May. 21 2010 - 10:18 pm | 2,220 views | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

When Animals Attack!: On Gordon Grice’s Deadly Kingdom

By MARK DERY

Dear Reader:

Do you, like me, rejoice in the knowledge that you could eat an adult mouse whole, if you wanted to? As Gordon Grice helpfully notes, in his endlessly entertaining new book Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals, the rodent’s bones are “no more troublesome than those of a catfish.” In medieval England, he adds, “a mouse on toast was thought to cure colds.”

This morsel of science fact and historical storytelling is typical of the oddments Grice tosses us, arcana from his Cabinet of Curiosities that invite rumination (in both senses, in this case). Deadly Kingdom rewards the reader who knows that stringing together chains of association is as important as hoarding information.

Grice is best known as the author of The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, a cult classic about black widows, brown recluses, tarantulas, and rattlesnakes, among other things, that launched a new genre: natural-history noir. If Cormac McCarthy turned his hand to nature writing, the results might sound something like Grice, who combines the laconic banter of rural Oklahoma, where he grew up, with a country boy’s inexhaustible curiosity about the natural world. He renders his dramas of animal behavior in tight close-up, with an eye for detail that makes the reader feel as if she’s lying on her belly, propped on her elbows, chin in hands, peering intensely into the jungle in the lawn. At that scale, insect tableaux become morality plays or, more often, Aesop’s fables for existentialists. (In a thumbnail review on Amazon, I called him “a Jean-Henri Fabre for literati with rifle racks.”) Grice’s style—unsentimental, black-comedic, philosophical in an unselfconscious, back-porch way—heightens that effect. He uses ironic understatement to dramatic effect, whether funny, horrific, or both in the same breath, as in this description, from The Red Hourglass, of the notoriously short-tempered female Praying Mantis’s response to the male’s sexual overtures:

She strikes. Now she is standing still, her blur of motion over so quickly it might seem unreal, except that she is slowly eating the right half of his head. He stands swaying, his actions only slightly interrupted by the amputation of half of his head. Then, while she is still eating, he crawls onto her back. He seems in this semiheadless state to have found a renewed vigor and sense of purpose.

Of course, “short-tempered” is pure anthropomorphism on my part, a tendency Grice avoids. To be sure, he delights in reminding us that we, too, are members of the deadly kingdom, holding up animal behavior at its most gross or grisly to show us unflattering reflections of our own bestiality. But he’s equally quick to point out the unfathomable Otherness of nature, the many ways in which its playful, purposeless malice mocks the consoling fiction of an Intelligent Designer. The Red Hourglass takes its title from the characteristic markings on the black widow’s underside, a quirk of evolution that we invest with morbid meaning, reading it as a vanitas. Against our rage for cosmic order, our insistence on the Meaning of Life, Grice offers the parable of the widow’s venom, “thousands of times more virulent” than the spider requires to kill its largest prey. Scientists are at a loss to explain the pointlessness of the thing, which serves no evolutionary purpose. “We want the world to be an ordered room,” writes Grice,

but in a corner of that room there hangs an untidy web. Here the analytical mind finds an irreducible mystery, a motiveless evil in nature… No idea of the cosmos as elegant design accounts for the widow. No idea of a benevolent God can be completely comfortable in a widow’s world. She hangs in her web, that marvel of design, and defies teleology.

The prairie theology of this passage always reminds me of those stunning little set pieces in Thomas Harris’s early novels, meditations on nature’s obliviousness to the human insect; the amoral purity of a godless cosmos. I’m thinking of Hannibal Lecter’s homily, in Silence of the Lambs, on good and evil, acts of god and forces of nature (“typhoid and swans—it all comes from the same place”), and of the bravura passage that ends Red Dragon, where the FBI profiler who hunts human predators—those mythic beasts called serial killers—remembers a pensive moment on the incongruously beautiful battlefield at Shiloh, where thousands died in one of the bloodiest slaughters of the civil war:

Now, drifting between memory and narcotic sleep, he saw that Shiloh was not sinister; it was indifferent. Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything. Its unforgivable beauty simply underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine. [...] In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us. [...] Yes, he had been wrong about Shiloh. Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.

Deadly Kingdom is a Darwinian sermon on this theme, puncturing the self-serving myths that obscure our understanding of the natural world: “Belief is a part of seeing. It’s hard to filter out the interpretation and leave mere facts.” Grice does an end run around the Free Willy/Jaws binary, the culture/nature version of the virgin/whore dualism. “I often read accounts that point out what the human victim did ‘wrong’ before she was attacked by a bear or a shark,” he writes. “Many writers depict virtually all animal attacks as ‘provoked’ by the victim.” (The blame-the-victim rape narrative, transposed into the key of When Animals Attack.) “On the other side, some writers are at pains to paint dangerous animals as monsters of cruelty.”

In truth, he suggests, nature isn’t so much malevolent as indifferent. When humans come to grief at tooth or claw, it’s often because of our insistence on seeing animals as emissaries of the peaceable kingdom, like the New Age sentimentalization of the dolphin as a guardian angel with a blowhole, or because we can’t seem to distinguish real, live creatures from the Audio-Animatronic critters in Disney theme parks or the CGI monsters at the multiplex—cartoon caricatures of our lovable foibles or primordial fears.

The cautionary tales in Deadly Kingdom bear that out. With grim relish, Grice tells of a toddler “whose mother smeared his hand with honey so that she could shoot video of him playing with a black bear. It ate his hand.” (That’s a Grice signature: the devastating punchline, a short, sharp , declarative sentence that serves as a kind of a black-comedy rimshot.)

We learn that a grizzly can fit a human head into its mouth: “If the person is lucky, the skull slides out like a pinched marble.” (Like his noir forebear, Raymond Chandler, Grice has a nice way with the simile.)

The author eyes the common housecat thoughtfully, noting the innocent sadism of the little “death games” it plays with its half-dead prey. His own cat bites him gently, using its carnassial teeth (“a narrow little mountain range meant for shearing meat”) to leave a circlet of blood on Grice’s finger. “I pushed the cat away and accused him of treachery. He only looked at me with his bright butterscotch eyes.”

The bigger cats, such as the lion (“one of the planet’s premier predators of human beings”), are less gentle; one of Grice’s sources mentions a lion that, “finding a man lying drunk outside a hut, merely nipped a chunk out of his behind, rather as you might take a passing bite from an apple and leave the rest.” Grice, who to this atheist’s eye exhibits the telltale cynicism of the unbeliever, seems to delight especially in horror stories that make the case for the prosecution: “In 2006, a visitor to the Kiev zoo proclaimed, ‘God will save me, if he exists,’ and entered the lion enclosure, where a lioness instantly sliced his carotid artery.’” Ba-dump.

On the subject of nature’s “motiveless evil,” as Grice calls it, he recounts Jane Goodall’s horror at seeing hyenas eating a live wildebeest, “which continued to bawl while the hyenas brawled with each other, ‘running off with pieces of gut, giggling.’” Readers whose view of the hyena as a skulking, cowardly carrion-feeder owes a debt to Disney’s Lion King will be surprised to learn that the animals are ferocious predators who’ve taken down hippos, rhinos, and even lions (when the outcome is insured by a four-to-one advantage). They may well have the most powerful jaws of all mammals; Grice cites a horrific description, in James Frederick Clarke’s unforgettably named Man is the Prey, of a man whose face ended just below his cheekbones, sheared off by “one bite, just one snap” from a hyena.

But the world’s most fearsome predator is unquestionably the orca, says Grice. Attaining lengths of 30 feet and weighing up to seven tons, these awesome animals have ganged up on the mythic Great White shark, one orca holding it at the ocean’s surface while another “disemboweled it, feasting on its liver.”

Yet, Grice notes, “despite their long-standing reputation as man-eaters, there are no clear-cut cases of orcas preying on people. There are, however, many cases of captive orcas hurting their trainers.” He tells the 1991 story of a trainer in British Columbia who fell into a pool:

One orca seized her in his mouth and raced around the pool underwater. Two other orcas joined in foiling her attempts to escape. Her colleagues threw in a life ring, but the whales prevented them from pulling the young woman out. She reached the side of the pool, but was dragged back down. The whales played a macabre game of catch with her body; they may have regarded her as a toy tossed in for her amusement. It was only hours later that they allowed the other trainers to remove her corpse.

A heartwrenching tragedy, to be sure. But the unnatural acts of wild animals penned up in zoos, or forced to perform in theme parks and stage acts, or treated like family in peoples’ homes is a recurrent theme in Deadly Kingdom. We love nature best when it plays the romantic Other to human culture, just wild enough to remind us how far we’ve come from the primordial soup, but still respectful of the bullwhip, a contract that reaffirms our status as the apple of God’s eye and the only primate with predator drones. Walt Disney, the man whose name is synonymous with talking animals, robotic wildlife, and the theme-parking of the forest primeval, once remarked without a hint of irony, “I don’t like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It’s just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess.”

"Fine-tuning a goat who must bleat and fidget, a Disney imagineer works on its innards." Life magazine, Sept. 1967. Found on Disney and More.

We dream of being part of an Edenic order where the lion lies down with the lamb: the paradise regained of Born Free, Free Willy, and moldy Disney chestnuts like Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar. Yet we insist, simultaneously, that we’re not animals; rather, we’re above nature, closer to God, at just the right altitude for Sarah Palin-style aerial wolf gunning.

Oddly, the mass imagination teems with animals: the articulate beasts who serve as human surrogates, lampooning our weaknesses and personifying our virtues, in the picture books, cartoons, and theme parks that shape our cultural consciousness. Likewise, in everyday life, we use wild things—the boa constrictor draped around the goth’s neck or the tarantula squatting on her palm; the pit bull clearing the sidewalk for the middle-class wangsta or his real-life inner-city counterpart—as tribal totems or Advertisements for Ourselves, broadcasting our uniqueness in a lookalike, thinkalike world.

But as Grice makes clear, anthropomorphism, and its philosophical twin anthropocentricity, can cost us dearly.

Sandra Herold, the 71-one-year-old widow who lived alone with Travis the Chimp, believed he “couldn’t have been more my son than if I gave birth to him.” Travis enjoyed honorary Homo sapiens status at home, where he “lived like a human, eating steak and drinking wine” and sleeping (and bathing!) with his female owner, and in his hometown of Stamford, Connecticut (“he was small and cute and friendly,” a local cop remembered, “he’d wave at you”)…until the day he ran amok, gnawing Charla Nash’s face to an eyeless, noseless pulp. Experts quoted in media coverage wondered if Lyme disease or a dose of Xanax had triggered Travis’s rampage. According to Grice, such explanations turn a blind eye on the answer hidden in plain sight: although we insist on viewing chimpanzees as midgets in fur suits, wearing nature’s mask to mock us, they are, in fact, wild animals. They may star in commercials, eat ice cream, and use the toilet, as Herold’s “son” did, but male chimps like Travis are born to battle their way to the top of dominance hierarchies, five times as strong as a man (“one captive chimp weighing about 160 pounds lifted an 1,800-pound object,” Grice notes), with impressive canines designed to break bone and flense meat. Travis’s attack, says Grice, was perfectly “normal behavior for a captive primate.” Again, the key word here is captive. Forced into close encounters of the human kind, let alone cohabitation, animals can behave unnaturally.

Nash takes her place, in the public mind, alongside Dawn Brancheau, the SeaWorld orca trainer who was telling a crowd of tourists that the orca who’d just surfaced nearby simply wanted a belly rub…when the animal snatched her in its jaws, dragged her into the pool, and held her underwater until she drowned.

SeaWorld knew the animal in question had been implicated in two previous deaths. Surely, the theme park, notorious among animal-rights activists for wrapping its profit motive (and animal deaths) in the mantle of conservation, bears some measure of responsibility for putting its employee in harm’s way. More generally, our fatally naive insistence on mythologizing potentially deadly predators as frolicsome playmates, practical jokers, or poster children for nature’s purer moral order is too blame as well. The nature stories retailed by animal theme parks like SeaWorld can have a profound effect on kids’ fantasy lives. According to a source quoted in one news story, Brancheau “had been inspired [to become a trainer] by a trip to SeaWorld when she was nine years old.”

Brancheau’s sister, quoted in one news report, said the trainer “‘loved the whales like her children, she loved all of them. They all had personalities, good days and bad days.’” Brancheau believed “you can’t put yourself in the water unless you trust them and they trust you.” But who can know the orca mind? Do we divine its intentions by looking into its inscrutable eyes? By mistaking its rapacious maw for a good-natured grin? By reading the behavioral signs we think we’ve become fluent in, down through the years of putting a 12,000-pound beast through its paces for a clapping crowd of overweight bipeds? What does “trust” mean to an animal whose familiar name is “killer whale”? Or to any wild thing, for that matter? “Years of association may make a human being—even an experienced trainer—think of an animal as his loyal friend,” writes Grice, in his chapter on the big cats. “Tigers don’t seem to see things that way.” Brancheau may have loved the whale in question like a child, but the whale had a different view of their relationship, it turned out. Maybe he’d grown tired of performing and wanted to teach the irksome human who was top predator, at least in the water. Perhaps he was just playing. Or possibly he was just having a bad day. We’ll never know, because orca consciousness is as mysterious to us as the deep blue sea.

Ask Timothy Treadwell about the primal darkness of the animal mind. Treadwell was a wannabe Bear Whisperer and self-appointed “eco-warrier” whose Me-Generation journey of self-discovery took him into the wild, an odyssey chronicled in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man. An amateur naturalist who believed he’d bonded with the Grizzlies he spent 13 summers filming, sometimes at arm’s length, in Alaska, Treadwell was repeatedly warned by the National Park Service that he was harassing the animals and, not incidentally, risking his life. He refused to protect himself with pepper spray and an electric fence around his campsite; too cruel, he contended. “I’m in love with my animal friends! I’m in love with my animal friends!” he gushes, in one of the homemade videos excerpted in the Herzog film. “It’s very emotional… I’m so in love with them, and they’re so fucked over, which so sucks.”

An aspiring Dian Fossey in a surfer-dude pageboy, Treadwell was to some a sweetly naive Nature Boy whose videos document an uncanny rapport with wild things. To others, he was a screwloose tree-hugger who chanted “I love you, I love you” when approaching Grizzlies, whom he insisted were just “harmless party animals.”

In the Green Machine, there is no mercy: inevitably, a hungry bear, fattening up for the cold months ahead, devoured the “gentle warrior” and his girlfriend. Investigators took Treadwell’s remains home in a garbage bag: his head, “a frozen grimace on his face,” and his right arm, wristwatch still ticking.

Grizzly Bear attack scene, posed during construction of Grizzly Bear Group diorama, 1941.

“A peculiar fallacy accompanies this urge to touch the wild: people feel, somehow, that nature will not hurt them because they are themselves approaching it with a kindred feeling,” writes Grice.

This is the extravagant self-regard of the naked ape, convinced that all of creation smiles on him; that wild nature is his helpmate or playmate, buffoon or bogeyman, raw resource for capitalist exploitation or metaphoric mirror, in which he can see himself and his society more clearly. As Deadly Kingdom makes abundantly clear, that is cosmic presumptuousness, a sometimes fatal narcissism.

In his last letter to one of his financial supporters, Treadwell wrote, “My transformation complete—a fully accepted wild animal—brother to these bears. I run free among them—with absolute love and respect for all the animals.” There’s a name for this delusion (I just made it up): Doolittle By Proxy. The truth, some biologists maintain, is that Treadwell escaped mauling for 13 summers not because he’d mastered interspecies telepathy, but because wild bears prefer not to tangle with humans, and are therefore long-sufferingly tolerant.

Treadwell’s undoing was his all-too-human assumption that to be a “fully accepted wild animal” is to be profoundly empathic, radiating love and respect in every direction. As it happens, the creature in question, the brown bear, has a different opinion in the matter, operating “on the principle of social dominance determined by intimidation and brute force,” says Grice. “This is why playing dead sometimes works with brown bears: the bear has no need to further dominate a dead or utterly submissive opponent. Even screaming while being mauled may encourage the bear to continue an attack.”

Some experts believe this is precisely what happened. On the audio track of a videotape taken from a camera that was running when Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed, Treadwell’s girlfriend can be heard exhorting him to “play dead.” Apparently, that didn’t work: the screams of Treadwell’s girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, fill the remainder of the tape. Larry Van Daele, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, believes that Treadwell may not have played dead long enough, inspiring the bear to return and finish him off; when Huguenard screamed in horror, the noise—which the animal may have interpreted as a “predator call,” the cries of wounded prey—”may have prompted the bear to return and kill her.”

In his last seconds, as the bear’s canines flensed the living flesh from his bones, did Treadwell realize that his transformation into man-bear was far from complete; that humans—tool-using, symbol-juggling primates that we are—have fallen too far from the garden to ever be wild again?

In his voiceover to Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog is thoughtful on the subject of our imagined kinship with our wild brothers:

[W]hat haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior. I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.

To err is human; to murder, with blank-eyed indifference, ursine.