Zak Smith, Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, works to safeguard some of the world’s most iconic and at-risk species.
Until recently, the wildlife trade, for many Americans, was a disturbing, but far-off, concern. Every so often, Twitter would erupt in outrage over pictures of someone engaged in trophy hunting, or the occasional Florida Man would have a run-in with an escaped pet python in the Everglades. But, over the last few months, the wildlife trade has hit very, very close to home, in one of the most disruptive possible ways. Many of the early COVID-19 cases were people who had direct exposure to a live animal market, where farmed and wild-caught exotic species were stacked in cages as they waited to be sold and slaughtered. This unnaturally close contact — among species that would rarely or never meet in any circumstance other than through the wildlife trade — creates ideal conditions for animal pathogens to jump species barriers.
Smith and experts discuss the boundaries of China’s Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park, part of China’s ambitious new national park system. The territory is home to about 30 Siberian tigers and 40 Amur leopards, which need non-fragmented habitat for their populations to grow.
In her forthcoming book Talking with Bears (Rocky Mountain Press, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells the story of the naturalist Charlie Russell. “If the search for truth was the engine of Charlie’s life, then it was love that provided the fuel,” she writes. (Photo courtesy of Gay Bradshaw)
Bears, like other carnivores, are typically cast as unthinking, emotionless killers. But the late naturalist Charlie Russell believed this tragic misperception hides the truth about who bears really are. Charlie’s life story changed how humans perceive grizzly bears. While other scientists and naturalists were studying bears from a distance, tranquilizing them and tagging them with trackers, Charlie chose to live — intimately and without harm — among bears for decades in far east Russia and in North America. His objectives were as different as his methods. “Biologists know a lot — how many calories a bear needs every day, their numbers, and so on. This is good information, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about who a bear is,” he told our guest. “I’ve never wanted to know about bears, I’ve only wanted to understand them.”
In her much anticipated new book,Talking with Bears (Rocky Mountain Books, fall 2019), Dr. Gay Bradshaw tells Russell’s story, built on a decade of conversations about, and two lifetimes devoted to, searching for the truth of who animals really are. An internationally renowned expert on animal trauma and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, Dr. Bradshaw has spent her life exploring the minds, emotions and lives of animals, and pushing and inspiring science and society to better understand them.
“Very conservative neuroscience does document and does demonstrate that non-humans have the same brains and processes in their brains that govern our consciousness and our emotions and thoughts,” Dr. Bradshaw says. But “our society, our relationships and everything reify and strengthen and reinforce [seeing them as ‘other’].”
Her expertise includes the effects of violence on and recovery of elephants, grizzly bears, chimpanzees, orcas, parrots, and other animals suffering from human violence, both in the wild and in captivity. Early in her career, she made the ground-breaking discovery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in free-living elephants — which is the topic of her Pulitzer-Prize-nominated book Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity. Her most recent book, Carnivore Minds: Who These Fearsome Beings Really Are, is an equally magnificent call for correcting how we think about and co-exist with carnivores. She is also the author of The Elephant Letters: The Story of Billy and Kani, which tells the stories of two African elephants, one wild and one captive, born on the same day. Dr. Bradshaw holds doctorates in both ecology and psychology and has taught, lectured and written widely about these fields in the U.S. and around the globe for over three decades. She is the founder and director of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence in Jacksonville, Oregon, where she lives and runs The Tortoise and The Hare Sanctuary.
“When you go to these elephants and you study their networks and you study their behavior, you find in elephants the same, I would argue, type of friendship that you find in us,” Dr. Christakis says. “I find that incredibly moving. If we can share this property with elephants for God’s sake, we can certainly share it with each other.” (Photo: Via Yale Human Nature Lab)
For decades, researchers have debated whether or not animals make friends. “Friends” — the taboo “f word” — was generally put in quotes if it was used at all. But if you study the social networks of elephants, whales and other animals, it is clear that they have friends just like we do, according to the renowned sociologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis. Friendship, like other societal characteristics, evolved independently and convergently across species. Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, Dr. Christakis is a leading Yale sociologist and physician known for his research on human social networks and biosocial science. In this episode, he speaks with us about the ancient origins and modern implications of our common animality and his remarkable new book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
In his new book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Dr. Christakis investigates the biological foundations of our impulse toward the good. “For too long,” he writes, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness, and cruelty. [But] our good deeds are not just the products of Enlightenment values. They have a deeper and prehistoric origin …. we come to this sort of goodness just as naturally as we come to our bloodier inclinations.”
The early twentieth century bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll studied the private worlds of animals, and the perceptual differences and similarities between our worlds. Uexküll used a musical metaphor to explain his idea that each organism has a distinct, subjective and all-consuming life-world. To Uexküll, in the words of Dorion Sagan, “Organisms are instruments in a sort of celestial music show of which we hear only strains.” In his view, as Sagan writes, the multitude of earth’s organisms — a word derived from the Greek word, organon, for “instrument” — formed a many-membered orchestra of extraordinary richness.
“Our human gaze has been misdirected,” says journalist and poet Charles Siebert. “We look heavenward for deliverance when deliverance comes from looking down and back into the biology from whence we came and that great symphony we’re part of.” (Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)
Once, while attending a symphony by Gustav Mahler and sitting beside a young man absorbed in following along the score, Uexküll wondered if it is “the task of biology to write the score of nature.” “Each voice of a person or instrument is a being for itself, but one which melts into a higher form through point and counterpoint with other voices, which from then grows further, gaining richness and beauty in order to bring forward to us the composer’s soul,” he wrote. “Reading the score,” the young man sitting beside him told Uexküll, “one can follow the growth and branching off of the individual voices that, like the columns of a cathedral, bear the weight of the all-encompassing dome. Only in this way does one get a glance into the many-membered form of the performed artwork.” Our guest on this episode has devoted his career to observing and writing these interplaying “scores” of natures, the stories of animals, through prose and poetry. His work has allowed millions of readers to hear and appreciate anew strains of non-human animals in nature’s symphony.
“Words are all we have… We’re stuck with words, but there’s a way to manipulate them and use them to free our thoughts and our thinking rather than build cages,” Siebert says. The windowsill in Siebert’s office hosts a menagerie of animal figurines. Each represents an animal he’s written about, and many represent creatures that we are at risk of losing forever. (Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)
