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Violation: Collected Essays. Sallie Tisdale
Читать онлайн.Название Violation: Collected Essays
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isbn 9780990437093
Автор произведения Sallie Tisdale
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
There is one profound problem to solve if artificial insemination does succeed, and that—once again—is musth. “Suppose A. I. is gloriously successful and you’ve got all these pregnant cows,” Schmidt said. “Half the calves are going to be males. In ten years, most of them are going to be shot. It’s not responsible to get into that situation—you have to have some way of dealing with surplus males. Some will be kept for breeding, but what are you going to do with the rest? Well, you can castrate them. They can be work elephants, they can be exhibit elephants. What about a little zoo in the Midwest with one elephant—an Asian cow that’s never going to be bred? She should be in a social group, yet they’ve got room for only one elephant, and, in any case, they can’t afford a group of cows. Well, they could have a neutered male instead—he’s going to be a docile animal, easygoing, happy-go-lucky, imprinted on people. He doesn’t need to be with other elephants, or to breed, to be happy.”
The castration of elephants has until recently been a fatal proposition; the testes are lodged in a web of circulatory vessels near the kidneys, and mortality from the surgery used to approach 90 percent. In 1983, seeing the long-term need, Schmidt and several other veterinarians joined forces to solve the puzzle. The team has done six castrations so far, all on circus bulls facing execution as they matured and grew more dangerous. “We have yet to lose a bull,” Schmidt told me. “We developed the surgical approach to the abdomen, and more understanding of the anatomy. And we know more about anesthesia now.”
Schmidt is aware that some people consider all animal research exploitive. He is quick to point out that none of the elephant research at Washington Park contributes to human health; it is all for the benefit of the elephants themselves. “I think these animals’ contributions will echo down the years,” he said. “We always felt that way—that they were contributing to the preservation of their species. I tell them so—‘Pet, you’re making a contribution to your species.’ She has more than paid her dues.”
RECENTLY, I VISITED the elephant barn again, stopping first at the elephant museum next door, which opened in 1986 and is privately funded. It is a half-moon-shaped building filled with ceremonial helmets, paintings, and tusk rings—the trappings of the human relationship with all things elephantine. Its centerpiece is the complete skeleton of a mastodon, on permanent loan from the Smithsonian Institution; it seemed unimposing here, so near the living thing. Then I walked over to watch the cows awhile, as they tossed hay about and rocked in place, their spongy feet compressing and springing back with every beat. Rama, back from the zoo in Tacoma only a few weeks and still nervous, was darting back and forth in a quarantine room, his trunk wild and fast. (Bets told me that when she splashed a sample of urine from Rosy, Rama’s mother, on the freshly washed floor of the room he flehmened thirty-five times in a row.) Packy was in the crush, relaxed, downing carrots, seeming not to know—or care—that he couldn’t walk out at will. Jay Haight took me right to the bull’s gigantic, warm side. His trunk, as thick at its base as my torso and three times as long, snaked back to where I stood, questing for me. A wet print of his left forefoot had made a near-perfect circle on the concrete; Jay and I stood together inside it, with room to spare.
Roger Henneous was there, as he almost always is, his stained ranger’s hat cocked back on his head, his feet spread wide on the damp, hay-covered floor. Behind him milled a wall of dusty gray. He talked about the research, and the keepers’ efforts to help, no matter how great the inconvenience or the danger. A considerable amount of extra work is required of all the keepers, and much of it is dirty and difficult. “I have many times, over the years, found myself cussing and stomping my feet, wondering, Goddammit, why couldn’t I have taken up rabbits?” he said, with a glint in his eye. “In the overall scheme of things, our efforts here may not make a nickel’s worth of difference. Not in the big real world out there. But no other breeding program like this one exists. If we can’t—or won’t—do the work, who will? We have the facilities, and we have the animals. If Betsey isolates and identifies the pheromone, then, theoretically, it can be synthesized. If it can be synthesized, it could be used to lure wild elephants from inhabited areas—essentially trick them out of harm’s way. It could save a lot of bulls in Asia from getting the lead pellet.”
Down the hall, Belle has planted her face against the crack of a door. Behind her in the room is a trio of younger cows. The elephant guards the tree of life; the elephant worships the moon and stars. Elephants were once supposed to have had wings. Belle greets me with a grim stare, blocking me like a house matron uncertain whether I’m fit to be let in. I stand quietly for the inspection. Her trunk slides up, loose and confident, and rapidly slips under my collar, through my hair, down my sleeve, my pant leg. She’s close, her trunk is enormous, the two huffing nostrils at the end strangely naked and pink, vacuuming in my smell, my volatiles, myself. All the while, she fixes her moist brown eye on mine. I remember—because I can’t forget—photographs I’ve seen of butchered elephants. What was left of one bull knelt in apparent calm. The body, its head missing, was eerily still, as though waiting. John Donne called the elephant “Nature’s great masterpiece … the only harmless great thing.” As I submit to Belle’s precise, intelligent examination, I remember that and the dead elephant’s calm, and look straight back into her cautious and curious eye.
New Yorker, January 23, 1989
When I began writing an essay about a scientist’s long search for a mysterious pheromone, I was given the keys to the kingdom: access to the elephant herd at what is now called the Oregon Zoo. The story felt like a gift—it was a great problem and it gave me a chance to go inside, to be close to animals I prize greatly.
I’m not particularly interested in the campaign to stop zoos from keeping elephants in captivity. I want them to be treated well, preferably in open spaces with the chance to socialize and wander in the most natural way. But we’ve been too busy killing wild elephants and destroying their habitat to stop keeping captive herds. That this animal could disappear from the Earth is a tragedy beyond words for me. Imagine a world without elephants: I can hardly think about it.
EVERY WINTER NIGHT OF MY CHILDHOOD, MY FATHER built a fire. Each element of the evening’s fire was treated with care—with the caress of the careful man. The wood, the wood box, the grate, the coal, black poker, and shovel: he touched these more often than he touched me. I would hold back, watching, and when the fire was lit plant myself before it and fall into a gentle dream. No idea was too strange or remote before the fire, no fantasy of shadow and light too bizarre.
But for all the long hours I spent before his fires, for all the honey-colored vapors that rose like smoke from that hearth, these aren’t the fires of memory. They aren’t my father’s fires. When I remember fire, I remember houses burning, scorched and flooded with flame, and mills burning, towers of fire leaping through the night to the lumber nearby like so much kindling, and cars burning, stinking and black and waiting to blow. I loved those fires with a hot horror, always daring myself to step closer, feel their heat, touch.
My father is a fireman. My submission to fire is lamentably obvious. But there is more than love here, more than jealousy—more than Electra’s unwilling need. It is a fundamental lure, a seduction of my roots and not my limbs. I am propelled toward fire, and the dual draw of fascination and fear, the urge to walk into and at the same time conquer fire, is like the twin poles of the hermaphrodite. I wanted to be a fireman before, and after, I wanted to be anything else.
Firemen are big, brawny, young, and smiling creatures. They sit in the fire hall with its high ceilings and cold concrete floors and dim corners, waiting,