Nothing makes me think of the passing of time more than putting together the two creatures in the title. The sleeper shark is a creature of the oceans around Greenland. She lives about 2 km deep, where it's cold and dark and the food is scarce, so she makes do this way. Life moves very slowly for her. If she's a veteran, she's some 400 years old - by far the longest living vertebrate on Earth. She moves around slowly and waits for something to fall from the waters above and fill her patient stomach. This could be a dead whale or marine snow. What is marine snow? Dead flesh from fish dying somewhere above. I wonder how 400 years feel to a sleeper shark, swimming around in the dark w/o resting (if sharks stop swimming, they drown). On the other hand, buried in the hot sand of the Galapagos Islands lies the racer snake, who knows what he has to do. He doesn't get a lot of time like the sleeper shark, nor does he get many feeding opportunities as good as the hatching of the marine iguana babies. If he can pride himself with something, it's the ability to sense the tiniest vibration as well as the crazy speed which earned his name in the human world. When the marine iguanas are out, they race to catch the best meal of their lifetime. Successful or not, they rush back into the sand, like a small predator should do. Everything happens in the blink of an eye, although I'm sure this feels very different to a racer snake. Wait, I wrote a poem for these two.
Sleeper shark and racer snake, Give me back my chocolate shake. Sleeper shark and racer snake, Brought my childhood dreams awake. Sleeper shark in all your glory, Though your mouth is really gory, know that you have no choice. No one ever hears your voice. Racer snake, where do you wallow? Your home is so very hollow. ‘Cause you are alive through speed, 'Guana pups are all you need. Sleeper shark, where have you gone? You’re just waiting with a yawn, Looking out for marine snow, It’s the deepest trails you sew. Racer snake, you’re fast and quiet, And you’re always on a diet. Like your friend, a sort of race Though a very different pace! Sleepers, you know no bedtime, Just the start and end of time. While you linger in the dark, Racer snakes have made their mark. Sleeper shark and racer snake, You might never get backache. Sleeper shark and racer snake, Swim with me in this old lake.
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1. Mary Ainsworth developed a theory on child attachment, resulting in 4 attachment styles: secure (positive & loved), avoidant (rejected), ambivalent (angry & confused), and disorganised (no attachment behaviour). This has later been discovered to shape adult expectations of relationships.
2. Animal attachment is being studied at a scientific level, with very few results at the moment. Meanwhile, it's common to hear people's opinions on it: they're basic creatures; they just want food; they want to keep warm, that's why they're sitting together; it's all about mating and eating for them. 3. Here's a couple of things I've seen: A couple of ducks following each other around on Regent's Park Canal; they swim together at a close distance, and when one stops, the other one stops. They don't necessarily eat together, so if one has stopped to nibble on something, the other one will wait until (s)he is done and ready to swim again. I've seen them doing the same in Bucharest, and in New York, too. Around 10 lemurs (all male) at the London Zoo. They're sat together mostly two by two, grooming each other or cuddling. They take turns in licking each other - that's called "social grooming". A cheetah social grooming his friend Dolph C. Volker on Youtube. He purrs and licks him pretty much every time he sees him, it's an old bond. A couple of lions at the Zoo. He comes next to her and chuffs. She hisses and growls at him. They just sit and stare at each other for a few seconds, then proceed to lie down together, touching each other. (Note that they have plenty of space to sit separated if they want to). If that's not a complicated form of attachment, I don't know what is. 4. Other interesting facts: Cows have best friends. Giant octopus moms stay with their eggs until they hatch. As a result of that, the fatigued mom dies the day her pups hatch. Animals sometimes adopt animals from other species (see the Rhesus Macaque who adopted a stray puppy in India). Also, sometimes animals kill babies of other species, for various reasons - elephants have been known to stomp on baby lions as a form of revenge. Elephants also take their revenge on people and safari cars, connecting them to hunters. 5. Now, onto people: There's no need to make this a long paragraph, but we all know how diverse and complicated human attachment is, from cases of deep childhood trauma to everyday cases of mixed signals, mixed feelings and crooked parenthood. Human-animal relations should be studied from an anti-anthropocentric perspective - we all belong to the vast category of complex living beings that interact with each other. This week, No-Name Bear was saved. She's this little moon bear who's lived 17 years alone in a cage with no sunlight or fresh water. Thanks to AnimalsAsia in Vietnam, she is now rehabilitating at a shelter, assisted by a team of very dedicated vets. AnimalsAsia sent me an email to thank me for my help with No-Name Bear's cause - donation or petition signing. I get hundreds of animal rights emails per week, yet I only click on a few. Apart from external factors such as a busy schedule, I can't help but think of all the internal factors. Which animals do we choose to save? Here's what J.M. Coetzee says, through the voice of Animal Rights activist Elizabeth Costello: Isn't that what is so suspect in the whole animal-rights business: that it has to ride on the back of pensive gorillas and sexy jaguars and huggable pandas because the real objects of its concern, chickens and pigs, to say nothing of white rats or prawns, are not newsworthy? (The Lives of Animals, 1999) No-Name Bear's story is heartbreaking and she deserves all the freedom and care in the world. I am thus proposing a short exercise - who gets saved first, by humans, from humans? 1. Gulper eel 2. Banded mongoose. I don't know if you know how the Gulper eel looks. I'm not going to post a picture of it here. The Banded mongoose looks like this: If the Mongoose needs help, it will be very clear. The situation will look dramatic, probably involving a snake, and the little Mongoose will have big, terrified eyes, and will make squeaky noises. It will be on dry land visible from far away.
However, if the Gulper eel needs help, probably because humans have in some way destroyed the oceans, it won't be visible. The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and still relatively inaccessible. Personally, if I were inside a submersible and stumbled upon a Gulper eel in need of help, my instinct would probably tell me to flee. Have you seen a Gulper eel? The obvious choice for most of us humans would be the Banded mongoose, not just because its environment would more easily permit us to intervene. We would choose the mongoose because it's cuter, a.k.a. more relatable. This is a big truth: what we cannot relate to scares us. (Think the most horrible things done by humanity, such as burning "witches", the Crusades, genocides, and homophobic crimes.) Nobody is asking us to step into the jaws of a Gulperboy, nor to do the thing that scares us most. But stepping out of our comfort zone may lead to the opening of our minds, generally speaking. Human-animal relations could potentially change as a result of trying to relate. I gave a mouse to a baby Black-headed Python today. It was defrosted, from frozen, from dead, from a humane farm. When they're unfrozen, they get this haemorrhage around their snouts, bleeding on the metal counter.
I don't feel okay about it. Why does it feel slightly better to eat 20 dead prawns accompanied by linguine? Our love for animals is complicated and conflicted. We love them as companions or as food, but very rarely as both at the same time. The problem appears when eating an animal that has suffered at the hands of man, inside a factory with no light and no room to move, injected with antibiotics and growth hormones. There's a reason this is so easy for us to do - we don't get to see inside these places. What we see is a decontextualized chunk of meat inside a supermarket. Joel Novek (Animals and the Human Imagination, 2012) coined two terms to talk about factory farming: discipline and distancing. Animals are born products, according to factory farming ideology. They are subject to the mechanisation and rationalisation of production. Nothing more. That's discipline. Let's talk distancing. Michel Foucault uses the term biopower to describe a series of techniques designed to manipulate human bodies into docile and productive bodies - these techniques were perfected in prisons, mental institutions and factories. What do these have in common? They're far away from populated areas, removed from the concern of what happens inside. Moreover, people usually avoid these places because it makes them feel uncomfortable. Excuse me? By all means, if you feel uncomfortable about it, pretend it isn't happening. Our actions sometimes contradict our stated ideals. It's not because we're evil. However we are truly distanced from the suffering of others. Hal Herzog discusses factory chickens versus fight roosters and decides that there is a lesser evil, even though he has conflicting feelings as well, as a meat-eating animal advocate. I think it's important to acknowledge that a snake needs his mouse more than I need my McDonald's. We want to communicate and we want to understand each other. We cut and paste:
Nothing dramatic. He's in an enclosure at the London Zoo. There's something very exciting about looking a predator in the eye. As if the gaze itself were more dangerous than, say, a mongoose's. This reminds me of the feeling of bravery and manhood felt by the numerous hunters killing wild, innocent, unaware and unarmed animals, with a gun, from far away. But really, it is intense. It's a mixture of fear and an unexpected, perhaps unnatural closure. The awareness that man has made that closure happen is only there to take the excitement away. Surely, London Zoo is more than this. Rising from the ashes of 19th century's horrible zoo history - the locking of wild animals in tiny cages with no attempt to recreate their natural habitat, for the sole purpose of entertaining upper class humans -, ZSL now invests serious time and money in helping animals. The main goals are:
The question remains though: hasn't the zoo done what modern society has been doing to animals for a few centuries now: removing the animal from the human world? We used to live with animals, says John Berger. Now we look at them. They are objects, others, curiosities. Stories of bored children at zoos ("Why isn't it doing anything?", "Why doesn't it have big eyes like Donald Duck?") illustrate Berger's point in his moving book Why Look at Animals?. The Dragon is interpreted mostly as a buff poser through the glass. From behind the glass, he is called Ganas - which means ferocious in Indonesian - and he's a good boy. He looks at you in a million ways, which proves reptiles are just as complex as mammals, more precisely the dogs and cats that we're so used to. He's curious and sociable, in spite of his wild nature (he does not belong to a species domesticated thousands of years ago). He responds to different types of calls and uses the vet box as a playground. Most of the time he basks in the UV light or cools down in the pond. He eats bits of pony every now and then. It's okay, they come from a farm where they lived a good life and died of old age. He could be selling old surfboards on Venice Beach. But then again, my human nature compels me to anthropomorphize him in order to better relate to him. To what extent are we allowed to do that? When does the humorous nature of this action stop and when are we just using the old reductionist, instrumentalist view on our fellow beings? Animals are not simpler humans and do not exist for us. Just as there's a human phenomenology, there's a tiger phenomenology and a snail phenomenology. Humans have created a complex web of symbols to understand the world, and now they act as if the world is made out of these symbols (quoting John Gray with The Silence of Animals here). It bothers us that we don't get how a snail sees the world. It shouldn't. We can use kindness and respect for aliveness as bridges over this difficult human-animal abyss. |