SUSAN ORLEAN EXPLORES OUR ANIMAL LOVE
AS A REPORTER, Susan Orlean doesn’t wear her love for animals on her sleeve. Who could afford to get overly attached in this cruel world? Baby tigers can be procured over the internet, the northern white rhino has been poached to extinction and a rabbit plague once wiped out 140 million bunnies in China. Orlean balances these hard truths with deep affection in “On Animals,” a companionable collection of her writing over the last twodecades-plus for the New Yorker, the Atlantic and other outlets on all manner of beasts.
No matter what else might divide us, the animal-human bond is one of the few relationships most of us hold sacred. Throughout the collection, Orlean meets some of the most devoted: An epidemiologist goes to great lengths to contacttrace her kidnapped dog; a Moroccan veterinary clinic treats every animal that comes to its door, including pack animals, for free. Sometimes reverence leads to folly. In “Where’s Willy?” about the famous orca (real name: Keiko) from the ’90s movie “Free Willy,” Orlean captures the absurd stunts humans will perpetrate to satisfy their notion of animal freedom. Absurdity aside, there’s no denying its beautiful ending: Keiko, swimming with his brethren, reimmersed in the wild waters near Iceland.
The part of Orlean who, as a child, wheedled her pet-averse mother into adopting a dog is never too distant from the reporter. “On Animals” is bookended by two essays that showcase the author’s animallover bona fides. She wrote a book on ’50s canine star Rin Tin Tin and long maintained a fowl-centric menagerie in the Hudson Valley.
Orlean’s deft handling of facts and her lived experience as an animal softy create a pleasing friction. It turns out that Orlean the pet owner is sentimental — supposedly a reporter’s bane — until reality intervenes. The first time one of her pet chickens is picked off by a predator, she reports crying for hours. By the fifth time, “I sighed deeply and went out and bought a new chicken.”
We need this kind of romanticrealist hybrid to guide us on this literary safari, which doubles as a travelogue. An incomplete list of locations: the panda forests of China, a wealthy Atlanta suburb, the oxentilled Cuban countryside, a taxidermy championship in Springfield, Ill., the lion-filled plains of South Africa. In Orlean’s hands, no location indulges the fantasy of “nature.” She is a clear-eyed witness to how “almost all of the ‘wild’ spaces are managed in one fashion or another, and in South Africa, in particular, everything is fenced, and all animal populations are metered.”
Interestingly, of all places, it’s Los Angeles, where she moved in 2011, that impresses her with its multitude of free-range animals. In addition to spotting hawks, coyotes and bobcats, Orlean is taken with one of the city’s most famous residents: “That first winter, the lion known as P-22 took time off from managing his busy social media accounts and set up camp in the crawl space under a house not far from us. … We were in the second-largest city in America, and yet it felt like we’d moved into a natural history diorama.”
The animal kingdom may be as corralled as we are, but it’s also “alien, unknowable, familiar but mysterious.” Orlean acknowledges the mystery but doesn’t explore it. Instead, she relies on her powers of observation. Her rich storytelling is almost soothing, even when it’s about something as disturbing as South African hunting facilities sedating animals so they can be more easily shot. Sometimes I wished for more countenance with that unknowability, but philosophical rumination is not included on this tour. Orlean is committed to investigating the dizzying multiplicity of roles animals serve — employee, best friend, harbinger of climate change — and the places where those functions intersect.
One of the finest essays to probe that fuzzy middle ground is “The Lady and the Tigers,” from 2002.
When a tiger saunters through Jackson, N.J., two entities are blamed for the escapee — a local Six Flags and the permitted, private operation known as Tigers Only Preservation Society, run by reclusive Joan ByronMarasek. She claims the big cat wasn’t hers, but the publicity exposes her outfit as an alleged front for her illegal ownership of a dozenplus tigers. As Orlean chases the twists and turns of the legal case, she tracks Jackson’s evolution from rural outpost to a full-blown suburb whose residents don’t want roaring, deercarcass-chewing neighbors.
“On Animals” is at its best when all Orlean’s strengths work in tandem — and it’s her adoration of the lowliest worker that elevates it most of all. In “Where Donkeys Deliver,” she marvels over the beasts that ferry supplies in the medina, the walled city within Fez, Morocco, whose alleys cannot accommodate cars or motor bikes. Watching a donkey haul six color televisions strapped to its back, she writes, “I caught only a glimpse of the animal’s face as he passed, but it was, like all donkey faces, utterly endearing, managing to be at once serene and weary and determined.” It’s not long before she’s “fallen in love.”
Later, a donkey vendor at a market tries to pressure Orlean into buying one. She explains that she doesn’t live there, but he presses on until a crowd forms around them. Most of us would try to extract ourselves from this situation as soon as possible, but Orlean just patiently explains her predicament. It’s one of the few times when practicality seems to win out over love, if only for a moment. Otherwise, Orlean is like the rest of us, devoted to creatures who are ornery, slobbery, aloof or just plain mortal when we don’t want them to be. As she writes in her final essay, regarding a death in the family, “even though dogs break your heart, they fill it up, even when they’re gone.” Orlean is still thinking about that donkey. Next time, she might make the leap.