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

Known,
as a textbook. “All of this would be highly amusing,” one zoo director wrote, “if it were not so pitifully serious to the children of the public schools.”
    But some of the nature fakers’ motivations were more poignant than their critics understood. Seton especially was responding to America’s war on predators. His most dignified, sympathetic protagonists were usually the same animals that were being exterminated in the West, like grizzlies and wolves. He was trying to create public empathy for these species—to save them. Like Robert Buchanan with his polar bears more than a hundred years later, Seton knew that regurgitating dry, scientific descriptions wasn’t enough to generate a true emotional response. Seton’s aim instead, he wrote, was to capture the “personality” of an individual animal “and his view of life.” “Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing only in degree from our own, they surely have their rights.”
    The nature fakers may be mostly forgotten, but this sentimental compassion lives on in nearly every children’s book about animals I’ve read to my daughter—books that, like everything adults give to little children, are echoes of our own beliefs. And it was evident, too, in so many of the letters about polar bears that schoolchildren wrote to the Department of the Interior in 2007. “I really think it is not fair to the polar bears,” wrote the fourth-grader in Oakland, Juan Piedra. “Also, they could drown and die off and what if they were you?”
    Nature can seem this pure and honorable only once we’re no longer afraid of it. We seem to be forever oscillating between demonizing and eradicating certain animals, and then, having beaten those creatures back, empathizing with them as underdogs and wanting to show them compassion. We exert our power, but are then unsettled by how powerful we are.
    Large predators—those able to rip us apart—have understandably commanded a huge share of humans’ psychic attention for as long as there have been humans. (Some of the earliest cave paintings are of bears and lions.) But as we’ve insulated ourselves from nature, and diffused the danger of those animals, we’ve started to give them new meanings. That basin of anxious, imaginative energy can get rechanneled into a deep aesthetic appreciation. In the bear especially, Yale’s Stephen Kellert argues, we see a creature a lot like us: it can walk upright, snores when it sleeps, and is roughly our size and shape. But it’s also omnivorous, agile, clever, self-possessed—all the admirable dimensions of ourselves that have been “diminished in modern culture.” For many of us today, who spend our days slumped over spreadsheets or quarreling with our banks over hidden fees, bears look like the composed and competent survivors we wish we still were.
    No single piece of research demonstrates this cycle of fear and reverence more clearly than a study, led by the geographer Jennifer Wolch, that examined how cougars were written about in the
Los Angeles Times
between 1985 and 1995. In the early 1970s, the cougar population in California had been ground down to as low as twenty-four hundred animals. But by 1990, a ban on hunting had allowed the species to come back; the cougar had become an icon of conservation in Southern California. It was described in the newspaper as “majestic” and “innocent,” an embodiment of nature’s grace, and a “symbol of our dwindling wilderness heritage.” But soon cougars started encroaching into the populated areas around Los Angeles. There were two fatal attacks. More people still died in America because of bee stings and black widow spider bites, Wolch writes, but “as reports of cougar-human interaction rose and public fears were fanned by episodic attacks, the images of cougars as charismatic and proud wild animals at home in nature were replaced by terms conjuring danger, death, and criminal intent.”