Animals and Aliens
I’m
hungry. I’ve got a jar of peanut butter
and some bread. The problem is, the
peanut butter has been in the fridge and is rock solid. There is no way I can
spread it on the bread without tearing a hole in it, so I take the lid off, tear
off the inner seal and stick it in the microwave set for 25 seconds. That, I figure, should do the trick. However, unbeknownst to me the inner seal has
aluminum in it. The microwave goes
“zzzz, snap, crack” scaring the shit out of me and as I release the door to
take the jar out, I scan the countertop for a knife. I use the knife to scrape the remnants of the
aluminum seal off, then microwave the peanut butter again. All goes well. I get to eat and the bread remains unholy.
Using a tool
to solve my problem is not second nature to me.
It is first nature, the place my human mind immediately goes when faced
with adversity. Throughout the day I
will unconsciously utilize my nature to solve dozens if not hundreds of minor
problems. It will not occur to me, at
the end of the day, that I am special because of all the clever things I’ve
done. I’ve just been a human being. That’s how we be, us humans. We manipulate our environments to further our
goals whether they include making a sandwich or creating electricity using a
nuclear reactor. It ain’t no thang, not
really. We can’t help ourselves. It’s what evolution has produced.
I used to
have this horse. A beautiful bay mustang
called Satch. He was a jumpy guy, had
had a hard life, rounded up off the reservation and sold to some chick high on
meth , and left to stand in a dirt lot with a bunch of other horses for four
years. He’d been “greenbroke,” or
accustomed to a halter and saddle but not much more than that, and when his
drug addled owner had gotten over the fun of drugs and jumped on a one way bus
to the dying part, I took possession of Satch rather than see him go the
slaughter, where he would have been rendered for cash on the pound. Satch accepted me only marginally throughout
our entire 8 year relationship, but did the best he could. I’ll never forget that first day he let me
close enough to take the cholla cactus branches out of his mane and tail. I’m sure they’d been irritating him terribly,
but for a very long time they seemed preferable to letting someone like me
actually touch him. Eventually he did
though, and became a good little trail horse.
But like I said, he was jumpy.
And
trying. It vexed me daily that when we’d
ride out from the boarding stable to the desert trails, a distance of about a
quarter of a mile. He was mostly fine,
but there was one day a week in which he wasn’t. Garbage day.
I’d get so angry at him, “it’s just a garbage bin, you big dummy!” I must have said that a dozen times before it
finally dawned on me that he wasn’t the dummy.
I was. All locked up in my human
“intelligence” I couldn’t understand that while what I saw was a big ugly metal
box, Satch saw a likely predator. Every
day of the week these large, industrial sized bins were in the same places, but
on garbage day, after they’d been picked up and emptied, they’d be moved. While this was almost entirely below the
radar for me, Satch was a horse and to a horse that has evolved over millions
of years of traveling the plains and perceiving every single detail of its range,
the moving of garbage bins was a huge deal.
Satch’s ancestral knowledge dictated that things that move are either
other herbivores—you can identify them easily because of the way they smell and
the fact that they’re almost always chewing, other horses, or predators. In other words, to Satch those garbage bins may
very well have been moving in to kill and eat him.
It’s
humiliating to admit that then and now I am so locked into my human way of
thinking, to what I understand as logic based and fairly utilitarian, that it
took me many months to “see” Satch. The
truth is, he was a careful and very smart horse. Had he been doing what his DNA prepared him
to do, roaming freely with his herd, his capacity to survive would have been
much higher than other of his less attentive brethren.
A long time
ago I was fortunate enough to get to work with wild animals. It was at a now defunct marine park called
Marineland, located at the tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Southern
California. I started as summer intern,
moved on to a lab technician position and eventually was hired as a keeper, the
first such hire in the park’s history. This
was in the late 1970’s, the cusp of the time in which women were allowed to have
real careers. Back then I had a sort of
romanticized idea of marine mammals, particularly cetaceans, since all kinds of
nuts like John Lilly were, at the time, insisting that whales and dolphins were
not just perhaps of superior intelligence to human beings, but some kind of
cosmic. Everybody was always looking for
“cosmic” back then. The 60’s and 70’s
had been filled with a lot of drugs.
Whether or not cetaceans, whales and dolphins are “smarter” than human
beings, that certainly doesn’t set the bar very high. Marineland’s cetaceans earned their captive
keep by jumping through hoops, racing their trainers around the tanks like jet
skis, and sliding out of the water and smiling.
Interesting thing about Bottlenosed dolphins or Tursiops truncates,
they can be in the most sublime agony and still look like they’re smiling. A man named Bill Walker wrote a paper once,
about what it must feel like for a sonic creature to live in a cement
tank. The devil himself could probably
not come up with more exquisite torture.
But that’s another story.
Mostly,
during my time at Marineland, I worked with California Sea Lions at the
Stranded Animal Center. Every year,
especially during breeding season, local animal control departments collected
sick and injured animals from beaches and brought them to us. We’d do our best to heal them, but their
mortality rates were still about 60%. I’m
sure these days, people who do this kind of work have gotten better at it, I
hope so, but in general, if a marine mammal is sick enough to haul out on a
beach filled with drunken hominids and screaming kids, it’s sick enough to have
already resigned itself to death.
So, in the
early summer I would be inundated with sea lions. It was my job to feed and medicate them,
clean up after them and generally take care of all their needs during
rehabilitation. I was never afraid of
them; my instinctive reaction to any wild animal is awe, but maybe I should
have been. California Sea Lions are the
most battling, posturing, roaring, whites of the eye threatening, mouth open display
of big bear-like teeth, noisy and barking animals there are. They’re constantly muscling up to each other,
growling and lunging, complaining, objecting, and putting up with each other,
but just barely, animals on earth.
And it’s
almost all for show. They rarely
actually bite each other, or anyone.
Their entire way of being is based on the knowledge of their social
hierarchy, respecting or not respecting, depending on what they’re up to on a
given day, their positions within the larger group. Social intelligence, for a sea lion, is
everything.
I read an
article on the BBC news feed yesterday about human “intelligence,” in which the
author proposes the idea that human beings have reached the pinnacle, that as a
self-limiting quality, our brand of intelligence has left us nowhere to
go. The article itself (probably
inspired by the ascendance of people like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair
Bolsonaro) mostly describes the physiology of feedback loops. For instance, we’re taller now than we were
in the 19th century because of better nutrition, less debilitating
jobs-- at least in the first world not many of us have to get up a 4am and go
down the coal mine anymore—and of course advances in medical science. I found
the author’s argument sound, but the best part of the entire piece was the
photo at the beginning. It was of a man
in a business suite sitting at the end of a tree limb and sawing it off,
ensuring that when he is finished he will plummet to his death.
It reminded
me of Carl Sagan, the now deceased astronomer, and his question about the
central problem in the search for extraterrestrial life. A long time ago, astronomers and the public
in general, were keen on this but at the time, the early 1980’s, there was a
lot of fear about nuclear war. The
United States and the Soviet Union were in an arms race, defining which country
could be the most lethal should war break out, and arriving eventually at a
policy called M.A.D, or mutually assured destruction. If anyone launched on anyone else, both
nations would be destroyed. This worked
fairly well as a disincentive for starting the kinds of large scale wars of the
past. Of course it didn’t address the
fact that China, India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Israel had all acquired or
were in the process of acquiring The Bomb during these years and Sagan wondered
if it is possible that every time a so called “intelligent” civilization
reaches the level of technological sophistication required for space travel, it
was fated to destroy itself.
This is the
crossroads at which we have arrived, now but oddly enough, not because we’re on
the brink of nuclear war. The
destruction we’re facing is due to severe human overpopulation and an attitude
towards our environment that can only be described as reckless. Our trash is everywhere, in the oceans, on
the land and in the air. Earth’s
atmosphere is heating up so rapidly because of carbon dioxide emissions, due almost
entirely on our dependence on fossil fuels, that it’s probable we’ve already
gone beyond the point of no return.
We’ve sawed through the branch.
Carl Sagan’s was right, just wrong about the tool of our
destruction. It’s not a bomb. It’s us.
As
scientists send probes to Mars, to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and search
the heavens daily with giant radio telescopes looking for signs of
technological sophistication or “intelligence,” were we to find it, it would be
disastrous for contact to take place.
Human beings, with our manipulative, relentless mental activity and
self-importance, cannot help themselves from destroying other species in the
name of our imagined superiority.
Evolution has produced billions of species, only one of which has opposable
thumbs and big brains. This one
evolutionary mistake is revealing itself to be a planetary disaster on the
scale of the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Scientists say we’re in the Sixth Mass
Extinction and anyone who argues this fact is simply and woefully uninformed. Hopefully when we are gone, and the remnants
of life left on earth resumes its evolutionary march, it will not make the same
mistake again.
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