A PET-CULIAR fascination

On Animals author Susan Orlean talks to Samantha Selinger-Morris about the nuanced recognition we get from pets, which people fall short of.

SThere is a consistency in [pets’] devotion that is superhuman. I mean, no human could achieve that amount of consistent enthusiasm.

usan Orlean is no stranger to unusual human desires. As a longtime writer for The New Yorker, she has profiled everyone from the parents of child beauty pageant contestants to origami obsessives.

It is in her personal life, too. Her husband once brought a lion to her flat as a treat when they were dating, and she thought that was great. “He allowed me to stroke his back, which radiated a coiled, heated energy I’d never felt before or since,” the bestselling author writes in her new book, On Animals, a collection of non-fiction stories about people and the animals in their lives.

Still, even Orlean was taken aback by some behaviour of the people profiled in her newly released book, which collects a lifetime of her writings on animals.

“I mean, honestly, I was kind of shocked,” she says about the intimate relationship shared by an animal trainer and Keiko, a killer whale who starred in 1993 children’s film Free Willy. The trainer kept pictures of Keiko, a 20-year-old, 5440kg orca, in her wallet rather than pictures of her own children.

“I’m enough of a sceptic that part of me [thought], ‘oh, that’s ridiculous’,” says Orlean about the idea of sharing an intimate bond with a whale. She grew up “wanting animals desperately” but focused on dogs, cats and horses.

But Orlean, who found fame after her 1998 nonfiction book, The Orchid Thief, was turned into Oscar-winning film, Adaptation, in which she was portrayed by Meryl Streep, found her world view tilted when she met Keiko herself.

“I felt like, ‘oh my god, I feel this emotional connection to this whale’,” she says, her eyes wide over our video call from her home in Los Angeles, as she reveals what happened after the whale came up next to her where she was sitting on a dock in Iceland.

“I felt this thrill of recognition, that he was curious about who I was. I felt very moved by his attention to me. The fact that this is a wild animal but he chose to sit with me.”

What exactly does recognition by an animal give us humans that other humans can’t? And what sort of bizarre things do we do to animals in the hunt for that connection?

These are two of the questions raised in Orlean’s book, with its profiles of people such as Joan Byron-Marasek, a recluse in suburban New Jersey who has 23 tigers, and Kevin Richardson, a South African who hugs his lions, one of which weighs 180kg with “paws the size of dinner plates” as if they were toddlers.

Many of us are just as guilty of treating their beloved animals like humans, according to animal welfare experts, and often to similarly negative effect. Richardson concedes he’s a “glorified jailer” to his lions, many of whom he rescued from theme parks.

Some of it is driven by what looks good on social media, such as a recent trend for people taking their elderly animals on adventurous “bucket list” road trips to take photos of them in front of iconic spots, says Dr Anne Quain, a professor of veterinarian professionalism and ethics at the University of Sydney.

“The cats are very clearly not [happy],” she says, noting that cats are territorial and don’t necessarily like to be outside their environment. “That’s what people do, [before] they die. They have a bucket list, they want to do all these things.” (She also sees people turn up to her veterinary practice with dogs in baby harnesses on their chests.)

“It’s possible to think you’re doing great, but [you’re not] thinking ‘what is it like for this [nonhuman] animal?’ ” Quain says.

For others, love for their animals blinds them from everything else, even the relative value of humans.

“There’s this famous philosophical puzzle that [Australian ethicist] Peter Singer and others pose: there’s a dog and a human in a sinking lifeboat,

and if you had to throw one overboard [which would you choose]?” says Siobhan O’Sullivan, an associate professor of social science at

The University of NSW, and author of Animals, Equality and Democracy.

Of her students, she says: “People do say things such as, ‘if it was my dog, I wouldn’t throw my dog [overboard], but if it was a random dog, I would’. I think people are thinking, ‘I love my dog so much, and I don’t know Betty [some random person].’ ”

Orlean profiles people in the book who might feel this way. “They would refer to him as a ‘man’,” she says of William and Tina Truesdale, the owners of a boxer show dog named Biff Truesdale. “They’d say, like, ‘he’s a very bossy person’. There was no question in my mind that, in their minds, he was no different from a person.”

Orlean is clear on how different animals are from humans. “I love my dogs, but I don’t think that they’re people”, but the pandemic has taught her just how much succour an animal can provide.

“There would be many times when my son was just being a teenager; I would fling myself on my bed, and my dogs and my cat would come as if

I had radiated some SOS signal, and they would be there and they would just snuggle,” says Orlean of being holed up with her 16-year-old son, Austin, and her husband, financial executive John Gillespie.

“There is a consistency in their devotion that is superhuman. I mean, no human could achieve that amount of consistent enthusiasm. A relationship with an animal is like a slot machine that always comes up [with] three bells. You pull the handle and you always win.”

It’s a rewarding relationship that not all humans understand.

“Well, for heaven’s sake, Susie,” her mother once said with frustration and a dose of side-eye, Orlean writes in her book, when she insisted on buying a 4-month-old dog, Molly, to live with her in her university flat in Michigan. “You and your animals.”

If only her mother, who died a few years ago, had lived to read Orlean’s newest book, and to hear the conversations about human and animal relationships that it’s likely to spark.

Animals know a lot more than they are able to let on, says Quain.

“Our body language, our smell, our pheromones, our tone, even the pace at which we move, they can read so much about how we’re feeling based on the way we’re moving,” she says. “And they have to, because they can’t rely on language. And in a way they’re not susceptible to our lies for that reason, because they know the truth.

“Our lies are verbal and written, that’s how we lie to each other as humans. Whereas animals know. They know if we don’t like someone, it’s very clear to them. We might be polite and do all the right things, but animals know how we feel about someone. They pick up on cues. In some ways they know the truth about us that we don’t, and that people around us might not.”

Orlean, who recently sold her farm in upstate New York to move her family to Los Angeles – letting go of her “menagerie” of farm animals – probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear this.

“I have a friend who just got chickens, and she is constantly sending me pictures of her chickens, and I feel like saying, ‘I don’t want to see your chickens’,” she says. “I’m very jealous.”

By all accounts, her friend has no idea she feels this way. But Orlean’s Welsh springer spaniel, Ivy, would.