Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America by Jon Mooallem

war on wolves by insisting, “Large predatory mammals, destructive of livestock and game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.”
    This is to say, the teddy bear was born in the middle of a great spasm of extermination that would go on for decades. (Even the Audubon Society began eradicating predatory birds, like hawks and eagles, from their bird sanctuaries.) It was a natural escalation of the mind-set formed a century earlier, in Thomas Jefferson’s time, when Americans told themselves that the gruesome Incognitum had been driven extinct to wipe the continent clean for their use. Now the country was finishing off all these smaller, less imposing Incognitums—buffing out the land’s last scratches of wildness so that all we could see in its surface was our own reflection.
    The teddy bear was only one sign that some people, deep down, had started to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated and feared the bear. But all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a hug.
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    T HIS AFFECTION was already starting to percolate when Roosevelt went to Mississippi. Two years earlier, in 1900, the bestselling author Ernest Thompson Seton published
The Biography of a Grizzly,
a book that tenderized the reputation of the bear in the same way the teddy bear would. The story begins with a mother grizzly and her cubs “living the quiet life that all bears prefer.” But when a rancher opens fire, only one cub survives—a morose little guy named Wahb who must find his way in a shrinking wilderness riddled with steel traps and tainted by the “horrible odor” of man. Yes, Seton argued, grizzlies were once ferocious. But the barbarity of men with rifles and traps had put them in their place. Now was the time to show the bear some mercy: “The giant has become inoffensive now,” he later wrote. “He is shy, indeed, and seeks only to be let mind his own business.”
    By the time Seton wrote
The
Biography of a Grizzly,
he was a controversial figure at the vanguard of a new literary genre called realistic wild animal stories. These stories claimed to be credible natural histories of wildlife. But they dramatized the lives of animals as though they were the anthropomorphic heroes of fiction. (Jack London’s
White Fang
may be the realistic wild animal story that’s best remembered today.) Seton insisted that his stories were steeped in a nuanced and accurate knowledge of animal behavior, gained from his years in the field. And yet he endowed his animals with a cleverness and morality that sometimes border on the ridiculous. He wrote, for example, of a mother fox that feeds her trapped offspring poisoned meat so that the pup won’t have to suffer the indignity of being chained up. Then she nobly commits suicide herself.
    Seton was not the most unrealistic realistic wild animal story author. Some almost completely sanitized nature of its violence or trauma. (The writer William Long described a scene of wolves ripping apart a deer as being “peaceable as a breakfast table.”) Still, Seton was one of the most successful authors, and he became a target for the backlash against the genre by other naturalists. One critic derided realistic wild animal stories as the “yellow journalism of the woods.” Theodore Roosevelt was one of the authors’ most vicious enemies, dubbing them “nature fakers,” which is the name by which they’re remembered today. The fear was that these writers were misleading readers about the way nature worked. Children would be especially vulnerable to their lies.
    The country was urbanizing. By 1910, a majority of Americans would live in cities. Instead of spending time in nature, children relied on secondhand descriptions of wildlife now, and naturalists worried that, without much firsthand experience of animals, kids might accept even these sappy bedtime stories as fact. Teachers around the country were starting to use another of Seton’s books,
Wild Animals I Have