Dolphin intimacy and other strange tales of human-animal interactions

26 Jun 2013


Wired: What's your earliest memory of an interaction with an animal?

I watched a lot of wildlife television shows on PBS -- but I grew up in suburban New Jersey, with hardly any exposure to actual animals.

There was a brook behind my house, which sounds idyllic, but wasn't. It was a weedy mess. The banks were paved into concrete slopes. My mother wouldn't let me go down there because she worried about ticks and teenagers smoking cigarettes. But, most mornings, I'd stop on the overpass during my walk to school and look down into the water for a while, trying to spot fish or frogs. I don't remember ever seeing any fish or frogs -- I'm not even sure it would have been possible from that height. But I do remember standing there, burning to see some fish or frogs.

That's the perspective I wrote Wild Ones from -- a perspective I think a lot of urban and suburban people share.

We seem subtly enthralled with these creatures we seldom see -- invested in them, imaginatively, but not always sure what to do with that emotion. You can see it trickling out in strange ways: not just giving money to wildlife conservation groups, but wearing t-shirts with birds and narwhals silk-screened on them, or passing around Internet videos of black bears breaking into pickup trucks.

Did you have pets as a kid?
I had a newt named Andre the Giant. I also had a guinea pig named Sir Cavendish who we had to put down after a series of mysterious rectal tumors.

How did you decide to write this book?
In 2008, my wife and I had our first child, a daughter named Isla. Immediately, our house filled up with cutesy animal paraphernalia: sippy cups with polar bears on them, owl onesies, butterfly mobiles, rubber giraffe teethers.

At the time, I was starting to report on conservation for the

New York Times Magazine. I was learning about this great storm of extinction we're living through, but also about the meticulous and sometimes preposterous-looking ways conservationists must now work to help species survive, like teaching condors not to perch on power lines, or employing a woman to sit deep inside a dam and stare through an underwater window, counting each endangered salmon that swims by.

This was all news to me. I realised that my ideas about wildlife really weren't so different, or better informed, than the cutesy animal kingdom my daughter was being introduced to. I got curious about how the stories we tell about animals -- these romantic ideas of wildness and nature -- stack up against the reality. I found that, in a world where so many species are dependent on our hard work and empathy for their survival, those stories actually shape the reality. Our imaginations are an ecological force.

John Mooallem

Who are the most interesting human or animal characters you came across in your research?
It's hard to choose! For example, I met Dennis "The Bear Man" Compayre in Churchill Manitoba -- an ecotourism hotspot in the sub-arctic that bills itself as the Polar Bear Capitol of the World. About ten years ago, Dennis launched a little ramshackle startup, live-streaming footage of wild polar bears from a moon-roverish buggy on monster truck tires that he drove around the tundra outside town. A bear he nicknamed Dancer would follow him like a loyal hound dog, sometimes dancing alongside the buggy on its hind legs while Dennis chucked it a sausage.

But as environmentalists and marketers turned the polar bear into an icon of climate change -- a mascot to rally action --

Dennis' access to the bears was essentially cut off; his webcam wasn't seen as the best, most productive use of the polar bear's image. An NGO took over, got some corporate funding, and turned the buggy into a mobile television studio for educational programs about climate change.

Dennis took this pretty hard. Surprisingly, most locals I met in Churchill don't even believe in climate change and resent how environmentalists have Disneyfied polar bears, rebranding their fearsome neighbors as delicate, helpless victims. "People come up here now with a lump in their throat because they think this bear is doomed," Dennis told me. "Not for the joy of being with a bear, and seeing a bear in the wild."

What is the most hilarious animal tale in the book?
There's a lot of history in the book -- I wanted to track how America's feelings about animals have changed over time -- and I got especially wrapped up in the hippie-fueled Save the Whales movement of the late 60s and early 70s. Within only a few years, whales went from being seen as big bags of oil to be harpooned and carved up, to blubbery deities whose amorous, pacifist lifestyle "could be an incredible teacher to us," as one activist put it.

And that led me to the story of the woman who lived with a dolphin.

There was a lab in St. Thomas dedicated to communicating with dolphins, which were presumed to be a higher intelligence. It was run by a former Navy neuroscientist; Carl Sagan liked to visit. In 1965, a woman named Margaret Howe decided that the best way to establish cross-species communication with a dolphin would be to move in with one -- like a study-abroad immersion program. So she lived with a bottlenose named Peter for two and a half months in a specially built "flooded house." There was a kitchenette, an office with a chair and a desk, and a cot -- all in twenty-two inches of water. She spent every day patiently trying to teach Peter to say her name or count to five, and wore bright red lipstick so that Peter could better track the movements of her mouth. They also watched television. "No matter how long it takes," Howe assured Lilly, "no matter how much work, this dolphin is going to learn to speak English."

It didn't go so well. Howe had imprisoned herself with a dolphin and was quickly crushed by loneliness and despair. (She also complained of chafing.) Peter was rambunctious and uncooperative, ramming her shins and prodding her with his constant erections.

Howe wound up having to give the dolphin hand jobs, to calm him down.

Right, of course, who wouldn't?
I love this story because, like a lot of stories I tell in the book, there's a glaringly hilarious element to it, but the people involved were motivated by a certain earnestness, idealism, and determination that are incredibly admirable. I try to celebrate that. Howe wrote movingly about the whole ordeal after it was over, and even made recommendations about how to tweak the experiment to encourage better results next time. "We owe it to the dolphin and to our curiosity to try it," she said.

A similar example is the story of the Otter Free Zone -- a failed, large-scale federal project in southern California to broker a peaceful co-existence between ticked off fishermen and endangered sea otters. Essentially, the government tried to tell the otters where they were, and weren't, allowed to swim. It would have solved everything, if the otters had listened.

Damn disobedient otters! But some of these stories aren't funny at all. Did reporting the book depress you?
When I started working on Wild Ones, I'd just become a father for the first time. I was thinking about the world, and its future, in a new way. And I was depressed. Clearly, there's a lot to get depressed about.

But I found the process of writing the book weirdly reassuring -- just like I say in the title. I was spending time with people who felt the same worry that I did, but who'd picked some piece of our collective mess and were working their asses off to fix it -- even though, in many cases, they also acknowledged that their work might not pay off. It was exhilarating just to be around these people, people living in such close proximity to big, mostly unanswerable questions about our species' place on earth. To be so persistent amid so much uncertainty requires an intense and peculiar heroism.

I'm not saying I wound up feeling tremendously optimistic about the future. But I definitely feel less worried now. The process of writing Wild Ones was a process of remembering how admirable humans can be -- our dignity and not just our destructiveness. I realise that's tough to explain, or that it might come off as Pollyanna-ish. But I hope the book recreates that experience, taking readers through the same process so that they'll realise it's true.

Do you know about the push to bring back extinct animals, like the passenger pigeon?
Yes! I'm fascinated with this idea, and have so many questions. (Stewart Brand, call me!)

To me, de-extinction feels more like a conceptual art project than a genuine tool for conservation. Passenger pigeons, for example, once roosted in flocks of more than a hundred million birds. They were mistaken for tornadoes. Trees snapped under their weight. They left inches of dung on the ground, like a blizzard.

There are stories of people on rooftops in Philadelphia knocking them out of the sky with brooms when they swarmed through the city.

That's quite an image.
Suppose we could recreate that. Do we want to? How many airliners will passenger pigeons take down when they're sucked into jet engines? What happens when a flock descends on your daughter's field hockey game? Farmers in the Midwest are already pretty agitated with the rebounding populations of sandhill cranes and pelicans that eat or trample their crops. There's hardly any of them, comparatively!

That said, I think it's great that this is being discussed. The field of conservation needs to have more ambitious conversations like this. We humans wield a lot of power on the planet. It's time we owned up to that, rather than only feeling guilty and ashamed by its consequences. I'd love to see more conservationists thinking creatively about what kind of world, and what kind of nature, we can create, rather than only struggling to keep the last threads of the world we inherited from fraying.

You often write about these animals in relation to your daughter, and you brought her along on some of your reporting trips for the book. What do you think parents can do to strengthen their kids' interest in the natural world?
I definitely don't think parents need to lug their toddlers to the subarctic to look at polar bears napping in the mud like I did. I wouldn't recommend it, in fact. The bottom line is, you won't care about biodiversity -- in the global, abstract sense -- if you're unaware of the biodiversity immediately around you. So I think the most important thing we can teach children is simply to notice things, even if it's only crows and raccoons and worms. It's a good excuse for us adults to notice those things, too. And I honestly feel that paying just the smallest amount of attention to those scraps of nature can enlarge your sense of the world.

Isla and I are big into butterflies now. We got a field guide and everything, and caught a Red Admiral the other day with our bare hands. She wanted to take it to a birthday party at one of those bouncy house places, to show off to her friends, but after "studying" it for a while, we released it on the back steps and wished it well.

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