Those Animals!

A local tabloid has seen fit to make up a name for the very rare Grey-headed gull at Coney Island. From the NY birding list, I learned that the birders the tabloider talked to said the bird didn’t have a nickname and that they didn’t name wild animals. When the tabloider nevertheless offered some suggestions for a nickname, the birders “groaned and said no.” The tabloider gave it a name anyway, and noted in his article “we have lovingly named” the gull a name too stupid to repeat here.

I’m surprised it took so long. Our popular media, desperate for the sensationalism that attracts the eyeballs that sell ads, typically go either cutesy or demonic when it comes to “animal stories.” Discovery’s nature-porno Shark Week! just ended, but the most terrifying thing about sharks is that 1.5 million of them are butchered every week for shark fin soup, not that that bloody reality makes very good entertainment. Or how about Animal Planet’s River Monsters, in which the “monsters” are just large fish, and Monster Fish, part of National Geographic Channel’s embarrassingly tawdry line-up – I caught part of one episode of this last show recently: the “monster fish” were, uh, salmon. The biologist/personality on that show should be ashamed of himself, but the money must be good, and money is the god we’re all temple whores for. This stuff isn’t just mindless time-filler, it’s actually destructive, feeding an appalling scientific ignorance among Americans.

I’m surprised also that some enterprising idiot didn’t start Tweeting “as” the gull. It’s almost mandatory now when an animal makes the news.

I don’t know if there’s a term for the opposite of anthropomorphism. I mean something more than “metaphor.” Naturemorphism? Case in point, the already omnipresent labeling of rioters in Britain as “animals.” Strictly speaking, all humans are animals, intricately interconnected with the lifeweb of the planet. But of course in the British political context, “animal” is being used to deny certain humans human status. Turning them into animals is necessary to avoid consideration of the social conditions – the fact that a born and bred upperclass British PM who preaches austerity had to rush back to England from his Tuscan villa, for instance – that spark riots. Turning one’s enemies into insects means they are easier to kill.

Think I’m being hyperbolic? Recall the recent conviction of the five New Orleans policemen for their killling of Katrina survivors at the Danziger Bridge, and how American media initially portrayed desperate citizens, abandoned by the wealthiest nation on earth, as animals in the aftermath of that hurricane.