Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
As suggested by the tortured-ray carcasses that washed up in the wake of the Irwin killing, swift acts of human retaliation have not infrequently followed the more dramatic of the late attacks. In Salt Springs, Florida, where gators went berserk a year and a half ago and killed three women in a week, the citizens “declared war on alligators.” That’s how one busy trapper described it. “People are really going crazy,” he said. In other cases, cooler heads have prevailed and more peaceful measures have been adopted. One example: in Bombay, earlier this year, a pack of leopards entered the town—just sauntered out of the forest at the heart of that city—and assassinated a total of twenty-two people. J. C. Daniel, an environmentalist who has monitored the wildlife in that forest for forty years, said, “We have to study why the animal is coming out. It never came out before.” But the people responded creatively. In hopes of calming the beasts—and with a gesture that had weird overtones of sacrificial offerings to assuage angry cat gods—officials in the area are releasing hundreds and hundreds of little pigs and rabbits into the forest. (2 Kings 17:25: “And when they began to dwell there, they feared not the Lord: and the Lord sent lions among them, which killed them.”)
In China it’s the pets that are changing. The AP reported, “About 90,000 people in Beijing have been attacked by dogs and cats in the first six months of this year, up almost 34 percent for the same period last year, the government said.” In America, where animals have perhaps a freer recourse to weapons, at least four people have been shot by their dogs in the past two years. One incident involved a stun gun. One reportedly took place while the animal was being beaten, its owner hoped to death. That killing, then, could accurately be described as self-defense. (In a third incident, in Memphis, a dog shot its owner in the back while the man was arguing with his girlfriend—this one may have been accidental.)
A pack of two hundred dogs descended out of the mountains—this was in Albania—ran straight into the middle of the town of Mamurras, and just started going after people, old people, young people, “dragging them to the ground and inflicting serious wounds.” One witness spoke of a “clearly identifiable leader.” (Lest we assume this to be a seasonal occurrence in Albania, the town’s mayor, Anton Frroku, stated, “Even in the movies, I have never seen a horde of two hundred stray dogs from the mountains attacking people in the middle of a town.”)
“Clearly identifiable leader”: Elsewhere, too, there are suggestions of organization, cooperation. In India one of the country’s busiest highways has been repeatedly taken over and brought to a standstill by what the BBC has described as “troops” of “monkey raiders,” two thousand at a time. “We have already seen that new troops have entered the area in recent weeks,” a local official tells the BBC. There was talk of “relocating” them. In Britain, where the rat population has increased by 40 percent in the last decade, and old people are saying they haven’t seen anything like it since the Blitz, scientists have pinned the otherwise inexplicable surge on the fact that the rats “have been learning from other rats how to avoid the poisons.” Again, look at these numbers. We’re consistently seeing increases not of 4 or 5 percent but on the order of 40, 50 percent.
In at least one situation, clearly discernible technological innovation has entered the picture. A community of chimpanzees living on the edges of the savanna in Senegal has learned to fashion and use spears, which they sharpen with their teeth. These are chimps we’ve been observing for two hundred years; they have never used spears. Now they’ve begun spiking little bush babies with them. The bush babies hide in hollow trees. The chimps do a sort of frog-gigging number on them and pull them out like fondue. Within a year of the first chimp having been observed using a weapon this way, nine others had caught on and were recorded doing it in a total of twenty-two observed instances, suggesting that at least at the simian level these fairly radical behavioral changes are taking place within the span of a single generation.
The science behind all this is, you might say, disturbingly fundamental. As the planet warms, evolution speeds. We’ve known this for a long time. You learn it in college biology. Things evolve faster nearer the equator. Heat speeds up molecular activity. You have a population of squid—it divides. One branch hangs out up by Alaska, the other goes down to the coast of Peru. Go and visit them fifty thousand years later. The group up by Alaska is slowly subdividing into two species. The one down by Peru has turned into twenty-six species and is no longer even recognizable. Well, these days the whole planet is experiencing that effect. More heat, more light. The animals are doing things differently; they’re showing up places they’re not supposed to go, sleeping at different times, eating different things. Talk with any field-worker and it’s a truism that the guidebooks are becoming obsolete at ten times the speed. As a researcher told the BBC in 2001, “There is a genetic change in their response to daylight. We can detect this change over as short a time period as five years. Evolution is happening and it is happening very fast.” And he was talking only about a particular species of mosquito. Dr. Christina Holzapfel, at the University of Oregon in Eugene, has been watching changes
among
Canadian red squirrels. “Phenotypic plasticity is not the whole story,” she told
Science
. “Studies show,” a source quoted her as saying, “that over the past several decades, rapid climate change has led to heritable, genetic changes in animal populations.” Most recently a piece in
Smithsonian
stated, “Lately there has been evidence that plants and animals are changing much faster.”
What this means is that we picked a bad time to have all the animals enraged at us, since just at the moment when their disposition might be expected to turn, they happen to be evolving like crazy.
What stuck out above all else, as I clicked through Livengood’s dots, was the same tendency that had presented itself when I was still just idly following news items on the Internet, namely the extraordinary number of “first time” attacks. That is, not simply unprecedented types of attack, such as leopard packs going forth and killing in a crowded city, but rather pure cases of animals that have never shown a desire to kill human beings before, killing them.
It was only a couple of years ago, in an October 2006 posting on the website of the Institute for the Future—an “independent nonprofit research group” headquartered in the States, that puts its considerable budget toward working “with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future”—that the first tentative red flag was raised on this whole issue, insofar as it marked the first time a group of nondismissible, intellectually clubbable types had gone so far, had been explicit:
“File this under the wildest of wildcards, but are the number of attacks by animals formerly thought to be relatively harmless or difficult to provoke on the rise? Are there other interesting statistics suggesting an increase in the number of attacks by animals that previously were not especially aggressive?”
Blogger and fellow seeker Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, there sure as hell are.
Attacks of dolphins on humans are noticeably up, with a particularly violent population repeatedly attacking dozens of swimmers off the coast of Cancún, killing at least two, with several more unexplained drownings that may have been “take under” incidents. Every marine biologist reached for comment after those confirmed attacks said the same thing: “There’s no such thing as a fatal dolphin attack.”
This news would be startling to Henri Le Lay, president of the Association of Fishermen and Yachtsmen at the port of Brézellec in Brittany, who spoke with reporters about “a psychotic dolphin,” nicknamed Jean Floch, that has been going after fishermen in their boats. “He’s like a mad dog,” Le Lay said. “I don’t want to see any widows or orphans. This could end badly.”
Sea lions, too, are going after human beings for the first time. Not accidentally bumping into them but pursuing them through open water. In Alaska one jumped into a boat, knocked a fisherman overboard, and took him down. Sea lions are famous for fleeing any sort of conflict. Expert opinion? “Abnormal behavior.”
Unlikely as it may sound, given the myth, in the history of the European occupation of North America there is but a single recorded fatal attack by a wild but healthy (that is, nonrabid, nonstarving) wolf on a human being. It happened in 2005, in Alaska. The guy went out to take a pee or maybe just to look at the stars. When they found him, he’d already been worked over by scavengers.
In Uganda and Tanzania, chimps “struggling to survive amid the destruction of their forest habitat are snatching and killing human babies.” They’ve taken sixteen in the past seven years and had killed half of those before anyone found them. The eating of babies is “a recent development,” said the article.
Click, click, click—they just kept coming. In Belarus the beavers have been attacking people (“first recorded attack [in that country’s long history] of a beaver on a human”). This has happened again, in Lindesberg, Sweden, quite recently; a woman was hospitalized. The decidedly non-Swedish response of the townspeople, as reported by a city official? “Four of the beavers in the river have been shot, and the rest will be exterminated. Then the beaver house will be blown up to prevent other families from taking it over.” Not comforting is a related report out of Washington, D.C., that states, “Beavers are expanding rapidly into cities.”
For every account that seemed a little far-fetched and made me think a few qualifying facts must have been left out, there’d be another that, while admittedly bizarre, had the instant ring of stuff you wouldn’t make up, like the jogger in southeastern North Carolina who witnesses saw get surrounded on the boardwalk by a squadron of oversize male hermit crabs, which approached him, kung fu–style, with that one bulging claw forward, and appeared to attempt to drive him off a pier. And as always with cases like these, the quote from the zoologist comes around like a mantra: first recorded … not known to have occurred previously … relevant literature was searched but no prior instances retrieved … experts shocked … abnormal … unheard of …
When Livengood came back, I was six inches lower in the chair; I probably looked like a person whose mind had just been destroyed by a satanic video game.
“Still ‘skeptically curious’?” Livengood said. (When we’d first spoken on the telephone, he’d asked me what my “take” was, and I’d replied, “Skeptically curious,” which I’d intended to mean essentially nothing—but oh man, it stuck with him.)
I mumbled something. To which Livengood replied, with a sigh and a fake-bored tone, “Oh yeah. Something’s happening.” Then he bounced for a minute in his black office chair, tapping his fingertips together.
I said, “It’s impossible.”
Then he looked at me and said, as if not having heard me, “Hey! You need to go to Africa with me!”
* * *
We were en route to a dry, formerly nomadic region in the northeast of Kenya, about 350 miles northeast of Nairobi, just before you hit the Somali border, a place called Mandera, although Marc insisted on saying repeatedly that we were “going to ground zero.”
In the year 2000—which Marc, displaying a certain stubborn lack of subtlety that I was beginning to see as not unrelated to his nonexistent status in the academic world, repeatedly referred to as “year zero”—there were two separate incidents within a single month’s time, not far from each other, in villages occupying this area. Marc refers to them as “the battle site” and “the kill site.”
He’d arranged for us to be met by a tall, extraordinarily upright young woman from Dakar named Sila Fall. Her hair was in braids, and she wore all white with a blue bandanna around her neck. She was the UNICEF liaison for this district. She took us down a road to a village; it looked more like a camp. But the people here were healthy. UNICEF was overseeing the digging of a new well. They asked us to sit and watch a sort of play, performed in Kikamba. I could just make out the plot. One man was sick; he was the patient. Another man came, the healer. They spoke to each other—that ancient bond. They danced.
We walked behind Sila Fall, who walked very fast. She showed us all the improvements UNICEF had made—though not so much with pride as with restlessness, as if to say, We’ve at least done this. The clinic. The school. “In 2000 it was not like this,” she said. “In 2000, if it didn’t get thrown from the back of an army truck, we didn’t have it. We were dying.”
“The woman lives here,” she said, pointing but without stopping. “They say she is at her sister’s today.” Seconds later, in front of another, identical hut, we did stop. I saw now that Marc was manifesting excitement through physical agitation, moving from foot to foot and emitting little
herm
sounds. From the shaded interior of the hut materialized a middle-aged woman in a long skirt and T-shirt. Sila Fall spoke to her in Kikamba, she spoke to Sila Fall in Kikamba, then Sila Fall said to Marc in English, “She says that she welcomes you, she … knows who you are, and she will show you the place that you want to know about.” This, then, was Kakenya Wamboi, or as Marc called her in e-mails to me, “the veteran.”
It’s known that in the spring of 2000, when the drought conditions were at their worst in this district, there occurred a two-hour pitched battle between monkeys and human beings over access to three newly arrived water tankers. As the four of us walked beyond the narrow outskirts of the village, about two hundred yards down an ovenishly hot road, Kakenya Wamboi, who participated in that event, was speaking through Sila Fall, answering Marc’s extremely precise, prepared-sounding questions, telling Marc and me the story of the fight, how the human beings had rushed to draw water from the tankers, yet within seconds an entire troop of monkeys had appeared. They ranged themselves along the edges of the tankers. Others came from across the road. “They bit us and clawed at us. They threw stones at us from the top of the truck. My husband is dead, but until he died he had a mark on his forehead from where one of the stones cracked his skull. You don’t know how strong they are! They struck ten people. Badly enough that we all ran off. The men went back with axes. The monkeys were drinking all of the water. My husband said that they could work the valves. The drivers were still in the trucks. They were scared. The men went at the monkeys with axes and had to kill eight of them before the rest ran off. The drivers would not stay in this village overnight as they usually do, so we had to draw all the water off in a rush; we didn’t get it all before they started the trucks again. Some of what we got was in bad containers and spoiled, and the monkeys had already taken about a third of it. Of the people that died in that famine, most of them died that spring, and my husband always said the monkeys killed them, that the monkeys won that battle.”