The Tiger

by John Vaillant

Under Stalin, science was a prisoner, too—bound and gagged by a particularly rigid brand of Marxist ideology, which declared, in short, that in order for Mankind to realize His destiny as a superhuman, super-rational master of all, Mother Nature must be forced to bow and, in the process, be radically transformed. By the mid-1930s, most advocates of environmental protection had been silenced one way or another, and their ideas replaced by slogans like “We cannot expect charity from nature.16 We must tear it from her.” In 1926, Vladimir Zazubrin, the first head of the Union of Siberian Writers, delivered a lecture in which he proclaimed, Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzles of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railroads.17 Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled.… Only in cement and iron can the fraternal union of all peoples, the iron brotherhood of all mankind, be forged.* Some hard-line Marxists sincerely believed that plants and animals unable to prove their usefulness to mankind should simply be exterminated.

If a lion could talk, we would not understand him. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN1

IN 1909, AN ESTONIAN-BORN BARON-TURNED-PHYSIOLOGIST NAMED Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of Umwelt to the world. Uexküll is considered one of the fathers of ethology, which is also known as behavioral ecology. It is a young discipline whose goal is to study behavior and social organization through a biological lens. “To do so,” wrote Uexküll in “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” “we must first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar … is transformed.”4 Uexküll called this bubble the umwelt, a German word that he applied to a given animal’s subjective or “self-centered” world. An individual’s umwelt exists side by side with the Umgebung—the term Uexküll used to describe the objective environment, a place that exists in theory but that none of us can truly know given the inherent limitations of our respective umwelten. In addition to being delightful words to say, umwelt and umgebung offer a framework for exploring and describing the experience of other creatures.

There were big cats, hyenas, and wolves all along the way, and this may be one reason most of our hominid relatives never made it. It is striking, too, that, unlike so many other species—cats, for example—we are the only branch of our family (Hominidae) who survived the journey. In this sense, we are evolutionary orphans—a broken family of one, and it puts us in strange company: we share our genetic solitude with the platypus, the gharial, and the coelacanth.

Barrett assembled two groups of children aged three to five; one group was made up of German preschoolers and the other was composed of Shuar, a tribe of subsistence hunter-agriculturalists from Ecuador’s Amazon basin. Needless to say, these two groups of children had radically different cultural reference points and experience with animals. The experiment was elegant in its simplicity. Using a toy lion and a toy zebra, Barrett asked each child, “When the lion sees the zebra, what does the lion want to do?”6 The results were surprising: 75 percent of the three-year-olds in both groups answered with some variation of “The lion wants to chase/bite/kill the zebra.”7 (It must be remembered that these children had only just learned to speak and had vastly different levels of exposure to media and information about the wider world.) When Barrett posed the same question to the four- and five-year-olds, every single child anticipated the predatory intentions of the lion. Barrett then took the scenario a step further, asking, “When the lion catches the zebra, what will happen?”8 In this case, 100 percent of the Shuar three-year-olds answered with some version of “The lion hurts/kills/eats the zebra.”9 Only two thirds of the more sheltered and media-saturated German three-year-olds gave this answer, but when Barrett got to the four- and five-year-olds, every child understood that the zebra was in serious trouble.

The brandname Viagra is derived from vyaaghra, the Sanskrit word for tiger.