Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, page 9
Now to the larger question. What is a zoo?
How did these institutions come into being and why do we continue to tolerate them? What logic can be offered for keeping tigers—white ones, orange ones, tigers of any subspecies or color or genetic persuasion—on a small patch of grass behind a high fence in a sycamore-shaded neighborhood of Cincinnati?
Zoos are educational, people say. Zoos represent the only glimpse of nature that many city-bound children, and their city-bound parents, will ever get. Zoos are the last refuge of certain endangered species. Zoos are a way to preserve a few tiny fragments or vestiges of wildness itself, people say. The better zoos of today, including Cincinnati’s, even play an important role in the captive propagation of rare and beleaguered animals that may eventually be released back into their native habitats, if by some miracle those habitats haven’t meanwhile been totally destroyed. People say each of these things. I’d like to agree, I try to agree, but in the back of my brain and the pit of my stomach I don’t. To me it’s all half-truth.
The pedagogic value of zoos is an afterthought, dreamed up and added on during just the last 150 years to raise the intellectual and social tone of a much older tradition, the commercial menagerie. Even today, zoos aren’t very educational. The white tiger exhibit in Cincinnati, for instance, is drastically coy on the subject of population genetics. Nor do zoos constitute fragments of wildness. In fact, wildness is precisely what’s missing; the infinite intricacy of an ecosystem is missing; only the animate bodies of a few animals, some of those animals potentially dangerous to humans (which is not the same as being wild), but stripped of their contexts and their community roles and therefore their living identities, are present. Zoos do provide glimpses of biological exotica that can be taken to represent nature, it’s true. But like many of the nature documentaries on public TV, zoos may actually undermine the continued existence of what they purport to celebrate. People watch the films, they visit the zoos, and by the mesmeric power of these vicarious experiences they come carelessly to believe that the Bengal tiger (or the white rhino, or the giant panda, or the diademed sifaka) is alive and well because they have seen it. Well I’m sorry but they haven’t seen it. They’ve seen images; they’ve seen taxidermy on the hoof. And the wellness, even the aliveness, is too often a theatrical illusion. Zoos are not fragments of the world of nature, no. They are substitutes.
That’s why they’re useful and that’s why they’re pernicious.
Let’s start again. What is a zoo? Most essentially, it’s an arena of the visual. It’s a place to see wonders. The act of seeing is the primary zoo experience—whereas learning, thinking, and emoting are dimensions of encounter that come secondarily, if at all. We go there to look; in passing, we read a few labels and placards, of which the information content is low. William Conway, having made that remark about “freaks,” continued with a statement that frames zoos (even great conservationist zoos, such as his) in visual terms: “We need to save our severely limited space for tiger subspecies that are close to totally disappearing in nature. If we choose to save the white tiger at the expense, say, of the Siberian tiger, it’s like saving a copy of a Rembrandt painted in glitter on velvet and throwing out ‘The Man with the Golden Helmet.’ ” A fellow named John Berger would take the argument still further.
Berger is a cantankerous British art critic who has written about the viewing experience of zoos. He’s well qualified to address the subject because a zoo, after all, as William Conway implied, is more like an art museum than like a forest.
What we see in a zoo, according to John Berger, are creatures that have been rendered marginal. “The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers.” So they are no longer wild. They are no longer complete. Their responses, their behavior, probably even their sensory capacities have changed. “Nothing surrounds them except their own lethargy or hyperactivity.” Each has been separated, not just from its natural habitat, but from its identity. They are numbed; in some sense, as they stand or sleep or eat or pace the cage floor, they are already extinguished. To assume that they retain the capacity for seeing and experiencing us, while we are seeing and experiencing them, is recklessly hopeful. Some writers have argued that the value of a zoo visit comes when a human and another animal make contact with their eyes. Forget about that, says Berger, it doesn’t happen. “At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically.” They have been immunized against encounter, he says. When a human looks deep into the eyes of a zoo animal, according to John Berger, the human is alone.
I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to look deep into the eyes of a white tiger. So, after talking with Bob Lotshaw, I walked back up to the compound in which four of the Cincinnati animals were basking beneath a wan winter sun.
They were confined to about a third of an acre of grassy slope, with a few rocks and bare trees—no prey, no competitors, no territorial structure, no forest, no natural context—but they were making the best of it. Occasionally one would pounce on another playfully. Their noses were pink. Their fur was creamy with umber stripes. They were impossibly, pathetically beautiful. If their eyes were blue, or otherwise remarkable, they didn’t show me.
The fence was eighteen feet high. Above was a wooden walkway, from which I and the few other visitors could look down. It was a quiet day in February—a day of low attendance, despite these box-office stars. Traffic sounds came from a distance, muffled by hills and trees. Suddenly a young boy on the walkway started screaming. The forced anger of his shrieks indicated a tantrum. He wanted his lunch, or an ice cream, or a Coke, or his nap, or simply his way on some other point. Maybe he wanted a carnival ride. He was about five. His squalling caught the attention of two tigers, below, and I watched as they stalked him along the fence. Their heads went low and they stepped carefully. They seemed to have come alive. Part of me hoped to see them leap up, clamber over the fence in one astonishing burst of athleticism, snatch that kid, drag him back down into their compound, and eat the little snot. But I was divided.
Then the tigers remembered their own hopeless impotence, and they lost interest.
To Live and Die in L.A.
The cab driver’s name is Amir, he’s a young Israeli, he lives in Sherman Oaks, just over the so-called Santa Monica Mountains from Beverly Hills. He meets me at my hotel, on Wilshire Boulevard, and for a moment we confer over destination and routing. Yes yes, says Amir, he believes he can find Burbank, no problem. He is a professional, with a professional map. So we drive off along the rain-slick Los Angeles freeways. At 5:30 on this winter morning it’s still dark, but the roads are already astream with traffic, and I’m happy to let Amir prove his professionalism versus the ramps and the merging lanes and the welter of split-second choices while I concentrate on my coffee. Thank heaven for taxis. If I were driving, I’d commit that single wrong move and wind up gridlocked on the far side of Long Beach at midmorning, whereas it’s crucial to reach Wildwood Canyon Park before dawn.
“You are doing what?” says Amir.
Going to look for coyotes, I tell him.
There are no coyotes in Tel Aviv, just one thing among many that distinguish Amir’s home city from Los Angeles. There are no coyotes in Israel whatsoever; the world’s most cunning and adaptable species of canid is strictly a creature of the Americas. But Amir is a quick study, and when I repeat the word, it registers. Kee-yotee, he says. Ah, like a dog, yes? That’s the one, I say: Like a dog, only it’s a wild animal. Amir is amused. He appreciates this departure from cab-driverly routine. Most of his early-morning fares are not gentlemen headed out to slog in the hills above Burbank in search of coyotes, he informs me. A silent ride to the airport is rather more common. While Amir talks, I gape out the window toward Studio City, noticing that the drizzle has gotten heavier. Then we make our appointed crossover from the Ventura Freeway to the Golden State Freeway, swinging back toward the northwest, and Amir adds: “I don’t know, these people, in this city, if they know that they have coyotes.”
No doubt he’s more right than wrong. Coyotes are adept, when they want to be, at remaining invisible. Within the Los Angeles basin, they’re obliged to choose their home territories and their travel corridors with care, finding security in the large patches and linear strips of greenery preserved as parks and wisps of landscaping, or in the topographic anomalies too steep and too fashionable to be buried completely by pavement: patches like Griffith Park, linear strips like Mulholland Drive, topographic anomalies like Laurel Canyon. These remnants of habitat are fragmented and scattered, but they aren’t scattered uniformly throughout the city. A person could live a lifetime within certain neighborhoods—Inglewood or Chinatown, for instance, or Mar Vista or Watts—without catching sight of a coyote. But while most of the Los Angeles populace may not know that they’re sharing their metropolitan area with Canis latrans, some people certainly do. Encounters happen. The city’s Department of Animal Regulation can bear witness to that.
In the course of an average year, the Department of Animal Regulation takes about seven hundred complaint calls involving coyotes. A coyote ate my cat, someone says. A coyote murdered my cockatoo, Orson, while he was sunning on the patio, whines somebody else. Or: A coyote jumped the back fence and pushed over a garbage can and scarfed up three grapefruit rinds and a quart of cappuccino yogurt, then glanced at my baby daughter and licked its chops. Or maybe: A whole pack of coyotes came swaggering down Sunset and scared the bejesus out of me and my Airedale. Or my own personal favorite: A coyote charged in through the pet door and disemboweled our poodle on the kitchen floor. Upon request, the DAR traps and destroys coyotes in any vicinity where a single animal has caused fear or trouble. Last year that amounted to roughly 160 dead coyotes within the city proper. The trapping procedures are not focused enough to target specific individuals, so there’s no way of knowing how many of the 160 dead animals were executed for offenses they didn’t commit, but a plausible case can be made, I suppose, that some minimal level of reactive control is within reason. Anyway, the persecution of coyotes in Los Angeles is not nearly so egregious as the persecution of coyotes in, say, the state of Montana. And those L.A. coyotes that remain innocent of garbage scarfing and poodle disembowelment, plus the ones that are just too smart to be trapped for their sins, can continue to thrive within the slightly less fashionable patches of urban greenery, such as Wildwood Canyon Park.
Amir drops me off at the park gate, with a promise to return in four hours. The gate is barricaded to traffic. A sign says PARK CLOSED, adding in large letters that violators will be SUBJECT TO ARREST OR CITATION, so I glance around carefully before ignoring it. If a car comes, I decide, I’ll dive into the brush. The minions of civil order will never catch me. I feel alert and superior and mildly outlawish this morning, besides which I’ve got business to do and can’t be bothered with arbitrary boundaries. In other words: One step past the barricade and I’ve entered the mind-set as well as the habitat of the Los Angeles coyote.
• • •
THE PARK road winds upward into steep hills and chaparral vegetation, away from the lights of somnolent Burbank. At the end of the road is a trail. At the end of the trail, on a ridgetop, I begin bushwhacking across to the next canyon. The earth of these slopes is soft and unstable, a porridge of mud-thickened sand that tends to slough away under each footstep. On a patch of bare mud I notice some tracks, unmistakably canid pad-and-toe prints but with no claw marks punctuating the outer two toes, a telling absence that suggests coyote rather than dog. I see a scat pile, each morsel pointy and fibrous at one end, wastage from what must have been a fur-covered little meal. This much seems promising. So after topping over into the next canyon—which turns out to be roadless, pathless, and surprisingly unscarred by human intrusion, a tiny token of wilderness surrounded by urban sprawl—I settle myself down on a mat of dead grass. From here my view is commanding: steep slopes, a brush-choked stream channel below, another high ridge across the way, a network of game trails lightly etched through the chaparral and, visible just a mile to the west, beyond where the canyon opens out onto the flat, Burbank.
I raise the hood of my jacket, pull my hands back inside the sleeves, and hunker, reasonably cozy despite the chilly rain. I sweep the far slope with my binoculars. Nothing. But it seems a good place to keep watch, and an excellent place to sit contemplating the persistence of coyotes in Los Angeles.
They have inhabited this valley since long before Homo sapiens arrived, of course. That’s a claim that can’t be made everywhere throughout the present distributional range of C. latrans, which was largely confined to the prairies and deserts of western North America at the time Europeans first invaded. Nowadays there are coyote populations to be found from California to Maine, from Costa Rica up through Alaska; the species has spread eastward and northward and southward to the limits of landmass and tolerable climate, expanding its range in association with those human settlers who accommodatingly cleared forests, filled grasslands with tasty and bone-stupid livestock, and exterminated the coyote’s two chief competitors, Canis lupus and Canis rufus, the gray wolf and the red wolf. But in the Los Angeles basin the coyote is no newcomer.
Fossils taken from the Rancho La Brea tar pit (one of the great sites in urban paleontology, back down on Wilshire Boulevard not far from my hotel) suggest that C. latrans was present here during the Pleistocene, sharing its habitat with dire wolves and sabertooth cats. The dire wolves in particular, gigantic and now-extinct predators of the species Canis dirus, serve as a reminder that maximal size and ferocity are not always favored by the pressures of evolution. The sabertooth cats and the dire wolves are long gone, but the coyote was a more versatile animal—smaller in size, less specialized in anatomy and habits, smart enough for social behavior, with an opportunistic disposition and a high rate of reproduction, all of which helped it survive.
For the Serrano Indians, in the early Los Angeles basin, the coyote held an important totemic status, as it did for other tribes in the Southwest. Among the Serrano, the coyote gave a name, an image, a social identity to the Wahilyam ceremonial society. It seems to have been an ambivalent totem, though, representing some good aspects (resourcefulness, for instance) and some bad aspects (villainous trickery) of human character. During the Spanish mission period, the coyote population in southern California increased dramatically, not just because the Franciscan missionaries were raising big herds of cattle, horses, and sheep, but because the cattle were grown for hides and for tallow, not for meat. When cows and steers were slaughtered, great piles of beef and offal were left to stink up the landscape. Since a female coyote is capable of producing up to a dozen pups annually, given abundant food and adequate security, C. latrans was perfectly suited to proliferate while the excess of carrion lasted. (The California condor probably thrived during that period too, but as a slow breeder it couldn’t increase its population so quickly.) The pattern of cattle raising, meat wasting, and coyote feeding continued after the missions were secularized, until a severe drought in the 1860s hit the tallow-and-hides industry hard enough to start a shift toward more varied agriculture. Within the Los Angeles basin, chaparral and sage were cleared for the planting of orchards, grainfields, vineyards. For coyotes, the great pig-out was over, but the new situation wasn’t disastrous. Though they belong to the order Carnivora, coyotes are actually omnivores, well able to scrounge and survive on a wide range of food items including mice, ground squirrels, rabbits, snakes, insects, grapes, peaches, avocados, prickly pear fruit, peanuts, cantaloupe, watermelons, dates, celery, soybean meal, harness straps, and oranges, as well as poodles and Persian cats and the occasional wing-clipped flamingo. So they made the transition to modern Los Angeles easily.
A geographer named Don Gill studied the coyotes of L.A. during the late 1960s and early ’70s. He estimated that at least four hundred animals were living inside the city, with several thousand more in the mountains along the immediate periphery of the basin. The Department of Animal Regulation, in those days, was hearing just over a hundred complaints annually (less than one-sixth as many as now) and killing thirty-five coyotes (versus 160 now) in an average year. That numerical increase during the past twenty years could reflect two things: a sheer increase in the population of coyotes or an increase in the chance that any given coyote will suffer a fateful encounter with humans. Either explanation might be true, and possibly both.
The animals, as charted by Gill, were clustered wherever brush and topography offered adequate refuge. About twenty lived within Griffith Park. There were scattered sightings and reported predations in Whittier, in Arcadia, in San Marino, and in Pasadena just west of the Rose Bowl. East Los Angeles, unaccountably, was a minor hotspot. Concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, an open-air theater surrounded with chaparral, were occasionally interrupted by howling. The Santa Monica range, a wedge-shaped zone of wooded hills jutting eastward into Los Angeles from the coast, with Mulholland Drive marking the ridge line and those fashionable canyons (Franklin Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon, among others) draining southward, harbored a big share of the city’s coyotes. One other island of occupied habitat, according to Gill, was the Verdugo Mountains area, bounded by the Foothill and the Golden State freeways, just northeast of Burbank. Don Gill himself had found coyote spoor in the Verdugos.
