Pulphead: Essays (37 page)

Professor Marcus Livengood, who goes by Marc to the point of indulging “Mr. Marc” among his students, attended Centerbrook before getting his Ph.D. in comparative zoology at UC Santa Clara. He then came back to a job in the life-sciences department at his undergraduate alma mater. When I showed up forty minutes late for our appointment, he was alone in his surprisingly gigantic office.

I’ve never seen a person easier to describe physically. He looks like a young George Lucas. Same head shape, same beard, squint, everything, only taller and not pudgy yet and without the gray. Also, Mr. Livengood wears a ponytail. He wore as well the heavy square glasses that rogue scientists are commanded to wear when they’re inducted into the Rogue Scientist Lodge.

With what struck me as no mean feel for theater, as if we hadn’t already been e-mailing for weeks, Livengood said, “So you’re here to talk about the animals?”

Whatever process led to this interview had begun about a year before. I fear I’ll be trading away some much, much needed credibility by confessing this up front, but it began for me on the Internet. Not on kook sites, mind you; I wouldn’t spend any time on the kook sites until a good bit later, until after I’d got mixed up with Marc, in fact. No, this was at AOL, America Online, which I, like many others, use to connect to the Internet every day and check my messages. One thing that happens when you connect via America Online is that this little list of news headlines pops up on the welcome page, and you can follow them to the relevant articles. You know all this. Well, someone at AOL, in a pulsating cubicle on the company’s editorial floor, a person entrusted with sifting through all the different wire reports from all over the planet and deciding what merited attention, started seeing something, a pattern. I wish there were a way to determine this person’s identity (I’ve tried), because these days I consider him or her a curious sort of brother or sister in arms. In any event, it seemed like every day, once a week at a minimum, there’d be a far-out animal-attack story.

Not just that. An animal-attack story is a mountain lion pouncing on a jogger, a bear busting into someone’s car, a surfer losing a leg. Mind you, those cases look to be on the rise, too, in many parts of the world. But that’s a story we know. Species self-protection + everybody loving the outdoors = occasional kills. We’re talking here about stories that have to do with changes in the nature and lethality of animal aggression. Let’s go ahead and escort an elephant out of the room here and just say it: we’re talking about things like what happened to Steve Irwin.

Yes, the Irwin story has long since turned into a butt for online commenters’ macabre jokes. I won’t make them myself: the man had a little girl, little Bindi. Indeed, it was while filming scenes for her show that Irwin perished. (My daughter watches her show and owns merchandise related to it. The theme song goes, “The Croc Hunter taught her, / Now his only daughter / Is Bindi the Jungle Girl.”

The fact remains that in roughly three hundred years during which human beings have been both (a) swimming, unknowingly or not, above giant stingrays in shallow water and (b) recording unusual things that happened to them in the ocean generally, there has been not a single instance of a stingray spiking someone to death in the heart, which is what happened to Irwin. The barbed end of the stingray’s tail—over which, I’m told, rays have unholy power of control and accuracy; they kill tiny, tiny fish with it—passed directly in between two of Irwin’s ribs and into his left ventricle. He stood up, pulled it out, and died. There was video of this, but the Irwin family has destroyed it. In the weeks following, Australians began slaughtering rays in the coastal waters. Police and beachcombers were finding mangled carcasses. But Michael Hornby, director of Irwin’s Wildlife Warrior fund, issued a statement disavowing these acts and making clear that it would “not accept and not stand for anyone who’s taken a form of retribution” on the rays.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point. Which is what you told yourself about the Irwin story. We’d gone three hundred years without an incident like this; if we could go three hundred more, we’d be all right. Clear snorkels.

As it was, we went six weeks. On October 19, 2006, in the waters off Boca Raton, Florida, a man named James Bertakis was boating with a family friend when a giant stingray leapt out of the water and into his lap. It’s important to visualize this correctly. The animal landed on his actual lap, with Bertakis in a sitting position, empty-handed—he had no rod—and the ray landed facing him, so they were eye to eye. This scene was described in some detail by the woman present. Bertakis and the ray were staring at each other, and it was flexing its tail. And then, bang. Up over its body and directly into the heart muscle, the heart flesh, inches deep.

Reporters immediately asked the internationally regarded marine biologists at the University of Miami if there could be any connection, but Dr. Bob Cowen, the researcher put forward as spokesperson by the department, responded that he could “not imagine any connection” and that the attacks were “just two really unusual situations.”

“Except not,” said Livengood.

*   *   *

We were sitting now, and I’d just read off that skeptical quotation, along with several others, in order to suggest—politely, I hoped—that the position held by those in his profession who could be called mainstream is that what may seem like an evolution in global animal behavior is really just an increase in media attention, or a string of coincidences that get stitched together on the Internet, or most charitably, an increase in the exposure of individual human beings to undomesticated animals, as our habitats expand and the animals become more desperate for food sources, more willing to venture out.

“What do you mean, ‘Except not’?” I asked.

“Except they weren’t unusual.”

I assumed, of course, that he meant there’d been other barb-to-heart ray attacks, and was prepared to ask if he’d share the data.

“Rays? No,” he said. “Or at least those are the only two we’ve seen. But everything else…” He looked up into the corner with his head tilted as if I’d told him to pose for a picture that way. Then he popped to his feet.

“You want to see our file?” he asked. He’d wandered over to another, larger computer in the corner of his office and was messing around on it.

I’d already shown him my file, when we first sat down. Mine was in a manila folder. It contained cutouts and printouts of all the articles I’d archived in the preceding year plus. Most of them I’d e-mailed first to friends, with little jokey subject headers along the lines of Gird Thyself. It was one of the lucky recipients who replied, after the thirtieth or fortieth message, “Did you know there’s actually a guy who believes this is happening?” When I wrote back saying, “Yes: myself,” he sent another message, saying, “Right, but this guy studies animals.”

When I showed Livengood my folder, he gave out a single loud laugh, and said, “That’s what we get in a week, since people found out about us.”

*   *   *

I won’t play dumb with you—I already knew, by this point, that by “us” Livengood meant not him and his colleagues but him and a bunch of isolated obsessives—bloggers and amateur naturalists and sci-fi people dizzy with their first taste of contrarian legitimacy and also, I suppose, people like me who’d become helplessly fixated for no honorable reason on a cabalistic pattern in the news. This “us,” if it’s even an “us,” doesn’t have a good acronym yet and hasn’t given any papers at conferences or generated much of a media profile at all, really, apart from a few stray “opposing point of view” quotes in wire-service articles like the ones I’d gathered.

“Check this out,” Livengood said, sliding his chair to the side to make room for me. On the screen was a large parti-color map of the world, in a circular shape like an old navigational map. The landmasses and coastlines were thickly riddled here and there with tiny black dots, about pencil-tip size. There were maybe twenty-five stray black dots on the open seas. Livengood said—breezily, like someone giving an office tour to the new guy—“Those are all confirmed, and most of those are from the past six years.”

“What are they, exactly?”

“Start clicking on them!” he said, like he’d been wondering when I’d get to this.

I sat there for at least half an hour. At one point, Livengood got up and went off down the hall. It was true that the sheaf of articles I’d been so proud of was a Cracker Jack flip-book in comparison with what Livengood and his various TAs had collected. I should say that for an item to make his list, it must stand up to the admittedly soft but at least not nonexistent test of being (a) not a hoax—that is, independently verifiable as an incident through follow-up research—and (b) not the result of some obvious confusion. I invite you to verify these things as well, through Google or LexisNexis or in a few cases an article in
Animal Behavior Abstracts
(a complete-looking set of which sat on the shelves behind Livengood’s desk); you won’t find them in the
Weekly World News
, either, but on the BBC website, the AP,
Science
, and
Nature
, places that have a vested interest in not getting fooled. Anyway, I assure you I don’t know enough about even the normal goings-on in the animal kingdom to fabricate this many anomalies.

I figured out that some of the little dots, when you clicked on them, led to multiple incidents, signifying vectors of activity, usually but not always confined to a single species. There are four small English seaport towns, for instance, where various seabirds have started targeting people. A swan came out of the water there and took a dog under. Indeed, when measured in actual numbers, birds may be the single most active species in terms of manifesting whatever lies beneath this shift. In Boston, for the past few years, there’s been what can only be called an ongoing siege of wild turkeys. Children and old people getting attacked. In Sonoma County, California, the chicken population not long ago carried out “a flurry of attacks on neighborhood children.” The mother of one of the victims told a reporter, “It’s not charming when you have to see your baby attacked … seeing the blood going down his face and seeing him screaming … I can’t sleep at night.”

A fair share of the new violence is animal-on-animal. Needless to say, it garners less attention in the media. In the Polish village of Stubienko, in June 2000 (one of the earlier blips in Livengood’s collection), the storks went crazy and started slaughtering chickens, hundreds of them. (There were, I’m seeing only now, additional reports of “sporadic attacks on humans” at the time.) Observers were “at a loss to explain the aberrant behavior.”

You see what I mean, I hope, about there being something
off
in these stories. The storks started slaughtering the chickens.

Much of the intra-animal violence seems to suggest sheer madness. Chimps have repeatedly been documented engaging in “rape, wife beating, murder, and infanticide.” Elephants on the African savanna have been raping rhinoceroses, something that is evidently just as startling to zoologists as to the layperson.

Indeed, if you’ve paid attention to one particular facet of this story as it’s unfolded, it’s probably the work of Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist and environmental scientist who’s been tracking the accelerated mental degeneration of elephant populations in severely destabilized areas of Africa and Asia. She’s an extremely well-regarded researcher whose work is adding up to maybe the most persuasive proof yet mounted that the overlap between our psyches and those of the more developed animals has been massively underestimated when it comes to affection, suffering, stress, and we don’t even know what areas. That’s how I understand her work, at any rate. Earlier this year, a major magazine brought her to national attention, and she has a book deal, and to make a long story short, she declined an interview, for which I blame her not even slightly; if I were an internationally respected animal scientist, I’d drive cold muddy hours out of my way to avoid even a Rumsfeld-and-Saddam-style meeting with Marc Livengood, not that I don’t personally find him heroic. Nonetheless there is perhaps more of a kinship between their respective working theses than either would care to admit. (Livengood regards Bradshaw with a bit of jealousy and eye-rolling, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn.)

Bradshaw’s focus doesn’t stray onto the animal-on-human part of the elephant crackup—nonetheless, they are killing us, too, in numbers never imagined. More than a thousand victims in less than a decade. Forty-four Nigerian communities “erased” by rampaging elephants in a single migratory season. Some of the incidents have been quite spectacular, with multiple animals working in concert (as opposed to isolated or “rogue” males, which frequently act up); they’re storming through neighborhoods, turning on crowds. If you’ve ever seen an elephant attack a human being, it’s very personal-looking anyway. They keep going after you when you’re down. And at first, at least, you’re conscious, while they basically knock the bejeezus out of you with their trunks and then stomp you into the earth. In one place, the animals first rampaged, clearing the town, then broke into unprotected casks of locally brewed rice beer, then hurled themselves against electrified fences and died. Bradshaw writes, “Some biologists think that increased elephant aggression might comprise, in part, revenge against humans for accidental or deliberate elephant deaths.” Not to be outdone, “angry villagers” are poisoning to death an average of twenty elephants each year, according to
The New York Times
.