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Susan Orlean
SUSAN ORLEAN: ON ANIMALS
SUSAN ORLEAN: ON ANIMALS
Facing page, top: Some animals we welcome into our homes; bottom: an orca in the wild. This page, above: On Animals author Susan Orlean with donkeys.
HOW HUMANS AND
animals interact has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages. Celebrated writer Susan Orlean visits The Commonwealth Club for the first time to discuss her new book, a collection from her lifetime of musings, mediations and in-depth profiles about animals. From the October 14, 2021, program “Susan Orlean: On Animals.” SUSAN ORLEAN, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, On Animals JULIA FLYNN SILER, Journalist; Author, The White Devil’s Daughters— Moderator JULIA FLYNN SILER: As a nonfiction author and a journalist myself, as well as a juror for the Club’s California Book Awards Program, I am so pleased to welcome Susan Orlean to The Commonwealth Club for the first time. Susan is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of 11 books, including The Library Book, which was the California Book Awards 2019 Gold Medal winner in nonfiction.
So tell us, why have you been drawn to writing about animals for so many years? SUSAN ORLEAN: This is a question that has quite a few answers. For one thing, I like animals, and so the opportunity to be around them is one that’s hard for me to resist.
Secondly, I think because I do like animals, I notice them in the world more than perhaps another writer would. The story that catches my attention because I like animals might go unnoticed by someone who simply doesn’t have their antenna tuned to that frequency.
I’ve also really liked the opportunity to write about humans through the lens of animals, and these stories as much as they are about animals are very much about people. There really is hardly an animal on this planet
that isn’t in some fashion affected by human civilization.
The stories that I’ve been drawn to most are those stories in which our interface with the animal world is very much what the story is about—how we manage coexisting with this alternate universe. SILER: Susan, is it true that you wrote your very first book at a very young age? And if so, what was that book about? ORLEAN: Well, according to family legend, I was only five years old and I’m not going to necessarily deliver that as gospel truth, but I was definitely young. It was a book titled Herbert the Nearsighted Pigeon, and all the characters in it were animals, which of course, to me seemed very natural. It just seemed like this was a world populated by all of these different interesting creatures. In this case, Herbert was a pigeon who was feeling like his relationships with his friends were not going well, and he couldn’t understand why. Eventually, he goes to an optometrist and discovers that he needs glasses and that what had been happening is he didn’t even recognize his friends because he couldn’t see them clearly. So all is well in the world once Herbert gets his glasses.
I think it’s interesting that rather than the protagonist being another little girl, which is what I was time, or a princess or whatever you think the fantasy life of a five-year-old would be, instead it was a sad pigeon who was having relationship problems and his relationships were with all of these other animals. Now, children’s literature, of course, is filled with animals. So the stories that I was reading, the stories I grew up on were populated largely by animals. So it’s not out of the blue that I would also craft my own book filled with animals. But it definitely was where my imaginative life resided, in the world of animals. SILER: And it probably gave a hint to your family of what was to come and the wonderful things you would write about. In On Animals, would you please read us the beginning of your essay “Show Dog,” because it so beautifully illustrates not only your spectacular sense of humor, but also the way you see the world of humans through animals. ORLEAN: I would love to. This is one of my favorite stories to do, and it’s called “Show Dog.” [Reading from On Animals:] If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale. This is perfect. He’s friendly, good-looking, rich, famous and in excellent physical condition.
He almost never drools. He’s not afraid of commitment. He wants children. Actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun. What Biff likes most is food and sex.
This makes him sound boorish, but he is not. He’s just elemental. Food he likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints and hotel soap. But he will eat just about anything. Richard Krieger, a friend of Biff’s who occasionally drives him to appointments, said, “Not long ago, when we’re driving on I-95, we’ll usually pull over at McDonald’s. Even if Biff is napping; he usually wakes up when we’re getting close. I get him a few plain hamburgers with buns. No ketchup, no mustard and no pickles. He loves hamburgers. I don’t get him his own french fries, but if I get myself fries, I always flip a few for him into the back.”
If you’re ever around Biff while you’re eating something he wants to taste—cold roast beef, a Wheatables cracker, chocolate pasta, aspirin, whatever—he will stare at you across the pleated bridge of his nose and let his eyes sag and his lips tremble and allow a little bead of drool to percolate at the edge of his mouth until you feel so crummy that you give him a taste. This routine puts the people who know him in a quandary, because Biff needs to keep an eye on his weight. Usually, he is as skinny as Kate Moss, but he can put on 3 pounds in an instant. The holidays can be tough. He takes time off at Christmas and spends it at home in Attleboro, Massachusetts, where there’s a lot of food around and no pressure and no schedule, and it’s easy to eat all day. Any extra weight goes to his neck.
Luckily, Biff likes working out. He runs for 15 or 20 minutes, twice a day, either outside or on his Jog Master. When he’s feeling heavy, he runs longer and skips snacks until he’s down to his ideal weight of 75 pounds.
Biff is a boxer; he is a show dog. He performs under the name Champion HiTech’s Arbitrage. Looking good is not mere vanity. It’s business, as a show dog’s career is short and judges are unforgiving. Each breed is judged by an exacting standard for appearance and temperament.
And then there is the incalculable element of charisma in the ring. When a show dog is fat or lazy or sullen, he doesn’t win. When he doesn’t win, he doesn’t enjoy the ancillary benefits of being a winner, such as appearing as the celebrity spokesmodel on packages of
Pedigree Mealtime with lamb and rice, which Biff will be doing soon, or picking the best looking bitches and charging them $600 or so for his sexual favors, which Biff does three or four times a month.
Another ancillary benefit of being a winner is that almost every single weekend of the year, as he travels to shows around the country, he gets to hear people applaud for him and yell his name and tell him what a good boy he is, which is something he seems to enjoy at least as much as eating a bar of soap. SILER: That’s so, so funny. I love that first line, “If I were a bitch, I’d be in love with Biff Truesdale.” ORLEAN: I felt like this was the one and only opportunity to make that elementary school joke about the use of the word bitch to mean a female dog. And I laughed myself sick as I was writing it because I thought, I am using this joke once and can never be used again. SILER: Anyway, how did you come up with that opening line and what was the inspiration for this amazing story? ORLEAN: I’ve always been a fan of watching the Westminster Dog Show, and it was a month or so before the show and I just was idly thinking about the dogs that are in the show and thought to myself, given that these are dogs who are worth all sorts of money, who have to always look good, I wonder if they are also still in a very fundamental way dogs. Do they chase their tails? Do they play with balls in the backyard? What is their life actually like? Many of these dogs live with their handlers. They don’t even live with the people who own them.
They have very rarefied lives. It just struck me as a really interesting story to write, to examine what the day-to-day life would be like to be a dog that was such a highperformance creature, when in the meantime, my dog was asleep on the sofa and chasing rabbits in her dreams and being just a very
regular dog.
Once I decided I wanted to do that story, I knew that I wanted to shape it the way you might shape a human celebrity profile. Who were the people who tended to this creature’s well-being? Did they worry about their weight and their hair? What do they do on their day off? Do they ever eat takeout Chinese? All of those questions that we have about people whose appearance is their business struck me as fascinating.
It’s also true that a dog is a dog is a dog, and I met this dog; I had zeroed in on him because I began asking around who was the top show dog in the U.S., who was a contender for best in show? And his name came up regularly. I’m not a particular fan of boxer dogs. I love dogs, but that’s not a breed that I am particularly drawn to. But I met this dog. He really had charisma. First of all, he was beautiful. Secondly, he was charming. He was delightful. I genuinely fell in love with him. I thought, You know, this is kind of the ur-dog. He is good looking and strong, and he makes a good living.
I began thinking of him in terms that you might as you were going through a dating app, like this is a good match. Look at this guy. He’s got a great job, he’s good looking, he’s in shape. And it just suddenly felt very personal, writing the story from the idea that
I was really charmed by this dog as a celebrity who was also really approachable. SILER: The deeper theme of how humans relate to animals is “Where’s Willy?” This is an essay about a killer whale that featured in the Free Willy movies. It is another astonishing essay. You never actually saw Willy. So I want to ask you the question, How did you go about reporting the world around him, the people around him? ORLEAN: Well, this is really one of my favorite stories. I suppose I can say that about all of these stories, because I feel very attached to each one of them.
But “Where’s Willy” was such a fascinating saga. Where I began with it was just trying to piece together the timeline of this one orca’s
life. This was an animal that had a truly extraordinary experience of having been born in the wild, captured when he was just a baby. First he was in an aquarium in Iceland, then was moved to an aquarium in Mexico, then starred in this movie that was a blockbuster. Went back to his aquarium in Mexico and suddenly was buoyed up by a huge public outcry, which was, This is a movie about an orca in captivity who is released back into the wild, that is the freeing of Willy the whale in the movie. Producers had no anticipation of what came next, which was people were saying, “Wait a minute. What happened to the whale who played Willy in the movies? Where is he?”
Well, the answer was he was in a crummy aquarium in Mexico, living alone and being very, very sad. Even the aquarium knew he was sad that he was the only whale. He was in a small body of water there, and he was not thriving. His physical condition was very poor, probably because of stress and inadequate conditions. Millions of dollars are required to do anything with an orca, and millions of dollars were contributed by people who saw the movie and wanted to free Keiko—his real name is Keiko, his stage name was Willy. But the viewers of the movie who loved the movie were saying, “Wait a minute, this isn’t fair. In the movie, you’re celebrating an orca being released into the wild. We should do that for Keiko.”
It’s not so simple. This was an animal who had been in captivity since a very early age, and he didn’t really know how to be a wild whale. First, he was flown to Oregon, where he was kept in a much improved aquarium situation, but he was still in captivity and people weren’t satisfied. There was still this drum roll of demand: This whale should be released into the wild.
It was a very heartfelt emotion, but also one that was unfortunately not grounded in a lot of reality, namely that an animal
that’s captured at a young age is not easily reintroduced into the wild. We’ve certainly seen instances of it, and it’s wonderful when it happens, but it isn’t always successful. It had never been done with an orca. So the idea that we were going to do it for the first time with Keiko was one that was fraught with potential problems.
Keiko was then moved from Oregon to Iceland, which is where he was originally captured—off the coast of Iceland. Many, many millions of dollars [were] spent. First of all, it’s not easy to fly an orca from Oregon to Iceland. So, mere fact—you have to buy, among other things, millions of gallons of Vaseline to lubricate the whale as he’s traveling by plane to Iceland. I mean, that fact alone was, for a reporter, a dream come true.
But also, Keiko wasn’t all that interested in being wild anymore. He really liked eating frozen fish. He was very, very comfortable with humans. He loved hanging out with his handlers. They would open the pen to let him take a walk in the ocean alone, and he wasn’t so interested in doing it.
So this story brought up so many issues, and this is why it was one that I really enjoyed doing, which is, What does being wild mean? What does captivity mean? What do we owe to the animals that we capture? What is the sort of moral meaning of spending millions of dollars on one individual animal? Is that the right thing to do? Is it wrong-headed?
What animal is it possible for us not to fall in love with? You would sort of think, How do you fall in love with a whale? Well, people fell in love with this well. So I would say there is no animal [people couldn’t love]. I mean, you would think of a whale and how big they are—and our sense of orcas as being killer whales. Although there has only been one whale orca in captivity who’s ever killed a human, and it was one whale who killed two different people. But otherwise, we’ve never known them to have any particular interest in killing humans.
Nevertheless, they’re gigantic. I mean, can you feel emotionally connected to this gigantic animal? The people around Keiko were smitten with him and felt an enormous connection to him.
So the story had a million octopus arms, there were so many subjects that it touched on. I will say that I had gone back after I finished the story to Iceland and to Norway and I did actually meet Keiko after I had finished the story. It was sort of reassuring to see that you could meet this gigantic animal and feel some sort of tug emotionally. That is hard to describe.
It defies logic, perhaps, but it definitely exists. SILER: What point did you enter the story in your reporting? I mean, how far along was the effort to free Keiko and reintroduce him to the wild when you came into the story? ORLEAN: He was in Iceland. So it was a number of years into the story, and he had been in Iceland for a while. They were already in the process of letting him get out of his pen and visit with wild whales.
And as it happened, the day I arrived happened to be the day that instead of coming back to his pen after visiting with wild whales, this was the first time ever that he stayed with the wild whales. What he had been doing up until that point is he would go out and play with the whales or mostly observe the whales. And then after a while he would come back and follow the boat back to the base.
This was the first time that he didn’t follow the boat back and instead continued on with this pod of whales. And he eventually ended up in Norway. And if you think whales are smart, they are very smart, but Norway is the one country in the world where whaling is legal—so, in part, not so smart. There were people in Norway who said, We should
harpoon him. He’s a whale and we hunt whales here.”
But fortunately, that did not happen. SILER: Susan, it’s so extraordinary. It’s a perfect example of reporter’s luck that you arrived at that moment where he was for the first time free; he made the decision on joining the pod and move on and leave his captors. And it’s incredible to reach the end of the story and then you basically reconstructed it from the beginning up until that point, right? ORLEAN: It was pure coincidence. In fact, I had fully expected that I would arrive, and I would see Keiko and I would observe him being taken care of. So when I first arrived, I was told, “Well, actually, he didn’t come home yesterday.” My reaction was, “Oh no, my story is ruined.” I’m sure you know that feeling where you think, “Well, forget it, it’s ruined. I can’t do it. I guess I’ll go home.”
And then you take a beat and you think, “Well, actually, this is a really interesting moment to be writing about it.” And this is certainly an example of how much these stories are about people, because I was mostly interacting with people. There was a large crew of people who were invested in this whale’s well-being, and they were all on site trying to figure out “Where is he going? Is he OK? Is he hungry? Is he lost?” So the story focused very much on this large kind of posse that existed around this one whale’s life. SILER: I, like everybody, loved your book The Orchid Thief, which was made into the movie adaptation. That book is about obsession. It’s about passion, it’s about the natural world and somebody who is obsessed with an aspect of it. What’s the parallel with, for example, “Where’s Willy?” Is it similarly passionate people? Is it this interface between the wild and the free or the wild and the captive? ORLEAN: Oh, I think it’s all of those things. I am certainly fascinated by passion. I’m fascinated by people who have organized their life around a very singular item or pursuit. I’m perhaps most fascinated by people who have focused their life around a living thing, because as in the case of The Orchid Thief, you can be an orchid collector, but every minute that’s a changeable phenomenon.
You don’t buy an orchid and have it in its perfect state forever. They’re living things. They die. They get fungus. They wilt. They need care. You don’t ever truly own them as much as you accept your stewardship under them. The desire to collect a living thing is one that can never be requited. So it’s particularly interesting to me.
I mean, people collect anything you can think of. And if somebody decides they’re going to be a cast iron skillet collector, it’s interesting, but it’s also a very static thing. You collect these cast iron skillets. When you buy one, you have it. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t age. It doesn’t die. But collecting a living thing or focusing your life around a living thing, you’re entering something that’s fraught with the possibility of heartbreak, of change, of evolution.
In the case of Keiko, he died. He came back from Norway. He caught pneumonia, and he was probably in his mid-thirties, which is a little bit on the young side. And he died and people were bereft, and there was this whole complicated infrastructure that had been built all around Keiko. It wasn’t built around wild whales of the world. It was built around one individual whale, and it was almost as if nobody had ever grappled with the intractable fact that someday he would die. It was as if that reality just didn’t enter the equation, so it’s particularly fascinating to me.
And death colored my entire writing of The Orchid Thief. I was imagining what it would feel like to have a fascination with a species that, for one thing, we don’t even know how many orchids there are in the world, so those people who have this desire to have one of every species, well, they will never achieve that. And maybe that’s part of the point. Maybe part of the draw is the imperfect ability of it, that collecting cast iron skillets is a bit of a dead end. Do you collect them when it’s done? SILER: You’re going to get angry tweets from cast iron skillet enthusiasts. ORLEAN: I know. I do not want to bring that on. I’m using that as an example!
