The cutest endangered species
‘Jungle Book,’ New Yorker poet put a spotlight on the pangolin
This month hordes of young folk were introduced to what is at once the toughest and the most fragile animal on earth right now: the pangolin. Disney’s live-action / CGI “Jungle Book” hit theaters, starring in a small but affecting role that cutest of all extremely endangered species. (But then, it’s exactly their powerlessness that cutifies the cute.)
Simultaneously the New Yorker celebrated a revival of its own quintessential star, poet and pangolin proponent Marianne Moore (she published 23 poems in that magazine between 1953 and 1970) around the republication of her 1925 volume “Observations,” edited by Linda Leavell, also the author of a prize-winning 2013 biography of Moore.
Not so many Westerners knew about pangolins until recently, but many of those few who did learned of them through Moore, whose 1936 poem “The Pangolin” begins “Another armored animal” and then goes on to describe the amazing beast and its hardworking lifestyle in detail. An inhabitant of Asia and Africa, the pangolin’s full body of scales protects it both from the bites of the ants it consumes and from predators. When attacked, it curls into a ball “that has / power to defy all effort to unroll it.” Apart from the ants, “pangolins,” Moore notes, “are not aggressive animals.” Though engineered to endure incredible difficulties, these stalwart beasts have no protection from the modern malefactors who traffic in their meat (viewed as a delicacy) and scales (thought to cure maladies).
Moore, an early eco-advocate, would have approved the canny means by which the filmmakers push their case for saving the darlings — and, really, all the animals in the film. Elephants, pangolins, tigers, orangutans, all inhabit the endangered lists, and the panthers and bears will be there soon enough if our species’ mean-hearted destructiveness (Shere Khan R Us) doesn’t evolve with lightning speed. Consciousness raising among our young is a start.
Jon Favreau’s “Jungle Book” expands on Kipling’s own Darwinism, morphing the familiar plot of the 1967 animated version (which radically reorganized Kipling’s text) into a story focused almost entirely on demonstrating humans’ connections to the many beasts of the jungle Mowgli encounters, and loves. Favreau holds onto only a few of the beloved tunes — mostly because he’d lose a lot of fans if he didn’t. He winds those into the plot by framing “Bare Necessities” within one of Baloo’s jungle lessons to Mowgli — this one on the value of song.
Though bears teaching humans to sing seems backward at first, the movie’s (and even more so the book’s) fascination with the evolution of language and communication among diverse animal groups raises
A sailboat was the first machine. Pangolins, made for moving quietly also, are models of exactness, on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade, with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon, man slaving to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth having, needing to choose wisely how to use his strength; a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs, like the ant; spidering a length of web from bluffs above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked like the pangolin; capsizing in disheartenment. Bedizened or stark naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing master to this world, griffons a dark “Like does not like like that is obnoxious”; and writes error with four r’s. — An excerpt from “The Pangolin,” by Marianne Moore
more questions than it claims to answer about our relation, and our responsibility, to our fellow creatures. But it asks us, and our children, to engage there.
There’s so much to do, but we have some history with speedy change. Recall, after all, that it’s only been 5000 years, an eye blink in the history of the planet, since we invented the writing that has allowed us to leapfrog forward on the cultural evolution front, putting multiple brains on all the problems, and then creating so many new problems in the process of solving the first set.
Though we are like our fellow animals in many ways, we have skills of mind that allow us to manipulate the environment in ways they cannot. In the course of the movie, Mowgli’s human “tricks” get generally frowned upon, but they are put to a use even Bagheera can approve of, when he rescues a trapped baby elephant with ropes, leverage and the power of the daddy pachyderm.
Moore, like the pangolin, “made graceful by adversities, con- / versities” would approve of the effort to turn our tricks toward planetary good, instead of the planetary waste land we seem headed for currently.
Like Mowgli, and as Moore illustrates, we have a lot to learn from our co-creatures, about coexistence & so much more, and quickly.