Animal Disorders

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

1/ CONSIDER THE HAMSTER

2/ BIG CATS

3/ THE MEANING OF MEAT

4/ THE BLUE HERON RETURNS

5/ SEE MONKEY DANCE, MAKE GOOD PHOTO

6/ FOR THE POLAR BEARS

7/ THE OTHER THOMPSON

8/ SCHRÖDINGER’S DOGS

9/ PACK THEORY

A BITCHUARY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ANIMAL DISORDERS:

ESSAYS ON TRANS-SPECIES RELATIONSHIPS

Deborah Thompson 

Executive Editor: Diane Goettel

Cover Design: Zoe Norvell

Cover Art: Snout #1 by Deborah Williams

Book Design: Amy Freels

Copyright © Deborah Thompson 2021

e-book ISBN: 978-1-62557-124-3

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: [email protected].

Originally published in 2021 by Black Lawrence Press.

INTRODUCTION

A man cages lions and tigers in his backyard. A woman’s house teems with so many cats that she’s lost count and doesn’t even notice when one dies. A man longing to become one with bears gets devoured by one.

Animal Disorders, I call them, these enactments, by a select few individuals, of much more widespread cultural disorders. These extreme versions of unhealthy relationships with animals capture irreconcilable contradictions and impossibilities in our approaches to (non-human) animals that we otherwise manage to repress. More mundane contradictions abound, often unnoticed. Millions of people who condemn cockfighting will eat the carcasses of chickens that were crammed into cages and de-beaked to keep them from pecking each other to death during their short lives. Our culture euthanizes hundreds of thousands of unwanted dogs every year while spending millions of dollars on a wanted few. Researchers sacrifice one dog to save another. An animal rights advocate may condemn animal cruelty in research laboratories but receive radiation therapy treatments first tested out on beagles. A woman who considers herself a vegetarian feeds her dogs meat.

These are some of the everyday symptoms of animal disorders that I find myself in. What follows are personal essays exploring disordered relationships with animals on the part of myself and of my (human) culture. I would characterize myself as having a fairly representative case of early-stage animal disorder. I’m the woman referred to above, the one who considers herself a vegetarian but feeds her dogs meat. I’m not (quite) (yet) a hoarder, and I don’t live among bears or run with wolves, but just a small change in a variable or two of my life might produce a very different story.

You may hear in my term animal disorders the echo of other disorders, like sleep disorders or eating disorders. Feminist philosopher Susan Bordo has proposed that eating disorders—anorexia nervosa, bulimia, binge eating, orthorexia, etc.—are crystallizations of culture. Their symptoms make manifest not just individual psyches but also cultural ailments. Eating disorders emerged historically at a time when Western culture’s approaches to food, consumption, and women’s bodies clashed. The individuals who developed eating disorders were primarily women responding to impossibly contradictory cultural demands: Eat! But don’t eat! Consume everything, but restrain yourself! You deserve to indulge yourself, but your worth comes from denying yourself! Their disordered eating forms a compromise among irreconcilable desires and demands.

Such compromised conditions similarly underlie sleep disorders. We find ourselves whirling in a culture of perpetual motion and simultaneity, a fast culture of fast food for fast company, with speedy motors and instant messaging, a culture that never sleeps. We desperately need sleep so that we can perform better-stronger-faster, but who has time for sleep? So our culture proliferates amphetamines to keep us up and opiates to push us through the pain. In such a culture, it’s inevitable that some people will develop insomnia and irregular sleep cycles. Some even develop a fear of sleeping. Others develop addictions to uppers or downers. Such disordered individuals are themselves symptoms of larger cultural disorders in the body politic. In their extreme and dramatic versions, they embody anxieties and untenable contradictions latent in the culture at large.

So too with animal disorders. When it comes to both domesticated and wild animals, we make ourselves oxymorons. We are a culture whose approach to our non-human kin is contradictory. As psychologist Hal Herzog puts it so eloquently in his book of the same title, Some we love, some we hate, some we eat. And some we love to death.

In this era of mass extinctions, we long to connect with the dying wild, even though acting on that longing may hasten the extinction. We become lovers of a nature that’s harmed by our consumption of it. Our culture produces a Terry Thompson, raising endangered tigers in an Ohio backyard, and then setting them free into an urban safari, as I explore in The Other Thompson. Or we create a Timothy Treadwell, destroyed by and destroying the grizzly bear he longs to become. Maybe we express our love for wild animals by hunting them, or seek oneness with nature by capturing its inhabitants. Or maybe we’re just nature voyeurs, viewing wilderness vistas on our screensavers while carbonating the atmosphere with our air conditioners.

We’re a bundle of animal contradictions. We’ll do anything to save some animals while casually obliterating others. We treat some animals more humanely than we treat some humans while killing others just for sport. We can’t seem to figure out even the legal, much less the ethical, status of animals. We can’t figure out whether domestic animals are objects we own or wards we steward. We don’t know how to value nature—or even what nature is.

Like eating and sleep disorders, animal disorders come in many forms. Indeed, there’s even some overlap between the two, such as when extreme veganism masks a fear of food. But might our ordinary approach to eating meat, or our acceptance of factory farms, or our alienation from the means of meat production, be just as disordered?

While mass extinction and factory farms are relatively new, animal disorders are as old as Homo sapiens, as timeless as myth. They are not, I recognize, merely culture-bound, but universal. Just look at the many myths across human cultures of human-animal hybrids: the elephant-headed god Ganesha, the jackal god Anubis, all those centaurs and minotaurs, fauns and satyrs, mermaids and mermen, not to mention Spiderman and Batman and Catwoman. Or look at the array of legends where humans are engulfed inside nonhuman animals: Jonah and the whale, Little Red Riding Hood. Or the many tales of becoming-animal: Actaeon, the hunter of Greek myth who became the hunted, turned by Artemis into a deer and torn apart by his dogs; Arachne, the talented weaver who, in her hubris, challenged Athena (thereby claiming super-human powers) and was turned into a spider; Philomela, raped by her brother-in-law, who then cut out her tongue so she couldn’t tell her tale, was transformed into a nightingale forever singing her lament. Myths world-wide attest to active questioning about human-animal relations.

Every human culture, I would venture, has its animal disorders. However, like unhappy families, every culture has been disordered in its own way. I sometimes wonder if twenty-first-century U.S. culture is so enmeshed in its animal disorders that it doesn’t even know how to dream of recovery.

This book is not about every culture, nor does it venture to present a comprehensive view even of twenty-first-century U.S. culture. Instead, it offers my own particular versions of animal disorders over the past fifty-odd years of my middle-class American culture. I have both objectified and anthropomorphized animals, sometimes simultaneously (Consider the Hamster; Pack Theory). I’ve displayed hoarding tendencies (The Other Thompson) and have benefited from animal experiments that I condemn (Schrödinger’s Dogs). I have generated my own personal myths of metamorphosis, which I’ve believed while disbelieving (The Blue Heron Returns). While overlooking the slow violence of environmental devastation and habitat destruction, I’ve grieved both with and through individual animals (Big Cats; The Meaning of Meat; For the Polar Bears) as well as for animals (A Bitchuary). The essays that follow deliver dispatches from one representative sufferer of animal disorders.

1/ CONSIDER THE HAMSTER

As I shuffle my cart toward the dog food aisle in the maze of a mega-pet store, a golden glow draws me to the Small Animal zone. It’s the translucent yellow acrylic of a hamster hut catching the fluorescent rays. Inhaling the long-ago scent of cedar chips, I peer through a glass display case labeled Golden Hamster, Male. $15.99. I spy a mound of tan fur exposed above the shallow bedding. Like many Americans of my late-baby-boomer generation, I had hamsters as a child. In 1970, keeping hamsters as pets was a fairly new phenomenon, but gaining momentum. Back then, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. Now, the yellow fluorescence casts the practice in an alien light, and prods me to reconsider the hamster.

My first pet, when I was a seven-year-old girl in 1970, was my hamster Frisky. I’d wanted a dog, like the Klingers’ gentle collie next door, but my brother’s allergies made this impossible. At the pet store I chose a hamster over a gerbil because the gerbil’s tail looked too wormy—yuck—and because my father told me that the hamster could store food in his cheek pouches, then paw it back out. Frisky was five inches of waistless waddle, earnest-eyed, and all mine. My father helped me set up the clear plastic Habitrail cage in my bedroom. The box housed a red plastic wheel and a lone translucent yellow tower. Dad showed me how to change the water bottle, food trough, and, once a week, the wood-chip bedding that filled with doll-house-sized poops. At night I fell asleep to the thrum of the spinning wheel, and when I woke up from a nightmare the steady churning calmed me back to oblivion.

In the daytime I nudged the groggy hamster awake and cupped him in my hand to hold his warmth. I offered him a sunflower seed between the pinch of my index finger and thumb; I liked to feel the slight tug in my fingertips as he took it and to hear the crack as he busily opened the shell and extracted the meat. Sometimes I coaxed him to stand on hind legs in begging position, or covered his head to feel his soft pink paws burrowing a tunnel between my thumb and index finger. When I set him down he ran for crevices until I scooped him up again. Because he delighted in cardboard tunnels, I used way more toilet paper than I needed just to empty the roll faster. Above all, I liked to stroke his fur from head to tail-stump as he bowed under