Changing the Subject Read online

  I wanted the other whales to dive and try to save their lives. But the mate of the bleeding whale had other ideas. He turned and swam full speed toward the whaling ship, toward certain death. And not just his own certain death: It looked like Karl was about to get crushed. His boat was directly between the whale and his target. For a second I thought that someone would know what to do. A second later I knew that there was nothing anyone could do. But the whale knew what to do. He made it look easy, leaping out of the water and sailing gracefully over Karl’s head, crashing back into the waves and surging on toward the whaling ship. The harpoon guns at point-blank range opened fire. The whale’s blood filled the waves. His cries were even more painful than his mate’s. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to sink every whaling ship in the world.

  I thought of Moby Dick ramming and sinking the Pequod, dragging Captain Ahab to the bottom of the sea. But why hadn’t Herman Melville described the screams of harpooned whales? He’d served on whaling ships and he must have heard those tragic sounds many times. Was it possible that he didn’t care, or that he thought that the voices of whales were aesthetically unimportant? Though the book had always been one of my favorites, I suddenly wasn’t so sure.

  But I was quite sure that something had to be done. I didn’t have long to wait. Captain Green was already turning the ship and gunning the engines. I still remember the feeling of picking up speed, then the moment of impact, the shock of getting knocked off my feet and almost off the ship, the sound of metal crunching against metal, our ship jolting into reverse, pausing briefly to gather up the lifeboats, then backing and turning and sailing away, having given the other whales a chance to escape. I never found out if the whaling ship went down. We were out of sight in less than fifteen minutes.

  A half-hour later, I found Karl sitting on his bunk, staring at the wall.

  I said: Karl, talk to me. You look all messed up.

  He said: I’m not all messed up. I’m trying to fully take in what just happened.

  I said: I practically shit in my pants, and I was just watching. You must have been going crazy with that whale coming at you.

  He said: For a second it was like being in a world without names. For a second there was something in the sky, something that only made sense in a world without names. Then there was all that blood, those horrible sounds. The whale was coming and then he was six feet above me, and his eye seemed even closer, maybe because it was so big, almost the size of my head. But the most amazing thing was the look in his eye, like he knew we weren’t his enemies, like he knew we were trying to help. I know it sounds crazy, but I know what I saw when I looked in his eye. It was like when I used to look in the Buddha’s eyes, and I knew he cared about me, and I knew he cared that I cared about him. That’s the feeling I got when I looked at that whale. And it wasn’t like I’d been with him for years and he’d learned to love the way I fed him and played with him. We’d never seen each other before.

  I said: He even made sure that he didn’t whack you with his tail when he came down. And he did this even though other members of our species had just killed his mate in cold blood.

  Karl said: That’s right—in cold blood.

  A few days later, Karl announced that he’d found his true calling. He told Captain Green that he wanted to spend the rest of his life saving whales, that he didn’t care how violent things got. In fact, he wanted violence if it meant saving innocent lives. When he tried to convince us to stay, I knew it was probably the right thing to do. But Charlie and Stu and I were too selfish. We had our music to return to, songs to write and concerts to give.

  We also felt oppressed by the food situation. Captain Green didn’t believe in eating red meat, but even if he’d been a hardcore burger junkie like we were, the ship’s galley space was too limited to keep and cook much ground beef. We joked about the menu at first, but within a few weeks it was driving us crazy. There was no escape from canned vegetables and pasta. Though we knew it was wrong to eat animals, we’d all been hooked on red meat since we graduated from baby food.

  Ironically, it was an animal rights group that made it safe to go home. An organization called Freedom from Slaughter heard about our case and spent hours investigating and exposing the violent procedures of the lab where the doctor worked. The situation was widely publicized, and the outrage against the doctor and his colleagues was so extreme that their lawyer advised them to drop the charges. When our boat returned to the city, we weren’t criminals anymore.

  I was pleasantly shocked. I hadn’t expected anything but bullshit from the legal profession. But when I heard that the lab’s lawyer had three black labs of his own, I wasn’t quite so surprised. People with dogs know that their animals are amazing creatures, capable of things that human beings will never understand. Time spent with animals puts you in a different place—and in some ways a more valuable place—than time spent with people. Now that I’ve moved from New York to San Diego, a city that sets aside large amounts of public space for dogs, I’ve adopted two dogs from the animal shelter, a black lab mix and a golden lab mix, and I see every day how special their companionship can be. There’s no need to talk. I can go for days without saying anything to my dogs. This would not be possible with people, who tend to be uncomfortable with silence when it lasts more than a few seconds.

  The obvious objection here is that words help people connect with each other in complex, beautiful ways that go beyond the simple connections that are possible with animals. But let’s test this assumption by consulting The Odyssey, a renowned example of what people can do with words. I don’t think I’m alone in my belief that the most moving scene in Homer’s epic occurs when Odysseus, returning to his palace disguised as a beggar, is recognized by Argus, his neglected and aging dog, who lifts his head, wags his tail, and dies from excitement. The dog alone can see through the hero’s disguise. Everyone else is fooled, even Penelope, who cautiously questions her husband to make sure he’s not an imposter. What does the dog know that Penelope doesn’t know? Even though Argus was only a puppy when Odysseus departed twenty years before, somehow he can feel or smell his master’s essence, something Penelope apparently can’t recognize. She can only determine her husband’s identity by testing him. His claim that he’s Odysseus is not enough. She knows that words are often tools of deception. But even the goddess Athene cannot disguise Odysseus fully enough to avoid his dog’s non-verbal understanding.

  So why do we assume that human intelligence, constructed by language, is superior to the ways of knowing other animals practice? Why do we try to measure an animal’s intelligence by comparing it to our own, running endless experiments, for example, to see if apes can be taught to speak? The obvious answer is that we can see only what our language tells us to see. Other forms of perception are beyond our understanding. We can think about them only in the terms our language proposes, the pictures and mental designs our words create. These designs have helped us build the technologies we use to dominate the rest of the animal kingdom, leading us to develop our ongoing sense of superiority. But who can recall the smirking face of former President George W. Bush, for eight years in charge of the world’s most powerful nation, without realizing how delusional our master species complex really is?

  At times, I catch myself thinking that those who voted for Bush were sub-human idiots. But some Republicans are actually quite brilliant by mainstream standards and have even won Nobel Prizes for their research. An old friend of mine used to work for one of these brilliant people at a university here in San Diego. I discovered this only recently, when I ran into this friend—I’ll call him Doug—at a café near the school. I like the café because it’s on a hill and has views of the ocean in one direction and mountains in the other. It’s also quiet. The owner is an ex-hippie who doesn’t fill the place with media noise. Often I sit there for hours enjoying the scenery and reading.

  When Doug walked in I didn’t recognize him at first. I didn’t even know he was in San Diego. I’d known
him when we lived in New York, but we’d fallen out of touch, and the last time I’d seen him was more than twenty years ago, when he was a biology student at NYU. But he knew me right away and shook my hand eagerly. It turned out he’d been looking for a job without success and was getting desperate. I remembered him as being a brilliant, assertive person, so it surprised me that he was having trouble with his career.

  When I asked him what the problem was, he looked around the room carefully, making sure that the wrong ears weren’t listening. Then he said, or rather half-whispered: I know this is going to sound paranoid, but I’m getting screwed because I offended the wrong people.

  I smiled: I’ve offended the wrong people many times myself, and I’ve paid the price, so you’re talking to the right person.

  He looked around the room quickly again before he said: Here’s what happened. Maybe you heard that I got a post-doc here at the school?

  I shook my head no.

  He said: It was almost fifteen years ago. I thought I had it made. I’d hooked up with a neuro-biologist who’d almost gotten a Nobel Prize for his work on Alzheimer’s. Initially I thought it was an honor to be working with him, and I’d been told that there might be an opening in his department, a full-time job. We got along so well that he was going to recommend me for the position. Everything seemed perfect. But after a while I couldn’t stand what he was doing to the monkeys.

  I made a face.

  Doug said: I’d always told myself that we needed to use animals in medical research. I mean, without animal research we never would have come up with the polio vaccine and all sorts of other medical advances. But when I started working there and saw those monkeys in cages, it really got to me. I’d worked with rats and mice, and even with old dogs from the animal shelter. But this was different.

  I made another face and said: My mother died of cancer. Some day scientists doing animal research might come up with a cure for cancer and AIDS and who knows what else. But I still can’t stand the thought of taking animals and putting wires in their heads or strapping them down to an operating table. I remember in New York a friend of mine had a dog who ended up in a research lab, and—

  Doug said: This neuroscientist didn’t cut up any dogs while I was there, but he routinely put rhesus monkeys on the operating table. He’d slice open their flesh down to their skulls, then he’d drill his way through the bone to their brains and start poking around. I’m trained to deal with this kind of stuff. The first few times, I told myself not to let it bother me. I just went along with what was happening. But then there were times when I was in the lab by myself, since it was my job to give the monkeys their meals, and I’d go in and switch on this harsh overhead light in a room with a concrete floor and no vegetation of any kind and I’d see the monkeys looking at me from their cages. They were going crazy from boredom and isolation. The cages were way too small and each monkey was kept in a separate cage, with no other monkey to touch or play with, and monkeys don’t do too well when they can’t touch or play with each other, especially in sterile environments like this one.

  I said: What bullshit! These people were scientists, right? They must have known what their monkeys needed. If you’re planning to drill a hole in someone’s skull, the least you can do is keep them comfortable before you torture them.

  Doug said: I mentioned it to one of the other research assistants there, a guy who’d been there longer than I had, and he just laughed and said that the place was an animal research facility, not an animal resort. Anyway, one of these monkeys eventually chewed his own tail down to a bloody stump. Another one chewed his arm down to the bone. And then they’d end up on the operating table, and it would take the man hours to drill holes in their skulls, and the sound of that drill was way worse than any dentist drill I’d ever heard. After a while, I couldn’t take it any more.

  I said: So you quit?

  Doug said: I didn’t just quit. I also joined a local animal rights group. I wrote articles for their newsletter describing what was going on at the school. The articles got people upset. I’m surprised you didn’t hear anything about it. I got lots of media—

  I said: And now no one will give you a job?

  He said: Now no one will give me a job. You don’t rock the boat in this field. Getting a job is all about recommendations and connections, and I offended the wrong person. This guy knew everybody.

  I said: There was no one outside his sphere of influence?

  Doug said: Actually, there was, and I found a job with him for about six months, a guy named Larry Parker, who was trying to teach chimpanzees to talk, or at least use sign language. He was at a small college up in Oregon, and he treated his chimps like members of his family. They were in cages at night, but each one had at least one companion, and during the day they circulated freely in a large research compound filled with trees and other vegetation. Most of what Larry did with them involved games and observation. Nothing violent or invasive. I made sure of that before I agreed to work with him. I showed him the articles I’d written.

  I said: I’m surprised that he wasn’t afraid of hiring you.

  Doug said: He was seen as an outsider anyway, and I think he figured that his grant money would keep coming in as long as he didn’t do anything too extreme. At that point he wasn’t active in the animal rights movement, though he told me that he liked what I’d written and he certainly felt that the animals he worked with had to be treated with respect. But a few months after I started working with him, he got a call from one of his colleagues who’d seen the way lab monkeys were being treated at the National Institutes of Health in Washington. So the next time Larry had business in the capital, he visited the D.C. labs himself and saw what his friend was talking about. He was totally disgusted. He came back with stories about how the NIH was driving their monkeys insane by keeping them in cages so small they could barely turn around, then killing them by drilling into their skulls or injecting them with deadly viruses. Pretty much the same thing I wrote about in my articles.

  I said: But why did they let him visit the labs if they were doing these horrible things? Weren’t they afraid of bad publicity?

  Doug said: They didn’t see anything wrong with it. They assumed they had nothing to hide. I think they figured that groups like PETA generally get regarded as a bunch of fanatics, especially when there’s some kind of protest, and the people with the signs and megaphones appear on the news looking like raging hippies who forgot to get their Prozac prescriptions refilled. And like I told you before, everyone knows everyone else and you don’t rock the boat, not with the National Institutes of Health. But after what he saw there, Larry stopped worrying about whose boat he might be rocking.

  The waitress came and Doug ordered coffee. I ordered coffee and a spinach croissant and told Doug that the croissants were not to be missed, so he ordered one for himself, even though he said he was on a diet. Ever since the French had enraged right-wing Americans by opposing the U.S. war in Iraq, I’d been making a point in restaurants of ordering anything that sounded French.

  Something caught the waitress’s eye. I followed her gaze out the window, saw what she must have been looking at, but I couldn’t say what it was. My eyes were prepared to tell me it was a cloud, but what I really saw was a globe of transparent glass filled with lightning bolts and rain, spinning slowly above the sea, maybe two miles distant. A second later it seemed to be less than a hundred yards away, even though it didn’t look any larger. Then it disappeared, replaced by a line of pelicans gliding and dipping down and skimming the sea, rising and falling as each wave rose and fell. I looked back to see if the waitress was alarmed, but she’d already turned away to get our coffee and croissants. I thought of asking Doug if he’d seen what I had, but he wasn’t facing the sea. He was watching the waitress.

  I said: So Larry got more radical?

  Doug turned back to face me with a lewd smile and said: Right. Larry got more radical, especially after he went to another research facilit
y near Atlanta a few months later. They’d invited him there to give a talk on the progress he’d made in teaching his chimps to talk, and after his presentation he got taken on a tour of the facility, where he saw an adult male chimp in a five-by-five-by-seven-foot cage. I think Larry said they were calling him JoJo, or maybe it was Bozo or Bonzo—I can’t remember—but I guess they figured if they gave him a name it would make their treatment of him sound more humane.

  Doug looked across the room, where the waitress was nodding and smiling, taking the orders of a bloated couple with killer whales on matching Sea World t-shirts. He looked back at me and said: Anyway, JoJo had been there for ten years, with nothing in the cage but an old tire dangling at the end of a rope from the ceiling. That was supposed to be his source of amusement. Larry told me that all he had to do was look in JoJo’s eyes and he could see that the chimp had been reduced to a state of terminal boredom and depression.

  I shook my head and said: I remember when I took my brother and his family to the San Diego Zoo, and the orangutans wouldn’t even look in our direction. It was clear that they hated us. They didn’t like being exhibits. But when I pointed this out to my brother, he just laughed and told me I was reading human emotions into animal behavior. He tried to tell me that animals don’t have feelings. If he were here now, listening to what you’re saying, he’d probably just claim that apes don’t get bored and depressed, that only people feel those things.

  Doug said: Then he’d have to be willfully deceiving himself. When JoJo saw that Larry was giving him a different kind of attention than he got from the lab personnel, he reached out between the bars of his cage to stroke Larry’s face, and they held hands for a few minutes. Larry couldn’t stop himself—he broke down and cried, even though there were other scientists there behaving like serious professionals, whatever that means. In that world keeping a straight face means being objective, so that people have to take you seriously.