![]() ![]() We were beyond survival, in a dark and lofty realm wherein our obsolete instincts had been perverted into atrocities like capitalism and bikini waxing. We were so far up the food chain that it was no longer even visible to us. I learned in elementary school that we were animals, but unlike other animals we did not seem driven by the instinct for physical survival. I might have had to close my eyes during the part of the nature documentary in which the pack of hyenas felled an antelope, but they had no qualms about tearing warm mouthfuls from her while she still kicked with frantic life. If the wild marten was overcome by her own feelings, she didn’t let it stop her from procuring dinner for her babies. Walt Whitman claimed our distinction from animals to be that “they do not sweat and whine about their condition” and “not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” However often Stouffer imposed human narratives on the animals depicted (very often), it was still always clear that survival was the priority that assigned value to everything in the animal world. ![]() I was confounded by silverware-why it should exist when we had such perfect instruments at the ends of our arms. I sympathized with the jittery business of squirrels and fanatical obsessions of our golden retriever. Alone in the woods behind our house I had beaten my chest, acted out my own invented stories without a thought to how another’s gaze might see me. I watched Wild America, a PBS show on which conservationist Marty Stouffer revealed the wildness of the animal world. I was less playing a particular kind of animal than enacting a form of wildness that I recognized in myself. Sometimes, I’d rip handfuls out and cram them in my mouth, which wasn’t much like the way any animal I knew of ate. On all fours, I would bury my face in the sweet red fruit-meat and tear away mouthfuls. M y mother had raised me vegetarian, and though I harbored no real desire to eat meat, sometimes, in summer, I would take a hunk of watermelon to a remote corner of our yard and pretend it was a fresh carcass. ![]()
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