Wildeor Voices: Maintaining One’s Hope for Wildlife
“Animals...are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Imagine a world in which animals were seen through Henry Beston’s eyes: neither lesser beings nor the chattel of humans to be used, protected, or disposed of at our whim. How might such a worldview change how we use, manage, or navigate through wildlife habitat? Might we stop and even reverse the human-caused sixth great extinction event that we are currently living in?
The cynics among us would laughingly dismiss such a naïve notion, pointing to our warring ways and the treatment of other indigenous people across the world – how we’ve treated less powerful nation-states does not engender hope that we would respect the other nations of the animal kingdom. Those same cynics may well assert that the current state of affairs is as it should be and has always been: humans have been torturing, hunting, butchering, and eating animals for millennia.
Indeed, the idea of animals as put on earth for the benefit of humans dates back to our earliest Western teachings – from the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 1:28: “…subdue [the earth] and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Aristotle wrote, “plants are created for the sake of animals and the animals for the sake of man.” In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas wrote that since animals are intended for man’s use, there was nothing wrong with killing them or using them in any other way whatsoever.
Somewhat more recently, in the 17th century, René Descartes, considered the world’s first modern philosopher, held that animals were mere clockwork with no capacity to feel pain or pleasure, soulless and without consciousness. Perhaps this belief gave comfort to the agricultural practices of the time that ranged from what we now term factory farming to techniques to “tenderize” meat, including nailing geese to the floor and hacking fish into pieces while still alive to make their flesh firmer.
In the early 20th century, behaviorists decreed that the very idea of animal experience was a form of unscientific naivete – the cardinal sin of anthropomorphism. Indeed, the inappropriateness of anthropomorphism was a feature of my biological education in the 1970s. While the logic was understandable – how are we to know that an animal may think or feel – it ran counter to my young lifetime of experiences with animals, and that of many others.
This human behavior pattern of use and exploitation of animals is not limited to Western cultures. Despite the reverence for nature often attributed to foraging peoples and indigenous cultures, history also documents that these cultures also hunted and fished animals to extinction, and at times, treated animals with cruelty.
In the face of human history, believing that the day might come wherein we allow most animals, particularly those that we don’t eat or need for our own survival, to live their lives without fatal persecution by humans seems a fool’s errand.
It’s then that I remember the story of a remarkable carnivore, the mountain lion P-22. P-22’s story gives me hope that we can continue to follow the better angels of our nature and redefine our relationships with our great carnivores.
P-22’s tale begins with his discovery in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Somehow, P-22 had crossed both Interstate 495 and U.S. 101, taking refuge in a 4,000+ acre city park with an abundant deer herd and no competing males. P-22 was likely chased out of the Santa Monica mountains by an older and larger male, causing him to “disperse” in search of friendlier territory.
His dispersal highlighted a mountain lion population in trouble. The cats in the Santa Monica mountains were cut off from other lions by urban development and those pulsing freeways. That lack of genetic flow poses a real risk that the Santa Monica population would in time go extinct. But P-22 has changed the script.
Beth Pratt, a conservationist with the National Wildlife Federation and an indomitable force of nature in her own right, upon hearing of P-22, declared that these Santa Monica cats would not blink out “on her watch.” And while Beth launched a decade-long campaign to reconnect the Santa Monica lions with populations to the east, P-22 became a Hollywood celebrity.
Rather than being a feared presence, P-22 was embraced by Angelenos. Nicknamed the Brad Pitt of mountain lions, P-22 became a Hollywood celebrity captured in ring doorbell photos. He was a sometime visitor of residents’ crawl spaces. He had his own Facebook page and Twitter account.
When he became the lead suspect in the death of a Koala at the L.A. Zoo, not only was he forgiven, but the L.A. City Council instituted an annual P-22 Day. Folks worried about his love life and dreamed of matchmaking when a young female was spotted close to the freeways.
In short, Los Angeles did exactly what biologists have told us for years is improper: it “anthropomorphized” P-22. In other words, people thought of and treated him as if he was a human with emotions, cognitive thought, and a life with hopes and dreams.
P-22’s story has been the engine that has driven realization of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing across U.S. Highway 101 (the Ventura Freeway). It will be the largest wildlife crossing of its type in the nation. It will also be the most expensive at approximately $88 million!
It would not have been built without private support from the Annenberg Foundation, Wallis Annenberg, and other private donations and individual contributors through the #SaveLACougars campaign, a collaborative effort of the National Wildlife Federation and the Santa Monica Mountains Fund.
Earlier this year, old age and a hit-and-run accident caught up with P-22 spelling the end of his life, but not his influence. As thousands of Angelenos gathered to honor the life of P-22, the National Wildlife Federation, supported by the Annenberg Foundation, announced the Wildlife Crossing Fund – a new initiative to raise private support to help build wildlife crossings all over the world.
P-22 is truly a hero of whom stories are written: an above-the-fold obituary in the LA Times, a “Requiem” published in the New Yorker; and about whom songs will be sung: The L.A. Philharmonic has commissioned the composer Adam Schoenberg to write a work in honor of P-22, to be titled “Cool Cat.” And yet, it is important to remember – P-22 was just going about being a cougar. He did not seek adoration or attention or “lionizing.”
Some will surely dismiss this as just a kooky quirk of Tinseltown – a one-off Hollywood story, incapable of repetition elsewhere. And perhaps they are right. But I suspect that when Beth Pratt was told there was no way anyone would support building the largest, most expensive wildlife crossing in the world to save a few mountain lions, she paid them no mind. And we should likewise not be detoured by the naysayers.
The story of P-22 leads us to redefine our relationship with wolves, cougars and the animal kingdom and gives me hope.
And so, for every shockingly sad decision of misguided governors, legislators, and wildlife agency staff in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Wisconsin perpetuating the butchering of wolves and other carnivores, I will choose to take the advice of a sitcom character, Coach Ted Lasso – with each setback in the fight, I will choose to “be a goldfish” with short memory span; I will “believe” in our ability to overcome these adversaries; and I will remember a long-term trend toward more respectful and humane treatment of those “other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”
