Men Gather Around Dying Squirrel, Ship it to Calabassas
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Courtesy of Steven Mikulan in the LA Weekly we get one of the most bizarre stories of public life in Los Angeles I’ve ever read. Not “midget stripper mauls Austrian hooker with dentures” bizarre, a different kind — subtler. Like the creepy old couple at the beginning of Mulholland Drive: banal yet oddly troubling.
The story begins simply enough with two friends walking home from a night at the museum.
Jeff Solomon and his friend Greg …[were] approached their apartment building about 11 p.m. That’s when they saw it. Near Fourth and Detroit streets, a live squirrel lay on the green space between the sidewalk and curb. Solomon approached the rodent and thought it odd that it didn’t run away.
“Then I saw he was panting,” Solomon recalls. But there was more. “He had this bobbing-head thing going on, too.”
As the men hovered around the injured squirrel a small crowd formed alongside them and for the next two hours, well past midnight, a group of grown men and women huddled around the rodent, empathetically soaking in its death paroxysms. Finally an animal control expert arrived and determined the squirrel had neurological damage. He shepherded it away to a squirrel expert…in Calabasas…20 miles away…well after midnight.
And Californians wonder why our state and cities are going bankrupt.
Don’t get me wrong, compassion is a good thing and the whole scene would be almost sweet if I knew for sure my tax dollars weren’t right now being spent on squirrel neurosurgery and physical therapy. But there’s also this:
“…there was no way I would’ve done this to save a homeless person,” Solomon told Mikulan. “I’m not particularly nice.”
Read the story and let me know what you think. There’s something profound happening here that I can’t quite wrap my head around. It’s like the public sphere is so stunted in Los Angeles that the simplest connection with public life reduces people to children. I can’t think of many cities where an ailing squirrel would constitute a public spectacle. And where residents would admit to a reporter that if said ailing creature were a homeless person they’d step over it and walk away.
I’m pretty sure the guy’s statement was just posturing — a nihilistic facade that doesn’t have to apply to the animal world, because, you know, helping animals is cool. Still, even if it is true that the guy is a softie doing his best gritty urban impression, what a bizarre public front to affect. Like a closeted gay Republican who goes out of his way to shoot down gay rights. It’s almost pathological.
‘Yeah, I’d let someone die in the street. But a squirrel, that’s worth fucking fighting for.’
For some reason my thoughts just turned to my grandfather, island hopping in the Pacific theater during World War II, wading through blood-and-piss-strewn mud as bullets whiz over his head and Dengue Fever-ridden mosquitos suck at his ears and face.
“Remember boys,” he tells his buddies during a brief lull in the fighting, swatting a bug out of his eye, “we’re doing this for the squirrels.”
Heartened, the unit reloads and charges Hill 321X.
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I am very sensitive to all this… but I do draw the line at pigeons.
It’s funny, I think just about all Americans hate pigeons, but for some reason we don’t eat them. In other countries they call it squab and it’s a delicacy. An injured pigeon in Morocco isn’t getting sent to a hilltop clinic. It’s going to be stewed and served over couscous.
In response to another comment. See in context »I once lived next to the Bird Man of 77th Street. He owned an entire town house. The top floor was a pigeon coop. On all other floors, the pigeons flew wild. Once a month, a tractor trailer rolled down 77th St — in Manhattan!! — to deliver 50-pound bags of feed that he kept in his basement. Need I tell you what that produced? No matter how hard I tried, no city agency would do anything about it. Perhaps that’s why I draw the line at pigeons and not squirrels.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] Los Angeles, when stumbling across an injured squirrel, we wait patiently by its side for hours until an animal control expert can ferry it to an [...]
Mr. Fleischer,
I think the what is missing in the analysis is the fact that the squirrel was dying, as opposed to being dead. It was twitching and writhing. Had it been dead no one would have given it the slightest attention. There is nothing more fascinating that watching something die, it has the same attraction that a car wreck does. This particular event is not really a window into the soul of Los Angeles, the same thing could happen anywhere.
What is somewhat unique is that it is possible that this particular squirrel had bubonic (or murine) plague. In the summertime in southern California one has to be on the look out for rodents that are behaving strangely, such as this one was. That may well be why there was a sign up. There is actually a state agency (it used to be called “Vector Biology Control”) that monitors the rodent population for such activity.
So this is a bit LA-ism, but of the public health variety, not social psychology.
Hi David,
You make some good points. Death is indeed fascinating, but for a group of people to stand around watching a squirrel write in agony FOR HOURS goes beyond mere morbid curiosity. Unless the people in question were goths who had just come from a Hieronymus Bosch exhibit at LACMA, hovering over an agonizing squirrel, waiting for its stare to go soft, is pretty bizarre behavior.
And, I don’t know about you, but if I see a rabid or bubonic plague stricken animal I don’t stand next to it in a group. I call animal control and get the hell away. If you read the original article the person who put the sign up wasn’t a public health expert, she was a strange cat lady named Amy, who, when contacted, decided she was too busy to deal with the situation.
That all said, perhaps you’re right that I am selling these people slightly short. Maybe their concerns did extend beyond emotional grief. But I definitely think there’s room for social analysis here.
In response to another comment. See in context »Animal stories always get me. Maybe it’s because they are, in their lowly position under modern man’s dominion, helpless and too often injured. There is a distinction between a helpless animal fallen in the street and a grown human being who, for whatever reason, is not working but instead living in the street, maybe drunk, maybe crazy. More hearts favor the helpless than the useless. In spite of this, there are many institutions established in cities to help the homeless and also there’s usually a humane society too. I don’t worry too much about what it cost to send that little squirrel to wherever for reasons I did not understand. There are too many other things to think about and worry about and not just in Calif.
I like that they helped the squirrel! Its a better use of our money in Los Angeles than, say, paying for Michael Jackson’s funeral. The fact that Solomon wouldn’t lift a finger to help a homeless person dying in the street says considerably less about Los Angelenos than what it says about Solomon who is clearly…a putz! I mean, who would leave a dying person alone in the gutter?
Some humans help humans, others help animals. It reminds me of how during Hurricane Katrina, millions of dollars were donated to saving pets while so many of their humans were left to fend for themselves. I don’t think it’s a particular LA thing. Americans in general, perhaps? The tone of the health care debate would certainly seem to indicate people are more interested in squirrel health, or maybe just squirreling healthcare? Your story reminded me of a video I saw on Facebook once “Hero dog”. One dog saving another on a highway in Chile. Sweet. In the version I saw, some construction workers came to help the dogs once they reached the curb. Let’s hope there was a happy ending.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXaRECHHT4