Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

My daughter’s world, like the world of most American four-year-olds, has overflowed with wild animals since it first came into focus: lionesses, puffins, hippos, bison, sparrows, rabbits, narwhals, and wolves. They are plush and whittled. Knitted, batik, and bean-stuffed. Appliquéd on onesies and embroidered into the ankles of her socks.

And peregrine falcons circle overhead again, thanks in part to ornithologists at Cornell University who, dedicated to collecting new genetic material and reviving the species, put on a specially made leather receptacle they called the “copulation hat” and coaxed captive falcons—one was named Beer Can—to ejaculate on their heads several times a day, every day, for much of the 1970s. Environmentalists are always shouting at America to care more about our planet’s many, pressing calamities. But we seem to care deeply enough about our wild animals to strap on the proverbial copulation hat again and again and again.

We now live in a country where it’s possible to become an Internet celebrity and get booked on the Today show just by posting a YouTube video of an eagle, a fox, and a house cat sitting on your porch doing absolutely nothing. (Last time I checked, Pam Aus’s video, titled “An eagle, a fox and my cat all getting along fine on my porch,” had more than three million views.)

As the naturalist Henry Beston wrote in 1928, “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”

I’m part of a generation that seems especially resigned to watching things we encountered in childhood disappear: landline telephones, newspapers, fossil fuels. But leaving your kids a world without wild animals feels like a special tragedy, even if it’s hard to rationalize why it should.

Polar bears in Churchill are already pushing the limits of what’s possible for their species. Surviving in a place where the primary habitat—ice—simply vanishes for a few months each year has meant evolving one of the longest fasting periods of any animal on Earth.

Jefferson was trying to debunk the Theory of American Degeneracy, which had been worked up several years earlier by the revered Enlightenment writer and natural historian, Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon. Count Buffon argued that the animal life of the New World was smaller, weaker, and less spectacular than that of the Old World. Not only were there fewer species in America—less of a diversity of life—but individual animals there were smaller than their counterparts in Europe: they were “degenerate” versions. Buffon himself had never been to America, it turns out, so he plucked measurements to support his claims from the accounts of travelers, who weren’t always reliable. (At one point in his book Natural History, Buffon repeats a claim that the region around Hudson Bay was populated by pygmies, winged serpents, and savages with backward-bending knees.) The degeneracy theory turned on a question of climate. Buffon believed that species could attain their ideal forms only in a warm climate. He imagined America as a humid stew of swamps and uncultivated wildness; he believed its landmass had only recently emerged from under the sea and was still drying out. The continent, he wrote, is “crisscrossed by old trees laden with parasitic plants, lichens, [and] fungi, the impure fruits of corruption.” Eventually, Buffon concluded that even lines of domesticated animals brought to America from Europe gradually shrank and degenerated. The dogs in America were “absolutely dumb.” T...

Ultimately, it’s easy to imagine Thomas Jefferson as an early American George Costanza, a seething nebbish quick to take umbrage but never quite able to respond convincingly.

One historian writes that most in Congress believed the Endangered Species Act was “a largely symbolic effort” to protect only the kinds of species environmentalists call “charismatic megafauna”—grizzlies, whales, bald eagles, and other large, beautiful species that people tend to feel an easy connection with. But the act had been quietly beefed up by idealistic staffers, and was much further-reaching and more powerful than most congressmen took the time to understand. After its passage, there was instantly a lot of buyer’s remorse. (In a famous example, a small fish called the snail darter quickly complicated a dam-building project in Tennessee.) Meanwhile, protection was being sought for obscure birds and skinny little snakes that none of these legislators had ever heard of. Within two years, some twenty-three thousand species had been proposed for endangered status. The Smithsonian pulled together a list of 3,187 plants it considered worthy of protection. The paperwork alone was staggering. The agencies responsible for ruling on those petitions, primarily the Fish and Wildlife Service, soon found ways of brushing them off their desks.

A Hawaiian plant called the Alani spent fifteen years on the candidate list before it was finally bumped up to endangered status in 1994. Unfortunately, the plant appeared to have gone extinct two years earlier.

Bears, after all, were considered monsters. For so long, the animal had been a shorthand for the unruliness and danger that Americans were encountering on the western frontier. Bears rarely turned up in toy catalogs and books, one historian notes, and “when they did they looked mean and were apparently designed to upset young children.” Two years before Roosevelt’s trip, Ladies’ Home Journal published a kids’ adventure story about a fourteen-year-old named Balser, described as “the happiest boy in Indiana” because he owned a rifle, “ten pounds of powder, and lead enough to kill every living creature within a radius of five miles.” In the story, Balser winds up killing a bear, but gets bitten in the process. So, in the story’s feel-good conclusion, the boy and his father track down the bear’s mate and shoot her, too, in revenge.

The teddy bear was only one sign that some people, deep down, had started to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated and feared the bear. But all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a hug.

Nature can seem this pure and honorable only once we’re no longer afraid of it. We seem to be forever oscillating between demonizing and eradicating certain animals, and then, having beaten those creatures back, empathizing with them as underdogs and wanting to show them compassion. We exert our power, but are then unsettled by how powerful we are.

No single piece of research demonstrates this cycle of fear and reverence more clearly than a study, led by the geographer Jennifer Wolch, that examined how cougars were written about in the Los Angeles Times between 1985 and 1995. In the early 1970s, the cougar population in California had been ground down to as low as twenty-four hundred animals. But by 1990, a ban on hunting had allowed the species to come back; the cougar had become an icon of conservation in Southern California. It was described in the newspaper as “majestic” and “innocent,” an embodiment of nature’s grace, and a “symbol of our dwindling wilderness heritage.” But soon cougars started encroaching into the populated areas around Los Angeles. There were two fatal attacks. More people still died in America because of bee stings and black widow spider bites, Wolch writes, but “as reports of cougar-human interaction rose and public fears were fanned by episodic attacks, the images of cougars as charismatic and proud wild animals at home in nature were replaced by terms conjuring danger, death, and criminal intent.” It was as if a switch had flipped. Before 1990, the predominant image in the newspaper was of an “elusive and fascinating wild creature.” After 1990, cougars were “efficient four-legged killers” and baby-snatchers, “roaming like phantoms” in the nearby hills.

As Seton once wrote, “No animal will give up its whole life seeking revenge; that kind of mind is found in man alone. The brute creation seeks for peace.” The bear was the bigger man.

The Atlanta Chamber of Commerce was going to serve Taft possum and taters, a Southern specialty that one writer of the time described as “the Christmas goose of the epicurean negro.” An opossum, roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, was typically presented whole—head on, pale tail hanging off it like a meaty noodle—with a smaller potato crammed between the animal’s fifty tiny teeth. The one brought to Taft’s table weighed eighteen pounds. After the meal, the orchestra started to play, and the guests suddenly broke into song while Taft, presumably caught off guard, was presented with a gift. It was a small stuffed opossum toy, beady-eyed and bald-eared. This brand-new creation was intended by a group of local boosters as the William Howard Taft presidency’s answer to the teddy bear. They called it the Billy Possum.

But, despite all this marketing, the life of the Billy Possum turned out to be demoralizingly brief. The toy was a flop, peaking and petering out within months of its introduction that January and almost entirely forgotten by the end of the year. That is, Billy Possum never even made it to Christmastime, a special sort of failure for a toy. In retrospect, the failure of the Billy Possum can probably be explained two ways. The first is straightforward: opossums are ugly. But the Billy Possum’s backstory was all wrong, too, particularly compared with the teddy bear’s.

Through most of human’s evolutionary history, what has made the bear magnificent in our eyes is the animal’s independence from us—its parallel life as a menace and competitor. But by the time Roosevelt was hunting bears in Mississippi, with the country exterminating its predators from coast to coast, that stature was being crushed. That one black bear, tied to a tree outside Smedes, symbolized the predicament of all bears. The animals now lived or died according to our wants and whims. It said something ominous about the future of bears, but it also raised disquieting questions about who we’d become, if the survival of such a creature was now up to us. The legend of Roosevelt and the bear resonated as an allegory of the confusion that America was only beginning to face. The bear was a helpless victim roped to a tree. The president of the United States decided to show it some mercy.

Taft, on the other hand, ate his opossum for supper. He ate a lot of it, in fact—so much that, after his first several helpings, a doctor seated nearby actually passed him a note, suggesting it might be a good idea if he slowed down. “Well I like possum,” Taft told reporters the next day. “I ate very heartily of it last night, and it did not disturb in the slightest my digestion or my sleep.” Today a small selection of stuffed opossums has found its way back onto the market. Judging from the reviews I found on Amazon, the toys seem to be mostly bought as gag gifts for people who have had creepy run-ins with actual opossums. One woman explains that the Fiesta Toys ten-inch plush opossu...

The polar bear, really, was just a prop to underscore the problem of climate change—a problem that, if left unaddressed, begs the question of whether addressing anything else is worthwhile. But now everyone had been yanked into a frothing, bottomless argument about the prop itself. Six years after she’d filed the original petition to list the bear, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Kassie Siegel was in a federal court in Washington arguing the definitions of “endangered” and “threatened” again when, finally, the judge asked her: “What does all that mean in the real world?”

Ladoon was expecting me. He got out to undo the chain he keeps slung between two posts as a gate. Then, motioning for me to stay put in my vehicle, he turned around, unzipped his pants, and took a piss.

He slapped his horn twice, but the bear kept coming. When it got within a few feet, Ladoon leaned out his window, revved his engine, and shouted at the animal. His stoner drawl exploded into a deep, low growl. He said, “No, you asshole!”

Cox wrote a response, and leading bear biologists lined up to defend him, noting, for starters, that feeding bears is illegal, and that the cub was in such poor condition that it was likely to die regardless. But they most of all stressed that feeding individual bears would only put a Band-Aid on the problem of climate change—it missed the point. Robert Buchanan told me that the reactions he saw were indicative of a knee-jerk, “bunny-hugging” attitude that, frankly, he can’t stand. Here were folks who burn a disproportionate share of the world’s fossil fuels feeling self-righteous about polar bears. “They’re killing polar bears from the comfort of their easy chairs,” Robert told me. “Excuse my expression, but fuck ’em.”

Butterflies occupy a special place in our imaginative wildernesses, transcending their status as bugs. They don’t sting, bite, buzz in your ear, or scamper across your kitchen floor. If you woke up to find one had alighted on your nose, you’d lie perfectly still, puzzling out whatever beneficent message the cosmos must be communicating to you—whereas you wouldn’t do this if you woke up with a banana slug on your nose, or a cockroach. We see butterflies as delicate, uncorrupted—which is probably why we’re so keen to paint them on our daughters’ cheeks at birthday parties or stitch them in glittery thread on their pajamas. We had to invent unicorns and fairies to keep little girls company. But we let the butterflies in, too, just as nature made them.

There had also been lots of industrial development around the dunes in the years after World War II, though, according to Powell, the last straw for Harry Lange’s generation would be the construction of the gypsum plant in 1956. Not only did it sprout up in the middle of the habitat, splitting the dunes in half, but it also cast white dust over the place. It felt—in a very visceral way—like an atrocity. It was all a matter of age and perspective, of course—all part of the same cycle of disillusionment that had been going on in San Francisco. The Lepidopterists’ Society trip was the first time Jerry Powell had ever been to the dunes, and he and the other students were just as excited by the place as Harry Lange and his contemporaries had been twenty years earlier. Just as Cottle loved the city that Behr wrote off, and Lange loved the city that Cottle wrote off, Powell now loved the dunes that Lange’s generation wrote off. Powell didn’t see a landscape sapped of life. He saw a “terrific variety” of insects. And he was sufficiently captivated to study the ecosystem on and off for decades as a professor at Berkeley.

THE PHENOMENON THAT Powell stumbled onto has a name: shifting baselines syndrome. The term was coined in 1995 by a fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly. Pauly recognized that global fish populations have been slowly collapsing, and though scientists weren’t blind to that damage, their vision was too narrow and subjective to take in its full extent. Every generation of scientist accepts the oceans as it inherits them, Pauly argued. Overfishing may eat away at fish stocks, or even drive species extinct. But when the next generation of scientists start their careers, they don’t see the oceans as depleted; that depleted condition becomes their baseline, against which they’ll measure any subsequent losses in their lifetimes.

Because of this, a comprehensive picture of the changes happening across generations never truly comes into focus. Scientists are concentrating on only part of a line graph that is, in fact, much longer and more steeply plunging. (We now know, for example, that between 1850 and 2005 overfishing reduced the cod population in the northwestern Atlantic by 92 percent.) As we began to fish bigger species like cod into scarcity, we transitioned to eating smaller ones, like monkfish. As Pauly puts it, humans are blindly fishing their way down the marine food web—not any differently from how entomologists blindly moved down the web of insects at Antioch Dunes, with Jerry Powell fascinated by the tiny bugs that his predecessors let pass through the mesh of their nets. When Pauly introduced the idea of shifting baselines syndrome in the nineties, he often joked to the press that kids might soon be enjoying jellyfish salad sandwiches, instead of tuna. These days, he points out that there actually is a commercial jellyfish fishing industry up and running in Asia and the American Southeast.

Shifting baselines syndrome, then, is only the scientific manifestation of a broader problem affecting all people: what the psychologist Peter H. Kahn Jr. has named “environmental generational amnesia.” All of us adopt the natural world we encounter in childhood as our psychological baseline—an expectation of how things should be—and gauge the changes we see against that norm. This explains why the children Kahn has interviewed in terribly polluted neighborhoods in Houston don’t believe their neighborhoods are polluted, and why Kahn’s daughter thinks the woods around their family cabin in Northern California are beautiful and pristine, while Kahn can’t get over no longer hearing the calls of owls. It’s also why Hans Hermann Behr and James Cottle—and ...

Now, as soon as Humphrey and the Bootlegger got going, motoring past the Antioch Dunes and heading home, the crowd rushed into their cars and peeled off for the next viewing opportunity in a neighboring town. “The place cleared out like the plague had hit,” one refuge employee reported. The dunes had been trampled. Endangered plants were destroyed, new trails had been stamped into the sand, and existing ones were smeared open and destabilized to the point where, a week later, after heavy rains, an entire section of hillside collapsed into the river. With it went many buckwheat plants and whatever Lange’s metalmark eggs had been laid on them that summer. An internal Fish and Wildlife Service memo noted, “It is ironic that one endangered species”—the humpback—“could have such an impact on three other endangered species.” It was a tragedy of charisma. Because of their affection for a single celebrity whale, hordes of people had jeopardized an entire species of anonymous butterfly. They weren’t an angry mob; they were a loving mob. But they loved only certain things.

We like to imagine our children as miniature noble savages, moving peacefully and naked among the beasts—“the naturals,” as the first colonists called the Indians. But they’re more like the colonists: greedy, vindictive, wary, shortsighted, and firing panicky musket shots at any rustling in the woods. It’s not their fault. They are behaving like children.

I DID SOMETHING else unsettling that winter. I talked to Rudi Mattoni.

After an X-ray showed that number 2 had, in fact, ripped a membrane in its wing and would never fly normally again, the bird was taken out of the migration and sent back to Patuxent. But by then, the whole debate about the bird between Operation Migration and the other partners seemed to have dragged out and gone sideways, in that special, galling way that disagreements between unhappy spouses do.

This is all there is, and all there ever could be: achingly imperfect people, working to achieve something more moral than they are. “It’s not a bird project,” Brooke said. “It’s a people project. The birds are an excuse for doing something good.”

But there was a matter-of-factness to Pister’s telling: he was confronted with a small, obvious crisis and saw a way to solve it, so he did. When he finished telling his story, Pister just looked at me and said, “It’s something you do, you know?”