I think I’ll always have animals and I think I’ll always write about them. Their unknowability challenges me. Our affection for them intrigues me. I resist the urge to anthropomorphize them, but I do think they know something we don’t about living elementally. I’m happy to be in their company.
I really liked what I’ve previously read by Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief, The Library Book), but I guess what I liked most about those books were their format: the intertwined threads that weave together straight facts, singular events, and Orlean’s personal involvement with the material that synergise into something special. I came into On Animals expecting more of the same, and it’s not. Rather than plumbing the depths of one overarching story, this is a series of fifteen articles that Orlean published over the years (in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Smithsonian Magazine) which all feature a lightweight look at some “animalish” topic. And taken one after another, this became a little repetitive and dull. I appreciate that Orlean has had a greater than average fascination with animals throughout her life, and that she has had the good fortune to travel the world as a journalist to investigate animal-related stories, but this collection didn’t add up to a satisfying book. Low three stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As Orlean explains in her introduction, she and her husband eventually left their Manhattan apartment for an acreage in upstate New York, which they then populated with chickens, ducks, turkeys, guinea fowl, dogs, cats, and cattle. Despite having been raised in suburbia, Orlean took to farmlife and its duties, explaining that chicken-keeping seems to be enjoying a revival in the US:
Chickens seemed to go hand in glove with the postfeminist reclamation of other farmwife domestic arts — knitting, canning, quilting. Keeping chickens was a do-it-yourself hobby at a moment when doing things for yourself was newly appreciated as a declaration of self-sufficiency, a celebration of handwork, and a pushback from a numbing and disconnected big-box life.
And although she does reference the farm and her life there in some of the articles that follow, it doesn’t much serve as a true linking mechanism. The articles explore everything from show dogs to captive panda breeding, and most did have some interesting tidbits. In a story about a woman who hoarded tigers in deplorable conditions (long before anyone heard of the Tiger King), Orlean notes, “There are at least fifteen thousand pet tigers in the country — more than seven times the number of registered Irish setters or Dalmatians.” In an article on taxidermy — which didn’t much interest me overall — my attention was grabbed by, “One display, a coyote whose torso was split open to reveal a miniature scene of the destruction of the World Trade Center, complete with little firefighters and rubble piles, was surpassingly weird.” In an article on the historic treatment of animals used in Hollywood, Orlean quotes the (then) director of American Humane’s Film and Television Unit, Karen Rosa:
“If you show up on set with twenty-five thousand cockroaches, you better leave with twenty-five thousand cockroaches,” she said. I wondered if she extended the same welcome to cockroaches at home. She shook her head. “A cockroach in my kitchen is one thing,” she said. “A cockroach in a movie is an actor. Like any other actor, it deserves to go home at the end of the day.”
So, some of this was interesting and surprising, but as On Animals includes articles that go back to 1995, not all of the information is current. In an article on the use of oxen in Cuba, Orlean notes the friendship between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez that guaranteed Venezuelan oil would flow freely to supply the abundance of Soviet tractors employed by most Cuban farmers. And after relating the whole inspiring story of Keiko the killer whale (of Free Willy fame), Orlean notes that she was disappointed to have arrived in Iceland just a month after Keiko had been successfully released into the wild. Keiko had followed a wild pod of orcas to Norway and Orlean ends this article on swelling violins:
The children in Skaalvik Fjord who swam on his back and fed him fish reportedly found him delightful, as has everyone who has ever known Keiko. He played with them for a night and a day, the luckiest whale in the world, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
(It takes only a minute on a search engine to learn that Keiko didn’t thrive in the wild and his case makes the whole rewilding enterprise appear suspect; that seems the more interesting story, but it’s beyond the scope of this book.) So, there were some interesting nuggets along the way, but I had to slog through the dross to find them; I was never excited to make that effort.
