On Sunday afternoons, after the museums, my father and I moved on from Exhibition Road to view a different kind of animal. News cinemas were dotted all over the place. We went from one to the other, on a really good day hitting four, even going as far as the one in Victoria to finish off before getting the 24 bus home. They showed fifteen or twenty minutes of Pathé or Movietone newsreels (the deaths of old Queen Mary, George VI and Stalin, the coronation, the Korean War, the four-minute mile, Suez) in which I had no interest, and then for the rest of the hour, before the whole programme repeated, the cartoons we were really there to see. Tom and Jerry, of course; Goofy, Donald Duck, Pluto, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweetie Pie, Woody Woodpecker, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Road Runner. There were different stables: Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes announced themselves with the big bull’s-eye with Bugs Bunny in the centre, biting down viciously on a carrot, eyeing the audience dangerously and demanding ‘What’s up, Folks?’, and Disney with Mickey Mouse’s beaming face bursting on to the screen – also at the centre of a bull’s-eye, or am I misremembering?
These were neither real nor stuffed animals. They often wore trousers and sweaters, and most of them talked. None of them were inexpressive: on the contrary they were excessively expressive, though some were nevertheless inscrutable. Though they hardly looked anything like the real animals they pretended to be, some of the housebound creatures, like Tom and Jerry or Tweetie Pie and Sylvester, led essentially domesticated animal lives, under the control of human beings who chastised and petted them. In secret, when out of human sight, they had wilder, more ‘natural’ lives. The cat chased the mouse or the canary, the dog chased the cat, but with the unreal twist that the mouse and canary (and sometimes the cat) always got the better of the predator. They were naughty children, making a nuisance of themselves with what Hollywood understood to be their innate child/animal ways in the domestic world of the typical middle-class American family and their servants, who were generally only shown as legs, or a hand holding a broom. But they weren’t merely naughty, and in that sense were not just an adult view of the ‘natural’ reality of their children: they were lethally violent, no-holds-barred wilful. No walls or grown-ups (people) were allowed to get in the way of their passionate pursuits. Read Bataille or de Sade or Genet (cutting out the overt sex) and you get something very like those cartoon rebuttals of civilisation. They burst through brick, broke windows, fell from unimaginably high cliffs, got beaten flat by heavy objects, and nothing stopped them, they reshaped and continued the chase. Not only wilful but vicious: they grinned with delight at whatever awfulness befell their enemies, no pain too great for their joyous, uncensored pleasure. ‘Uhhh, what’s up, Doc?’ asks Bugs Bunny of Elmer Fudd, whose head has been replaced by black curling smoke from the gun with which he has shot himself, instead of Bugs. ‘Beep-beep’ hoots Road Runner as he leaves Wile E. Coyote smashed, a smear on the tarmac, though I always heard it as ‘meep-meep’, which I prefer. The boundaries were all there, just as they were in real life, but the cartoon creatures ignored them (as children daren’t and can’t) – for all the world as if they were mere lines on paper. Though the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum were obliged to exist within their human makers’ vision of nature until they crumbled to dust, the drawn ones seemed to get away from the human hands that created them and ran riot over all natural or domestic constraints. In one cartoon, Mickey Mouse actually appropriated the pencil and drew himself back on to the page, as a human hand tried, fruitlessly, to rub him out. Nevertheless, for the ultimate security of the adults and their children, the cartoon animals were stuffed, too, in their way. Their chaos was always contained on the flat, rectangular screen. What was broken always repaired itself.
The picture books began early. Oddly, I have no recollection of Beatrix Potter. I don’t think I read them until my daughter was born. Perhaps my parents, children of immigrants, didn’t know about the necessity of Beatrix Potter for every proper English child, or perhaps for some reason Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny just didn’t stick with me in the way that my 1950s reprint of the 1916 The Real Mother Goose did. Inside for my endless delight were ducks with neat, spotted headscarves, cradling a wicker shopping basket on one elegant white wing, not so dissimilar to Jemima Puddle-Duck, but there was more and different. A leaping cow danced a jig right over an outraged crescent moon, while a cat on hind legs played on the fiddle like a furious demon. A snuggle of naughty kittens in their basket pretended not to have lost their mittens. Little pigs went to market, some returned home crying ‘wee, wee, wee’ all the way, each as pink as my sugar pigs and Mr Britain’s plastic pigs, walking on tiptoe, their tails tight-curled and springy. A sky full of cobwebs was being swept away along with their makers, the angry space-spiders, by the witchy old woman in a basket. And on the cover, inside the black-and-white chequered border, Mother Goose herself, a jovial old crone, held the reins of the huge snowy bird she rode side-saddle through orange clouds, also with a basket on her arm (so many baskets for a small child to take in), this one with a cheery baby inside, arms and eyes wide with delight at the high-flying adventure. When I wanted a change, there were Kate Greenaway’s untameable rats, nestling inside men’s Sunday hats and biting the babies in their cradles, before being drawn eerily by the sound of the Piper, scampering around him, with his drooping nightcap, himself as thin and long as his pipe, in his burnt-orange robe, leading them to their doom at the edge of the River Weser. And then the procession of children, just like the rats, scampering happily, dancing tragically, excitingly, away from the town.
There was a waywardness about the nursery rhymes, and a rejection of the adult world that’s as clear as it is in the cartoons. Perhaps more so: the senselessness was more senseless since the narrative didn’t bother itself with coherent story if it didn’t feel like it, as the cartoons did, having to echo the necessity of chase and follow, of consequence, even if the consequences were reversible. I suppose it is, in part, that nursery rhymes come from everywhere, political scandal as well as baby-babble. Satire and nonsense, as wild as you like, not only having to tie itself down to domestic mirroring. The animals fluted and flaunted, danced and went about the world, or off it to the moon or the spidery sky, slightly off-centre or madly off-centre from the life of animals as created by humans. Like the fantasy of the teddy bears and other toys coming to life when everyone was asleep, it seemed perfectly possible to a small child that there was a space in existence, a sideways invisible space, where the real animals behaved as crazily and mockingly as they did in the nursery rhymes. They were as undercover as children were, with our, as I learned, secret thoughts and strange interior games that the grown-ups could never know about. At least we could imagine them so. And along with their faux cuddliness, there was another human use for animals, discovered early in life.
I know how important and how gratifying animals were, but it’s impossible to recall the actual understanding I gained at the time from reading about Pooh and Piglet trying so hard to be in the world, the smug know-all disappearing Cheshire Cat, the hilariously dangerous ticking Crocodile, Moley listening with immense concentration to Mr Badger and Mr Toad not paying attention at all. What I am sure I learned was that animals were available to humans for representing thoughts, ideas, fears and wishes. At any rate, I learned to use them in that way, as we all did, each culture and period in its own way.
Urban, post-domestic child that I was, I may have had very few real animals in my life, and mostly been responsible for the death of any naturally occurring ones (the baby bird, and bees that stung me, ants I stepped on, beetles and snails I matchboxed), but the stories I was told and then read for myself were massively populated by non-human creatures. The protagonists weren’t all animals – some were supernatural beings, like fairies and ogres – but what they had in common was that they were not human. Human children and adults do inhabit the pages of books, but rarely at the earliest stage, and as a rule they are dangerous to the animal heroes. Well, of course they are; stories about non-human creatures are the way we tell children about the ways of humanity. It’s paradoxical because although the children are to identify with them finally, at first the humans in their book must show what not to do. They are usually to be feared for their killing, habitat-destroying, unnatural ways. Animals are good versions of us, humans are bad versions of them, meaning the adults, who are not exactly us – just for the time being.
Analogy and allegory come before social realism. We presume that it’s easier for children to grasp the nature of the species they belong to through the medium of other species, as if indirection works better on young minds. Children, knowing first nothing and then little about being cultural humans, are more amenable to smaller, softer, rounded, furry-animal forms than tall, clothed, angular human forms. I doubt very much (trying hard to look back) whether young children really think of themselves as the same species as adults. Indeed, they are so different, so lacking in cultural understanding, as well as physical adeptness, that in a real sense they aren’t human like adults are until they become so – a good many years after their birth. It may also be that adults see their babies and toddlers as beings more akin to the animal world. The task is to bring them slowly into the human fold. Certainly, we give them teddy bears and bunny rabbits before we give them dolls.
Beyond the sensory or observational grasp we begin to attain as babies, by osmosis, about our own species, most of our early instruction on how to be human comes from the animal world. Nevertheless, one of the things we learn, even while we are identifying with the animals, is that it is better, in the sense of most potent, to be human. Peter Rabbit fears Mr McGregor, whom we may not like, but he does have the shotgun and the power to control the life and death of our gentle hero. And all those transformation tales we are read confirm our suspicions. Not being human is invariably a form of punishment. People can be alienated from their real form and their true selves by wicked magic, from which they can only be rescued and redeemed by love. The Frog Prince returns to his upper-class manly form, and the Beast is brought back to unswinish humanity by Female Beauty. Love looks human (and female); animals are beastly, ugly in form and spirit, terrifyingly other, unless they can be saved. The transformation is from the good to the bad to the good (they are usually innocent of any very terrible crime, the young men who suffer the magic). Six princes are turned to swans by their evil stepmother, but are saved by their devoted sister who spends years sewing enchanted shirts against a deadline, to bring them back to themselves. She succeeds but doesn’t manage to finish one sleeve of one shirt in the time allowed, and the last brother lives with a swan’s wing instead of an arm to remind us all of something quite important that need not and should not be said. Bottom becomes an ass. Ulysses’ men are turned to pigs by Circe.
The stories suggest that the border between human and animal is by no means fixed and impermeable. It’s perfectly clear that only certain civilising influences (love, domesticity, inner struggle) can hold us in place – above the animals – or bring us back from occasional forays into animality. Love, domesticity and inner struggle become qualities distinctly human and humanising. The Beast grasps civilisation as a tragic lack and tries to hold Beauty to him, but only when Beauty responds to the Beast as if he were a human, with love even as he is, can he cross the barrier and return to himself. It does seem to be specifically the human male who is in danger and closest to the animals. They have to be known for their animality but domesticated back into civilised being by their womenfolk. But I remember a certain regret when the enchanted creatures returned to their regular princely, human selves. And regret too that the redeeming princesses never had the opportunity to become Frog-girls or Beast-women, and who wouldn’t want to be a swan by night and fly around the world? But then, do I remember? When did I start to regret the animals turning back into humans? Now I would give anything to have the chance to inhabit the being of a non-human animal. That is, to be and experience self and the world as something utterly other, which is how, as an adult, I choose to see animals, rather than as wild versions of humans. But children, perhaps, only want to hear stories about otherness, and be reassured that they can be rescued from their wild state. Or do they? I just can’t remember.
Narrative is infinitely pliable. Allegory and parable turn inside out, or take another route, as their creators and users wish. Fables, which aren’t necessarily stories for children, offer us animals as qualities which humans need to practice. We are already beyond and above animals by the time we perceive the moral of the Hare and the Tortoise. The animals don’t get it, the stories tell us, but we can. In any case, the creatures in Aesop’s fables don’t live lives of their own, but exist only to represent human vices and virtues. As teaching materials in Western and Eastern traditions, animals are borrowed for their perceived human qualities, slow-and-fast become hasty-and-cautious for our edification, or represent sticking points to spiritual progress – the scorpion can’t help stinging the frog who has carried him across the river. In other forms, animals are blank canvases on which to paint human characters. They are put in trousers, and stand for order and chaos, becoming indistinguishable (aside from their fur and paws) from human actors dressed up, which they later become in pantomime. The riverside and woodland creatures in The Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter’s small farm animals all wear the human clothes and characteristics of the peasantry and gentry of nineteenth-century England. Mr Badger, Moley, Ratty, Toad and the Weasels all translate directly to classes and types that middle-class children in the early twentieth century would have been familiar with. For a while, the incorrigible Mr Toad is transformed into a human female by the kindly gaoler’s daughter (beauty and the beast again) – an opportunity to become the very force that saves creatures from their coarse animality – but he only uses it to escape from prison and can’t sustain ordinary decency. He returns to his wilful, thoughtless ways, just like any bumptious landed gent. Like the Beast, he lives in a fine house and lacks nothing but manners and refinement. The only creatures Mr Toad fears are the unruly Weasels from the Wild Wood who, Ratty says, are ‘all right in a way … but … well, you can’t really trust them’. These low-class riotous villains (early versions of the crazy cartoon animals) mirror Toad’s upper-class chaos, and destroy Toad Hall to teach Mr Toad (and any wayward children) a lesson about the virtue of the middle way. E. H. Shepard’s illustrations keep the animals well covered in human clothing. It’s very hard, even if you’ve spent hours of your life reading and rereading The Wind in the Willows to see an actual toad and think of Kenneth Grahame’s creation, while the human world is full of rich boors who, even in these differently-classed days, fit the bill perfectly.
If the characters in The Wind in the Willows are ciphers for adult human types, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends are much closer to the child who is reading about them. For one thing, they are soft toys and a very miscegenated bunch of creatures from the woodland, the outback, the farm and the jungle. They come together in the nursery in the charge of Christopher Robin, and they are always in need of his advice and assistance. They are less clever, less knowing than him or the readers and have no desire to rebel. They simply get things wrong. They are children to children, and the human children laugh as adults would at how their intellectual and social inferiors’ lack of understanding gets them into trouble. Even the wise Owl – wise for Hundred Acre Wood, that is – spells his name wrong on his house. A small child who sees this and knows that owl is spelled Owl and not Wol is for a change in a position of superiority. Friendship, even love is possible between Christopher Robin and the soft-toy characters, but it’s always an unequal friendship. The love, the friendship depends on this inequality. It doesn’t transform either party. The names of the animals are, of course, the names that Christopher Robin, adamically, has given them, misspellings and all. Pooh, who is ‘a bear of very little brain’ gets stuck in Rabbit’s front door having greedily eaten too much honey while visiting; Piglet goes round and round a spinney following his own footsteps in search of a mythic Woozle; and Tigger bounces about annoying everyone just as younger brothers and sisters do. Eeyore is a special case. He might be a lost adult, not part of any community, or perhaps he is one of those strange children who are born grown-up. He lives in a no-man’s land. He doesn’t know more (he’s a stuffed toy, after all) but he is cursed with knowing that he doesn’t and that his fellow nursery toys know even less:
‘Eeyore, what are you doing there?’ said Rabbit.
‘I’ll give you three guesses, Rabbit. Digging holes in the ground? Wrong. Leaping from branch to branch of a young oak tree? Wrong. Waiting for somebody to help me out of the river? Right. Give Rabbit time, and he’ll always get the answer.’
‘But, Eeyore,’ said Pooh in distress, ‘what can we – I mean, how shall we – do you think if we—’
‘Yes,’ said Eeyore. ‘One of those would be just the thing. Thank you, Pooh.’1
I’ve got to admit, I had very little interest in stories about animals as animals rather than animals as surrogate or allegorical humans. I always liked the idea that stories could be about something other than what they appeared to be about. I couldn’t be bothered with Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s novel narrated by a mistreated horse. Dogs like Lassie or Old Yeller and horses like Flicka showed – albeit uncanny – devotion and intelligence while instructing children on how to behave decently to animals, as well as teaching them the obligations of human love. But they didn’t excite me. I don’t remember wanting a dog or a horse to love and be loved by, but perhaps the impossibility of getting one had something to do with that. Or maybe my baby-bird experience had made me wary.
There is an obvious educational and civilising value in children being told via stories and films to behave well to other creatures and to treat them kindly, but it also alerts them to their special position as separate and superior animals. Only the fact of our dominion over them enables us to consider treating them with kindness. It is a form of noblesse oblige that teaches children the value of animals as sentient creatures, but also establishes the child’s own place in the world, owned and managed by humans, inhabited also by animals who live on human sufferance or because they give humans pleasure in some way, or because humans haven’t yet figured out how to eradicate the very annoying and dangerous ones like mosquitoes. Animals even serve humans, in extremis, by loving us (in our terms), at any rate accepting us, more than other people do. The homeless often have dogs, and it’s not hard to see the use value, but also the emotional value, even if they have to be fed. Jack London tells another kind of story in Call of the Wild, in which Buck, a wolf-like domestic dog, after experiencing both mistreatment and kindness (which he loses through human-on-human violence), gives up the domesticated world and chooses to live in a state of nature with a pack of wolves, becoming, as it were, his real self. But this is not a book for the nursery – it tells a supplementary tale to older children who have already found their place in the scheme of things.
Most of the devoted-animal stories have translated iconically to the screen. Highly trained animals acted out their roles: dog after dog, male and female, played Lassie in the movies and on TV over the years, saving their humans, usually at the risk, fictionally, of their own lives (though two real horses died in the 2006 remake of Flicka). I’m not at all clear what the relationship of an animal movie star is to a human movie star, but I imagine, which is the best I can do, that a trained animal actor benefits less from either the pride or the perks of movie stardom, and suffers as least as much if differently as its human equivalents. The dogs who play Lassie, and the other animal actors, live out, as well as act out their subservience to human wishes. We can’t know, though some animal trainers have opinions. In the early 1990s Vicki Hearne, an animal trainer, poet and writer, visited the Las Vegas show of Bobby Berosini and his trained orangutans. He had been sued by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) for cruelty in his training methods, and Berosini sued back, insisting that no cruelty was involved in his act. Hearne, who we will come to again later, was astounded by the performance, which is largely an extended joke about the animal subverting the authority of the trainer. Berosini tells the audience how he trains them:
‘You have to show them who is boss.’ He brings Rusty out to show him who is boss, and Rusty not only refuses to jump onto the stool provided for the purpose but tricks his trainer into doing so by pretending incomprehension until Berosini finally demonstrates, jumping onto the stool himself. Once Berosini has dutifully jumped, Rusty invites the audience to applaud. Berosini goes on to mock much scientific and popular wisdom about operant conditioning training that relies more on the carrot than on the stick by demonstrating how he doesn’t need to train the orangutans at all because ‘I have magic orang cookies’. A fast and lively slapstick round results from his failed attempts to get Bo to eat a cookie, the cookie is juggled, spit into the audience, hidden, fed to Berosini, but never eaten by the orangutan.
Hearne, talking to Berosini after witnessing the show, made a judgement about how the trainer got his orangs to perform in the act:
The radical claim … is that the animals are ‘referring to’, or at least imitating, these gestures deliberately, with some sense – if not precisely our sense – of the meaning of what they are doing. Berosini says that Bo is in on the joke, or at least on some joke, and that it is her interest and pleasure in such monkeying around that makes it possible for him to work with her as he does. This is speculative, of course, but it could be argued that Berosini’s is a more parsimonious explanation than an explanation based on conditioning would be. Indeed, it’s questionable whether any model of conditioning, however elaborate, can explain behaviour this complex, particularly since every performance the act changes, with both Berosini and the orangs offering improvisations. Talk of conditioned responses may be helpful in understanding part of a trained animal’s development (or, for that matter, a dancer’s or a poet’s or an actor’s or a philosopher’s), but animal performances at this level make more sense when viewed as rudimentary expressions of at least one primeval artistic impulse – the impulse to play with meaning.2
Hearne is careful in her speculation about the motives of animal performers – how can we know what the animals themselves think? Does thinking as we use the word bear any relation to what it is they do – might it be perfectly possible to have ‘consciousness’ yet not ‘think’ in any way we can understand? In 2008 Fourth Estate published Me, Cheetah, the autobiography of the chimpanzee who starred in the Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller. Cheetah, aged seventy-six and in retirement in Palm Springs, tells his own story – his childhood in the jungle, the accident that killed his mother and left him alone, the rescue and his wilderness time in Manhattan where at last he met King Kong and understood the centrality of Hollywood in the collective unconscious – plus all the gossip that libel laws allow about his long-dead fellow Hollywood actors. Veronica Horwell reviewed the book in the Guardian, and praised Cheetah’s polemical brilliance as he argues against the contemporary use of animated simulacra rather than real animal actors, as they did in his day, though the rot, of course, started back with Disney and Looney Tunes: ‘an animated Pixar pixel hasn’t suffered for its art, hasn’t eluded death, there’s no soul there even if every hair is exactly replicated’. No ghostwriter is named in the book; this is all Cheetah’s own work. The use of the animal voice in sophisticated satire and adult fiction is not uncommon – from Kafka’s Report to the Academy given by an ape to Sam Savage’s 2008 novel Firmin3 narrated by a book-consuming rat – but clearly, Cheetah’s autobiography also represents a collective unconscious – the powerful wish we all have to communicate with animals, to find out what they really ‘think’ or how they really think. Deep down Me, Cheetah must disappoint; we can only go along so far with the conceit. We know we don’t really know and we know that Cheetah isn’t really telling. But even the most grownup of us wishes that he was.
The cartoons that delighted me as a child had caricatured animals as wild children behaving the way no one was allowed to. They followed the logic of the impossible escalating the violent and the uncivilised into extreme and absurd consequence. But Disney, one of those dealers in pandemonium, also made full-length narrative cartoons, and the early versions are quite different from the short evocations of chaos that were churned out for the news cinemas by the cartoon studios. Bambi (1942) is allegory, plain and simple. A picture of the social world as it should be, even including a little tragedy to be overcome. Bambi is a story only in the sense that it narrates the desired patterns of human life. Even Disney couldn’t present deer life precisely in terms of the upper-middle-class American nuclear social unit, although the distant antler-phallic stag somewhat mirrors the remote paterfamilias of the wealthy family, even if his world was on the very cusp of changing. Deer reality is glossed into suburban family values in this version of nature-as-allegory. These deer are drawn to be as reminiscent of humans as possible – their huge eyes are human eyes, not blank, but meaningful windows on the soul. Their faces express emotion – happiness, sadness, fear – in a way that no deer could manage even if it felt such things in the way that humans do.
Dumbo, made the year before, shows another way with animals. It’s just as sentimental but much more vibrant. These animals don’t live in nature, but at the circus, the least natural existence a wild animal can have. They are all female, apart from Dumbo himself, and wear little caps and bonnets, gossiping and whispering among themselves at the slightest sign of nonconformity, exactly like the stereotype of suburban matrons during their coffee mornings. Dumbo is certainly allegory, too. The baby born with gigantic ears is immediately a pariah, and the elephant matrons turn their very large buttocks on him. His only supporters are his fiercely loving mother (that is what mothers should do and animals show: love fiercely), who is eventually locked up and labelled ‘mad’ for her defensive anger, and Timothy, a feisty mouse. It is a glorious cartoon as the rather dully animated Bambi isn’t, which includes the wild and thrilling improvisation of the drunk scene in which Dumbo and Timothy hallucinate pink elephants that dance and morph into pure colour and form. Not surprising that in the late 1960s, Dumbo was sought out (along with Kubrick’s 2001– remember those apelike hominids?) as a perfect accompaniment to an acid trip. After getting drunk and waking in a tree the morning after, Dumbo’s preposterous ears enable him to fly. He’s what we would call ‘differently abled’. Up in the tree, the crows doubt Dumbo’s spectacular talent, and get to sing and dance the jazzy, snazzy, sinuous ‘When I See An Elephant Fly’. This is another joy of the film. It is also a real problem. The crows are black, as crows are, but in the cartoon, they are cool black dudes, who talk jive and whose leader is called in the credits ‘Jim Crow’. The freaky Dumbo triumphs as a flying elephant entertainer with flapping ears, and the black crows perform their well-known dancing and singing skills. Neither elephants nor crows (nor deer) can be depicted as elephants and crows simply, but must be caricatured into their nearest equivalent in human society. Big, fleshy, smug matrons; hip, musical, oppositional black men; isolated children who come right in the end. Dumbo triumphs over his persecutors and flies to a kind of achievement, but it’s not a flight to freedom. His happiness is that he becomes a star of the circus. There is no suggestion, no thought that he belongs elsewhere. He will fly for the pleasure of the human audience. In return he will garner admiration and the best conditions (his mother is seen at the end relaxing on the veranda of the finest coach of the circus train). The film ends there, but Dumbo will certainly end up like Cheetah, in luxurious retirement in Palm Springs, relaxing by his swimming pool, writing his memoirs.*
There was another kind of Disney film, not animated: the Disney wildlife movies that sometimes accompanied the film you actually had gone to see, and sometimes were the main event. I remember them mostly as second features, something I had to sit through, along with the interval and the advertisements, until, at very long last (time is so protracted for a small child) the cinema darkened again and the real film started.
They were in full colour with full-throated soaring music and had titles like White Wilderness, The Living Desert, The Vanishing Prairie, The African Lion and Beaver Valley. Their stated aim was to show the wonders of nature, but if nature didn’t oblige for the camera, they fixed it so it was wonderful. Most famously, in White Wilderness, Disney actually created the myth that we all now ‘know’ to be true, that every seven to ten years, lemmings commit mass suicide by running off the edge of a cliff to drown in the sea. The wildlife crew filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not the habitat of lemmings, who live in Alaska. To remedy this annoyance, the Disney filmmakers bought lemmings from Inuit children in Manitoba and set up the sequence in the way they thought best for their movie. I remember the voice of Winston Hibler, smooth and authoritative and so confidently American. His script and his vocal cords made complete, indubitable sense of what we saw, sitting in the cinema in London, a million and more miles as it might have been from Alaska, Alberta or the moon. The lemmings massed to fill the huge screen, and then ran, as if following the Piper, for the nearest cliff top and, like a waterfall, dropped off the edge and fell to their deaths in the broiling sea. Hibler narrated the lemmings’ thoughts and motivation: ‘A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent, and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny … They’ve become victims of an obsession – a one-track thought: Move on! Move on!’
But, according to a 1983 investigation by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer Brian Vallée, the lemming scenes were faked. Those lemmings tumbling into the sea, apparently leaping voluntarily to their death, which I watched with my own eyes, were in fact thrown off a cliff by the Disney filmmakers. The great migration we saw and marvelled at in the cinema was actually a few dozen Manitoba lemmings running on snow-covered turntables, shot with tight camera angles and edited to within an inch of its life. It seemed OK to stage an event for the benefit of educating and entertaining people about the natural world. But actually, the event itself was invented. Lemmings don’t commit hara-kiri, they simply do what most animals do, they move on when their feeding grounds become depleted. They can swim, and they cross rivers in search of good places to feed. ‘Sometimes they drown,’ explains zoologist Gordon Jarrell of the University of Alaska.4
Much of what I ‘learned’ as a child came from Disney wildlife films. Prairies were beyond my experience, but I know about them from Westerns and from Disney. Nature, for Disney, was to be manipulated for our entertainment. That’s what film did. If the reality didn’t make a great sequence, the magic of film would fix it. A good deal of what we were told when I was a child turns out not to be the truth, and, after all, manipulating stories of what animals do and are is what people have done since they acquired art and language. Creation myths, cave art, fables, allegory, all take animals and shape them to our own ends as if they were made of plasticine or dreams. In some sense they are: the natural world and everything in it that isn’t us, are aspects of our mind. They are taken in by our senses and become our understanding of what is outside ourselves. But nothing we observe and think about is entirely outside ourselves.
Occasionally, we have moments when we wonder if the world outside us has a life of its own – but how could we ever know, since all we have are our own minds with which to think and apprehend the world? ‘Why do we treat animals like animals?’ the film version of Dr Dolittle asks the judge who wants to send him to an insane asylum. And earlier, before his parrot starts to tutor him, he sings his dream:
If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages
Think of all the things we could discuss
If we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals,
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us.