On Animals by Susan Orlean
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Though I never met her, Susan Orlean and I are exact contemporaries, and co-alums of the University of Michigan, 1976. We are both animal lovers. I settled in to this with some enjoyable anticipation. It didn’t last long.
Throughout most of these essays, reprinted largely from The New Yorker and Smithsonian magazines, there is an unsettling sense of someone for whom animals are interesting and appealing, and some of whom she comes to be fond of, but who are more accoutrements, charming rural accessories, or colorful topics for an essay than individual, thinking, feeling, “complete” beings in their own right. She is frequently glib, surprisingly callous. In an otherwise fine vignette about the role of oxen in the agriculture of Cuba over the decades of pre- and post-Soviet dominion, and the character of these highly-valued animals, she can’t resist a flippant comment about an ox who broke into a feed bin and “died happy of incurable colic.” Colic is extremely painful; that ox did not “die happy.”
Then there’s the fact-checking… or lack thereof. Statements of fact or incident are questionable or outdated at best; wrong at worst. She mentions buying hay for her chickens nests; straw would be much more likely, preferred, and cheaper. Biff the show dog “beg[s] for chocolate”; I thought everyone knew chocolate can make dogs sick, and the brand of dog food Biff shills for is lousy quality, mostly-corn junk food. She blithely states that knee-replacement surgery has boosted the market for riding mules because mules have a smoother gait and thus are easier on the knees; no substantiation is given, and most riders with replaced knees are fine in the saddle – it’s the mounting and dismounting that can be dicey. And perhaps this is old fake news, but she posits the possibility that cellphone towers may be disorienting homing pigeons – again, with no factual support, and which has been fairly well debunked by Audubon Society researchers. And really, Susan, lions don’t sweat.
The best essays are the ones in which Orlean herself features the least. The strange and awful Tiger Lady saga (pre-Tiger King!) is a disturbing portrait of the wild-animal-as-pet trade and obsession. The piece on rabbit-keeping in the U.S. is a clear-eyed look at the ambivalence of rabbit fanciers who can’t decide if their charges are much-loved pets or meat stock. Taxidermists come across as a pleasantly loony, obsessed, creative and artistic bunch – but she completely avoids the figurative (and maybe even literal) elephant in the room about where the “trophies” they create come from, how, and at whose hands. However, the piece on the Lion Guy forcefully depicts the tragic state of lions in the modern world, and the unconscionable horrors of canned safari hunts. I was struck by how so many of these essays depict humans using, misusing, abusing, and exploiting the sentient creatures in their power, and Orlean rarely seems troubled by it.
And then, her family ups sticks and moves to Los Angeles for a job opportunity. The animals are handed off, arranged for, and away they go. They spend a few more summers in New York, but it turns out to be too much trouble, so they sell up what we’ve been told is a much-loved, long-dreamed-for place, and that’s that.
Animal lovers, if you are looking for dedication, loyalty, intimacy, and a recognition of animals as, in the inimitable words of Henry Beston, “finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth,” don’t look here. To be fair, she is never mawkish or sentimental, she does not anthropomorphize, and her approach seems to be one clinging to objectivity (with some factual issues), an eye for detail, and respect for the attitudes the human subjects may have toward their animal charges. But her own humanity has gaps, and she lacks “another and a wiser…concept of animals,” (Beston again) that respects them as they deserve.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Simon & Schuster may never send me another one.
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