12: Animals

Different Voices

From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. From PRI, Public Radio International. Public Radio. Public Radio International.

Ira Glass

So when I heard that a woman named Samantha Martin had trained raccoons to play basketball, and hires them out for parties and corporate events, I pictured raccoons. You know, in three-on-three or four-on-four games, in little Chicago Bulls uniforms. You know, Raccoon Scottie Pippen passes to Raccoon Dennis Rodman. Raccoon Michael Jordan, you know, takes it in for a layup or dunks it. The team is a little raccoon Orlando Magic or Los Angeles Lakers. I could see it all. But that is not what it was like. No, no, no. That was naive.

Ira Glass

Samantha Martin chases after one of her two basketball-playing raccoons, holding a bag of blue and pink cotton candy. She alternates, actually, between taking a fingerful of cotton candy for herself and giving one to the raccoon.

Ira Glass

Samantha is actually a skilled and successful trainer, but the animals are not cooperating this day, probably because Samantha went away for the holidays and they're still feeling neglected. Samantha puts a grapefruit-sized ball in the raccoon's hand and then pushes the raccoon's hand toward a Fisher-Price basketball net that rises perhaps a foot and a half off the floor.

Ira Glass

The fact is, there are things that raccoons like to do, are born to do. And playing basketball is not one of them.

Ira Glass

Taming animals means basically teaching them to conform to the human world, teaching them human expectations. And with many of the animals that Samantha raises, it's possible to make them more human while they're little. But then once they reach a certain age, their real animal nature kicks in. A baby cougar she was raising started stalking her friends, biting at their throats. The raccoons also go for the throat.

Ira Glass

What do we want from animals? To run her business, Samantha has had to figure this out, and at parties, at corporate events, in commercials and films, Samantha has her raccoons pick pockets and play basketball. She has rats that bowl, rats that answer toy telephones?

Ira Glass

Most of us, the only animals we ever see are animals who act like humans-- cats and dogs. We watch movies and TV shows and commercials that are filled with animals that fetch beers from the refrigerator and solve crimes. And we forget the sheer animalness of animals. We don't see it. Maybe we don't want to see it. Well, this brings us to the topic of today's program. From WBEZ, of course, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, The Animalness of Animals. Our show today in three acts.

Act One, Staging the Food Chain in a New York Apartment.

Act Two, Animal Court. That's an original radio play by David Sedaris.

Act Three, The Moment Humans Stopped Being Animals. That's a story by Scott Carrier. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. You know, usually when we see pictures of animals, they're fluffy and cute or they are noble and dignified. Well, compare that to this set of photos by Catherine Chalmers. In this first picture, we have a caterpillar eating a tomato, a brightly-colored close up of that. In the second picture, a praying mantis eats the caterpillar. And in the third picture, a tarantula eats the praying mantis. Catherine Chalmers takes these pictures in her own apartment in New York City, where she also raises the animals that she feeds to each other. Paul Tough stopped by for a visit.

Paul Tough

Growing up, Catherine Chalmers wasn't really an animal person. She always had a pet or two, nothing unusual. Then a few years ago, she was working on these sculptures where she would take dead insects and glue them onto plants and flowers. She needed a lot of dead flies, more than she could buy anywhere, and so she decided to start raising live flies in a glass cage in the corner of her apartment. She would just let them breed and wait for them to die. But then one day, she picked up a camera and looked at the flies through a close-up lens.

Paul Tough

She realized that there were two basic moments of life that she couldn't see in the flies' cage. She couldn't see them eating and she couldn't see them die. So she came up with this project that she called The Food Chain. She decided to raise a few different animals-- caterpillars, praying mantises, frogs, spiders-- and take pictures of each animal eating the one that came beneath it in the natural food chain.

Paul Tough

And so Catherine began to fill her loft with animals. There isn't much furniture, but every surface has got terrariums and cages on it. Frogs and mealworms and a snake on one table. Goldfish in the kitchen to feed the frogs. Crickets which chirp constantly. A tarantula and two cages full of mice. On a spare corner of the table where the frogs and the snake live, she's got a lightbox set up, and we sit down there to take a look at some of her pictures.

Paul Tough

The photos don't look like normal nature photography. They look more like fashion shots. The animals are brightly lit and sharply focused, pictured against a clear white background.

Paul Tough

If there were two emotions competing in Catherine Chalmers, her fascination with the food chain and her disgust with what she was doing, it becomes clear to me, as she shows me her work, that in the end, her fascination won out. She lays out a sequence of shots that begin with the praying mantis about to attack a caterpillar.

Paul Tough

You'd think it would be easy to take pictures of predators eating their prey. That's what they do, after all. But it turns out to be more complicated than just putting a couple of animals together and snapping away. There are considerations of timing and staging. When she tried to have frogs eat the praying mantises, the problem was the frogs were simply too fast. Photo One would show a hungry frog and a praying mantis, and Photo Two would just show a well-fed frog.

Then there was the tarantula problem. Tarantulas can go for months without eating and days without moving. She put the spider and the praying mantis up on her set, and the tarantula would just stare at the praying mantis, completely still, one leg in the air, for hours. Finally in one session at three in the morning, after staring through her camera all night, Catherine got what she wanted. She slides the photos onto the lightbox.

Paul Tough

At this point in The Food Chain, her pictures were becoming more and more vivid, but so was the suffering that she was watching through her lens.

Paul Tough

One of the things that the Food Chain photos have made Catherine think about is how we humans choose which animals we love and which ones we hate, the distinction we make, basically, between pets and pests. She says most of us are attracted to animals that are like us, that are mammals, that have round faces and big eyes like human infants. And she's not immune to that instinct. Her favorite animal is her dog, Leo. But she also finds herself drawn to the animals that we are supposed to fear, and the moments in their lives that we usually turn away from.

At the lightbox, she puts down four new photos from a different project, a series of shots of two praying mantises having sex.

Paul Tough

The photos aren't exactly grisly. There's no blood, not really even any color, but they're still pretty disturbing.

Paul Tough

At the center of Catherine's studio, there are two glass cages where her mice live. There are about 20 mice in each cage, of all ages. Some have just been born, still nursing from their mothers, some pregnant, some have been around for a few generations. It's the nicest part of the studio. The mice are all very clean and healthy and cute, and the cage even smells good. These mice are the centerpiece of Catherine's current project. She photographs them being born, and then photographs them being eaten by various predators.

Today she's going to take pictures of a two-day-old mouse, which is called a pinkie because it's too young to have fur. It just has pink skin. Its eyes are still closed, and it can barely move. Her 10-inch, pencil-thin snake, Pumpkin, hasn't eaten in almost a week. Today, Pumpkin's going to eat a pinkie.

She puts the pinkie and the snake up on what she calls her set. This is where she takes all her pictures. It's chest-high, about three feet by three feet, with a white Formica surface that curves up at the back to form a seamless background. There are only two strobe lights, plus a third light underneath the surface to make sure the animals stay warm.

Paul Tough

The snake's moving slowly, putting its head up right next to the pinkie and flicking out its tongue as if it wants to lick it.

Paul Tough

stood there for 15 minutes watching as the snake tried to decide what to do. The pinkie didn't move much, just sort of quivered, raising its head every once in a while. Then, finally, the snake made its move.

Paul Tough

What was strange was the way the snake attacked. Pumpkin is a constrictor, which means that usually when it goes for its prey, it quickly wraps its body around it and squeezes it to death.

Paul Tough

This time it bit the pinkie and held it in its fangs, alive, for a couple of minutes before it finally constricted it.

Paul Tough

Catherine says that we've developed a hierarchy of death. Some animals we're prohibited from killing. Some we're encouraged to kill. And most of them we just don't care about. I asked her whether doing the Food Chain project changed the way she saw animals. And she said that it hadn't changed the way she saw them, it made her see them for the first time. Before she started photographing animals, she was like most people. She never really thought about them at all.

Paul Tough

It's getting to the point with the mouse project where those feelings are starting to have real repercussions. Right now, Pumpkin can't eat anything bigger than a pinkie, but she's growing. Eventually she'll be three feet or more. Before long, she'll be eating full-grown mice, the ones that Catherine feeds and holds and plays with every day.

Paul Tough

Catherine talks about her apartment being like an oasis in the middle of Soho. She loves coming home from the cars and concrete of Manhattan into a place that's filled with life. But in another way, it's Manhattan, it's our world, that's the oasis in the middle of a planet that's full of nature. All around us, things are eating and having sex and dying and suffering, and we don't notice or even think about it.

Paul Tough

At the end of our photoshoot, Catherine carefully picks up the snake and carries it back to its cage. There's a bulge about a third of the way down the snake's body where the pinkie is being digested. Before I leave, Catherine pours us a glass of wine, and we sit on the floor for a little while playing with a couple of her full-grown mice, letting them run over our hands and up our arms. They're tiny and warm, and through their fur, we can feel their little hearts beating.

[MUSIC -- "INSECT COLLECTOR" BY SHONEN KNIFE]

Ira Glass

Paul Tough. Catherine Chalmers' pictures are in a book called Food Chain: Encounters Between Mates, Predators, and Prey.

Coming up, animal radio theater by David Sedaris, and animal research from Scott Carrier. That's all in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a topic, and tackle that topic with documentaries, short fiction, radio monologues, found tape, anything we can think of. Today's topic, animals and the animalness of animals. We've arrived at Act Two of our program, which is basically more animals eating other animals.

But first a little story. A little girl is given a new sweater, an ugly new sweater which she hates. She takes the sweater, puts it on the floor, takes a nap, and when she wakes up, her sweater's been chewed to shreds. She, of course, could not be happier, but her mother's very upset, cries a little. The girl blames the dog, a little spaniel named Kathleen.

Ira Glass

Kathleen the spaniel then stood to proclaim.

Ira Glass

David Sedaris has written a play for our program. This play is an original radio play entirely in rhymed couplets. In this play, the animals do lots of things that humans do. For example, they talk. And they hold court out in the forest. But in this play, also, every now and then-- unlike most fairy tales, unlike most movies about animals or stories about animals-- these animals reassert their animalness.

Our play begins as Kathleen the spaniel heads out into the forest and our narrator, the little girl who owns her, follows behind.

Narrator

I waited till late and crept out. It was dark. I was deep in the forest when I heard a bark. It was Kathleen, my spaniel, kneeling before an old dog, a judge. And this elder, he wore a dark floor-length robe. I think it was silk. He paused then and lapped from a bowl of skim milk.

Narrator

He patted his chest with potato-sized paws, then pounded his gavel and laid down the law.

Narrator

The clearing was silent. A cat took the floor, a smooth-talking tongue with a high pompadour.

Narrator

It seemed like a lifetime. The worm took forever to inch to the stand and begin her endeavor.

Narrator

The worm had concluded. She'd finished her say and reached for a thimble of cold consomme.

Narrator

The cat said. I watched as a wren hopped to the floor where the cat once had been.

Narrator

The bird took a book written in Lebanese, and carried it out past the pond to the trees.

Narrator

The angry worm hissed.

Narrator

Said the bird, keen on proving a point.

Narrator

She looked at the bird then, a certified goner. The wren whispered softly, as if to confirm, and then she lunged forward, beheading the worm.

Narrator

The cat yelled.

Narrator

The bird, in a grand show of physical fitness, finished the worm and returned to her perch, the lowest-hung branch of a young silver birch.

The cat called a witness, a chubby black cricket I'd seen once or twice in my room eat a ticket to movies or plays. This thing, it ate paper. It's body was small, just the size of a caper.

Narrator

Said the cricket, her vocal cords fierce in retort.

Narrator

Cried the bird. The cat yelled,

Narrator

The court was in chaos. The cricket hopped off. She flew through the air just like Baryshnikov. The bird then, she followed it into the thicket and returned having eaten that hot-tempered cricket. There was no objection, no cry of foul play. The judge and the lawyers gave a silent OK.

Narrator

The judge barked.

Narrator

The bird said.

Narrator

The judge took an aspirin and shouted out,

Narrator

The cat took a watch from his pocket.

Narrator

There was no need to prompt her, no need to coerce. The squirrel entered talking. She set down her purse. And, crossing her legs, lady-like, at the shin, the squirrel eyewitness began to weigh in.

Narrator

The cat cried.

Narrator

Said the squirrel.

Narrator

The cat lawyer cried.

Narrator

The bird said.

Narrator

The cat said.

Narrator

The squirrel said, beaming.

Narrator

The bird then approached, feathers standing in rage.

Narrator

The bird slapped the stand with the tip of her wing and spat in discuss.

Narrator

She said. The cat flexed his paws, and then used them to shred that squirrel to ribbons. He tore her to bits. And ate everything but her eyes and armpits. And then he pounced forward and firmly procured between his firm jaws that lawyering bird.

Narrator

That was all that I heard. The rest was too muffled. I watched for a while as the two of them scuffled. The cat took the bird right down to the beak. The judge rose, then asking if now he might speak.

Narrator

The judge then walked off, and I watched as the cat foolishly followed that judge past a stump to a field of tires once used as a dump. I heard the cat hiss then, and then [INAUDIBLE]. I can't say for certain who struck the first blow, but I can say who won. I know that the judge stepped out of his chambers unable to budge. He belched and he sagged, both lips heavy with fur, and looked out at the courtroom where others once were.

Narrator

He said to my spaniel.

Narrator

I heard Kathleen say.

Narrator

I waited for Kathleen beside a small creek. She passed me, despondent, refusing to speak. And me, I returned to my comfortable bed, thinking of how, by some fluke, I'd been led to animal court, that harsh hostile scene, that by chance thought to spare my companion, Kathleen.

Ira Glass

The Pinetree Gang. Amy Sedaris, David Rakoff, Toby Warey, Stacy Goldstein, Jackie Hoffman, Nora Ladonny, Sarah Tire, and Richard Zaragoza. Story by David Sedaris.

[MUSIC -- "ROCKY RACCOON" BY LENA HORNE]

Ira Glass

Act Three, The Moment When Humans Stopped Being Animals. If you ask anthropologists the moment that humans divide off from the animal kingdom, it's the moment that our ape-like ancestors started walking upright on two legs. For people who don't believe that God created the earth in six days, that moment is our origin. That's our Book of Genesis. That is the mythic point where we began. But nobody knows why these pre-humans started walking around on two legs instead of loping around on all fours the way that most animals do. There are different theories but no consensus among scientists.

Well, 10 years ago, Scott Carrier decided to do some research on his own, and he made this radio report.

Scott Carrier

A couple of years ago, my brother and I went to Wyoming to run down an antelope.

Scott Carrier

It was August and our plan was to chase one animal until it overheated and collapsed.

Scott Carrier

We had good reasons for what we were doing. One was that it seemed entirely possible. Another had to do with an argument concerning human evolution. It's a scientific argument, so it takes a few minutes to explain.

Remember the scene in 2001, where an ape-man realizes he can use a bone as a weapon and murders another ape-man? Then he throws the bone in the air and it becomes a space station orbiting the earth. The theory behind this scene is that we separated from the apes when we stood upright and freed our hands to make and use tools, especially weapon-type tools for hunting and killing other animals. It's called the hunting hypothesis, and there's nothing wrong with it except that we don't have any physical evidence to support it. We just haven't found any tools or weapons that are that old.

Well, some of the work that my brother does as a biologist made him interested in another theory of human evolution. You might call it the running hypothesis. He believed that he and I were probably good enough runners to be able to run down big game without using any weapons at all. And he thought that if we could do it, then maybe our early ancestors could have done it too.

Shortly before we went to Wyoming, I went to see Owen Lovejoy. He teaches anthropology at Kent State University. We talked about the running hypothesis, and he thought it was pretty funny.

Scott Carrier

Well, I just happen to have a German Shepherd, and I take him with me when I go running.

And Lovejoy's right. He's a better runner than I am. In fact, most of the time, he'd rather have me take my bicycle. So there's no question about me being slower. But as far as being clumsy, Lovejoy calls bipedalism clumsy because of reasons that have to do with biomechanics. Running bipedally takes twice as much energy as running quadrupedally That is, when my dog and I run, he uses half the energy that I do. So Lovejoy and many other anthropologists think it's crazy to assume that the survival strategy of the early hominids involved running after quadrupeds. They've just got us beat, both in terms of speed and efficiency.

But the thing is, if my dog and I go running in the summer in the middle of the day, when temperatures hit 85 to 100 or more degrees, it's a whole different ballgame. He'll come with me and run for a while, but then he walks and lags behind. And sometimes he just goes home. So if I'm an awkward and clumsy biped, why can I outrun my dog?

Well, it's because he overheats. The main way that he and most other quadrupeds cool themselves when they run is by breathing. The air coming in and going out of their mouth evaporates water off their tongues. We do this too, but we do it all over our body by sweating, and then we get a nice flow of air directly over our skin, because we don't have a fur coat. So we can't run as fast as a quadruped, but we can run farther, especially in high heat. And when you remember that we're using twice the energy, this seems like a very strange biological paradox. And it was this paradox, combined with the argument about not being able to hunt without tools, that made my brother and I decide that it was time to try to run down an antelope.

Antilocapra americana, the pronghorn, the second-fastest land mammal on the planet. We thought that if we could keep one running for two hours on a hot day, we'd have it beat.

Ira Glass

Hey there listeners, I'm just going to interrupt right here. This is an old episode from 1996, and we have a music rights issue. So we can't play you this next little patch of the story. But I'm just going to summarize it for you, very briefly. It's not that long of a section.

Basically, what happens is, Scott and his brother talk about what to do next. And his brother says they should go out and look for more. Scott asks, you mean forget about these? And his brother says he doesn't know where these ones went.

Scott writes, It could have been the Serengeti-- orange and green and purple plains, a hot sun, thin high clouds, blue mountains on the horizon. It could have been the Serengeti, but we were no primitive hunters. We quickly realized we knew nothing about the animal we were chasing or the land we were running on. We ran after several herds that first day without much success.

Alright, we'll pick up the story from there.

Scott Carrier

We found dead animals, bare bones, an abandoned house.

Scott Carrier

We saw dust devils, horned toads, an eagle. We found a small lake, some badlands, and a rattlesnake.

Scott Carrier

It never did get very hot that day, but in the afternoon, we had a good long chase after a female and two males. They ran in circles around an area of about 10 square miles. There were two hills and a long smooth valley in between, and the chase went up and around and back and forth between these hills, the antelope running short periods of time but covering long distances and then stopping and waiting for us to catch up. The two males ran behind the female, as if they were trying to protect her, and sometimes they'd all go in different directions, but we stayed behind the female and the males would eventually rejoin her.

One thing we'd learned the day before was that we could run much less distance than the antelopes by staying well inside their circle, and we were also starting to communicate with each other over long distances. For instance, if my brother was on top of one of the hills, and he could see where the antelope were going, he'd point, and I wouldn't have to run to the top of the hill. So we were running after these three and feeling pretty good about not letting them ditch us, and a couple times, we even got within 50 yards of them. And I'd look into their eyes, trying to see some sign of fear or fatigue, but all I kept seeing were very quiet animals that seemed to know exactly who we were, what we were proposing, and didn't seem to be in the least bit worried.

Anyway, we ran after these three for about an hour, and then they found a large herd, or the herd found them. And they ran up and over a hill, and by the time we got to the top of the hill, the herd had split into three groups of about three or four antelopes each. And each of the groups seemed to have at least one female that looked exactly like the one we'd started chasing-- the magic shell game trick again. We weren't really all that physically tired, mainly mentally beaten, and we went home.

I haven't gone back to Wyoming for the purpose of chasing antelope, but I drive through there sometimes on my way somewhere else. And one time last spring I was going east, and there was a train along the highway also going east at about the same speed. And suddenly there were three antelope running alongside the engine, chasing it. It was incredible. It was even more incredible to see the three of them simultaneously speed up, pull out in front of the engine, and fly across the tracks.

I pulled over and waited for the train to go by, and there they were. Three young males, looking back at me with those same black eyes and hardly breathing at all.

Ira Glass

In the years since he first recorded that story, Scott has put it into a collection of his stories, a book called, simply, Running After Antelope.

[MUSIC -- "I WAN'NA BE LIKE YOU" BY LOUIS PRIMA]

Ira Glass

Well, the great Louis Prima, from The Jungle Book soundtrack. Our program was produced today by Peter Clowney and me, with Alix Spiegel and Nancy Updike. Contributing editors for this show, Paul Tough, Jack Hitt, and Margy Rockland. Original music for the opening story in today's program by Jeff Muller and Jason Noble. Other musical help from Mr. John Connors and the Mysterious Rumpety Rattles. And you know, you can download today's program and our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. [FUNDING CREDITS] WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who treats his employees this way.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.