Читать книгу Seasons - Ellen Meloy - Страница 11

Animal News

Tonight’s news was animal news. Once again I have timed dinner with a graphic wildlife documentary. Last night, forty hunger-crazed hyenas eviscerated a wildebeest, just as I lifted a fork load of cheesy lasagna to my mouth.

Tonight a man spoke against reintroducing wolves in the West. “The wolf kills for a living,” he said. “I wonder if people who want wolves back would be so enthusiastic if they actually saw a wolf pack jump on some deer and eat that animal alive.” He’s right, I thought, pushing my plate aside, nature is rude and wolves should change their ways.

First, they should dump that disgusting pack technique and hire someone to procure their food. Next, they should sit up and use forks like the rest of us. Consign a few picnic tables to wolf packs, hand out bibs and moose liver, no longer pulsating of course. And while we’re at it make them wear pants, so no family from Iowa has to suffer the sight of a rangy pack of buck-naked canids gnawing elk legs twenty yards from a souvenir shop.

Perhaps I’m overreacting. Every so often wild animals are ambushed by a rash of anthropocentric dodiness. In our confusion about nature’s ways, we end up taking it out on the creatures themselves. In a national forest recently a bear was mistaken for a large rock and set ablaze when firefighters lit a backfire.

Elsewhere forest rangers were improving moose habitat by using dynamite to create boggy areas. They set off their charges just as two moose sauntered into the blasting site. Because of the force of the explosion, the meat could not be salvaged, they reported.

Westerners live closer to wildlife than most people. When we see an elk we know if it is right side up. We know the difference between a coyote and a poodle. So why suffer these outbreaks of animal anxiety? Perhaps the sight of natural predation, wolves bringing down an elk and eating it with the teeth they were born with, triggers the uneasy revelation that humans are animals.

Perhaps we pick on other creatures because we know we can be quite beastly ourselves. The ways of wild food are so remote from our minds we forget that we too are part of the feast. We’re the executioner. Sometimes we’re the entrée. Just ask a grizzly bear or a shark. Less and less we are the witness. So estranged are we from wild animals on their own terms, we insist they live on ours or be gone.

We may stalk our prey in the aisles of Safeway. We may wear pants at the dinner table, but we kill to live. By making wolves into demons and bears into bonfires, we make ourselves into gods. We forget we are mammals. This is a dangerous amnesia. The man on the news implied that wolves have no place among us if they gross us out by jumping on Bambi and eating him without cooking him first. This is hubris. This is silly. This is very bad biology. Face it and be awed by the true wild. The wolf on your nature poster is a killer, a predator of supreme skill and endurance. The human in your mirror is an animal. Both revelations should humble and ennoble us.

Undated