The Unappreciated Beasts

The beasts of the world (someone has predicted) that we have tamed, abused, caged, made to perform, or even loved will soon rebel, along with Gaia, and pick up and leave for their original habitats. (For the beast that is me, there's not far to go. My DNA can be traced back to Neolithic France.) We already hear about elephants killing their trainers---for good reason, undoubtedly, since baby elephants are routinely traumatized in order to make them trainable---and sea mammals leaping up to brutalize theirs. Lions have been removed from Bolivia's zoos and taken into sanctuary, and the wild horses that the US Bureau of Land Management cruelly rounds up (on their own dedicated territory) and starves to make room for cattle ranchers, they too are finally getting Congress' attention. Will our cats and dogs just take off one day for their continent of origin? I don't blame them.

Plus docile que l'homme, ...le chien s'instruit en peu de temps... comme il est dédaigneux chez les grands et rustre a la campagne... il donne des exemples de courage, de tempérance et de fidélité...

"Sweeter than man, the dog learns quickly... disdainful among aristocrats, rustic in the country, he is an example of courage, temperance and fidelity," wrote Buffon, the great French naturalist, in 1755.

He wrote that here in Paris, near the world's oldest menagerie of trapped beasts (1793) at Jardin des Plantes.  Its majestic front lawn stretches to gold-tipped wrought iron gates on the Quai d'Austerlitz, on which Buffon sits on his plump stone behind while pigeons roost fondly on his head. An alleyway of twisted tree trunks on winter's dusty earth runs along an iris and rose gardens where some goblin spirit eyes a young boy lasciviously--in stone. There are four museums of Natural History here, the most important next to old Buffon's maison, in which a long taxidermized procession from Noah's putative ark winds through the building. At the time I moved to Paris there was an exhibit on dragons from around the world.

I used to jog along parts of the zoo where huge dark swans shared my complaints against Paris, and sought me out for relief once when a mentally ill young person started to have a fit by their pen. Mountain sheep duke it out with their horns and panda bears roll around in bamboo tree houses--that's what you see without paying the entrance fee.

Gardeners, who appear to have been misplaced from some previous century plant exotic, spikey species and then uproot them every few months. A jog can circle alpine gardens and a plot that has been allowed to go to seed just to see what plants would come up. Then you circle up the "labyrinth", a little hill of spiraling hedges with a gazebo on top. Everything is geeky, labeled, scruffy, never quite tamed. That's what I like. On my morning jog I could see the grand apartments across from the gazebo lit warmly as children rushed to pick up their backpacks lying on grand pianos, all promising a world of happy Parisians. That I found a little depressing. But Jardin des Plantes itself is the earnest place where naturalism's great discoveries--except for Darwin's--were made, and before that, where Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon wrote:

Lorsque le sentiment délicat est exquis, lorsqu'il peut encore etre perfectionné par l'éducation, l'animal devient digne d'entrer en société avec l'homme. Le chien sait concourir a ses desseins, veiller a sa sureté, l'aider, le défendre, le flatter; il sait se concilier son maitre, le captiver...... il a toute la chaleur du sentiment; il a de plus que lui la fidélité, la constance dans ses affections...

"When the delicate sentiments are exquisite, when they can be perfected by education, the animal becomes worthy to enter into human society. The dog know how to contribute to (man's) designs, look over his safety, aid, defend, flatter; he knows how to assuage his master and captivate him... he has all the warmth of feeling and more faithfulness and constancy of affection."

A beast licks the martyr's feet, all that's left of the meal at Jardin des Plantes.

Can you blame the beasts we so take for granted for abandoning our wayward affections, and marching back home?