a supermarket tabloid -- all those celebrities and their "hidden" lives -- wrapped up in stories that are at once accessible and challenging. The best of them pack an emotional charge that will stay with a reader (they have with me), and as a whole the collection is one of the smartest I've read in a long time. Millet seems to be a writer who thinks deeply about difficult problems and isn't afraid to let them remain difficult on the page.

But let's go back for a moment to Harry Harlow.

Millet's story adopts a distanced, almost biographical tone. One of the greatest pleasures of this collection is its rich variety of points-of-view. The stories contain everything from stream-of-consciousness (Madonna after shooting a pheasant on her English estate) to hearsay (a wife recounting an incident that happened to her husband), to fairly straight forward first and third person stories. I was delighted to see so much range so I asked Millet about point-of-view and how conscious her decisions about it are while writing:

I don’t typically think about point of view, I have that when I start; in this collection the voice was demanded by the celebrity-animal conjunction, I felt, where there wasn’t much room for choice on my part. I couldn’t have written about Madonna without interior monologue, or about Harry Harlow in the first person; these were dictated, form by content.

"Love in Infant Monkeys" (the story) begins with an almost text-book tone:

Harry Harlow had a general hypothesis: Mothers are useful, in scientific terms. They have an intrinsic value, even beyond their breast milk. Call it their company.

One of the less high-minded pleasures of this collection is guessing exactly where the real lives of famous people end and fiction begins. With some stories its easier. For instance:

But he spoke harshly of his test subjects. "The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out to be a property I can publish," he said. "I don't have any love for them. I never have. How could you love a monkey?"

I'm not sure how much those words reflect either Harry Harlow's feelings -- or his publicly stated feelings -- about monkeys. Indeed, I couldn't find any public statements from Harlow that seemed to reflect feelings at all. He talked about feelings, as a subject for scientific study, but never seems to have expressed his feelings at all.

More importantly -- in the world of Millet's story -- we still can't be sure how much Harlow's words reflect his true feelings, and how much they reflect a repression of feeling that is killing him. He wanders through his laboratory, checking on the monkeys in his "pits of despair" -- the total isolation tanks in which he confines young monkeys to observe the effects. He singles out one young female who is "still plucky ... still game to try and get out, to change her situation." But he knows that the end is always defeat, surrender and depression. Harry himself seems to be sinking into a pit of despair -- he is haunted by dreams of monkey mothers, fierce and protective, forced to watch their infants wasting away. The bleakness and hopelessness, for both the subjects and the scientist, is inescapable.

I will continue the review of "Love in Infant Monkeys" along with Lydia Millet's most recent novel "How the Dead Dream", and have more of my interview with her in my next posting.