Antipode – Chapter 9

Cute, Furry, Desperate and Alone

Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

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People the world over find comfort in cute and furry animals. Throughout the developing world animals are taken from the forest as pets. Then, when the animal grows too large, or too difficult, it is returned, sometimes to a different forest entirely. People think they are doing the animal a favor. In truth, that animal, all other individuals of its own species that it may encounter, and often any humans that it meets, are worse off for its existence after being an ill-treated pet.

The term pet may be misleading for those in the developed world, who conjure up images of a well-groomed dog, lovingly taken for walks, played with, and given food designed for the well-being of the animal. Pets in the developing world are a different phenomenon, and exotic pets, such as primates from the forest, are yet one more step removed. Some of the omnipresent dogs in developing world villages are pets, insomuch as someone would notice if they died. Similarly, the rarer cats are tolerated in people’s doorways, more occasionally inside a shack, as they keep the rodent population down. They are pets, as cats on a farm are pets—acknowledged, but not necessarily enjoyed.

Exotic pets are unique. The owners of such animals have recognized in their surroundings some element of the local biota that fascinates. You do not find marmosets as pets in Africa, nor lemurs in Central America, nor scarlet macaws in Madagascar. Exotic pets in these locales are taken directly from local habitats. Many middle class families in Tana have had a lemur as a pet. It is chic, and suggests a sophisticated recognition of the animal’s unparalleled persona. Many of those people have later discarded their animals. It is no great loss for the families, for these animals were never loved, or treated as one of the family. Primate pets are often kept in cages, sometimes outside on a dead tree, tied with a short lead, unable to climb, obtain fruit, or escape from their own excrement.

A spider monkey I once met in the Osa peninsula of Costa Rica, a frugivore, was being fed bread and milk by his master. The man objected to my giving the monkey bananas and mangoes from the local market, which the animal ate with a voracious appetite, having knocked over the unwanted plate of bread and milk in his eagerness for the fruit. The man explained to me that fruit is bad for monkeys, and that he was doing it a service by generously giving it expensive milk. In truth, milk can’t be digested by most adult mammals, as we often stop producing the enzyme that breaks down milk sugar when we mature, and the milk that monkey was being fed probably caused him painful stomach cramps, besides lacking the fruit pulp his anatomy demanded.

In Tana, the most obvious place to abandon lemurs is at Tsimbazaza, the underfunded zoo in the middle of a poverty-choked city. Already swamped with more animals than it can handle, Tsimbazaza receives these pets, born wild, taken into captivity and treated badly, now loved and wanted by no one. When Tsimbazaza can truly take no more, people do what must seem like the right thing to do, the kind and generous thing to do—they put their pets back into the forest. There is, however, especially among the urban middle class of the developing world, an utter lack of recognition that one wilderness differs from another. Thus, an animal that came originally from the spiny desert of the south might be replaced in high elevation cloud forest, or in the lowland rainforest of the east coast.

People who do not know America, and do not recognize its vastness, may assume that we all know one another. “Ah, an American. I have an uncle who moved to America, to Norfolk, Virginia. He is a mechanic, balding—do you know him?” All Americans look alike to those without practice discerning our features, and a country of this size is too large to believe. We make the same error, of course, when we assign to people a nationality—Chinese, for instance—which speaks hardly at all to the experience they have had in the specific region of China from which they come. Even Madagascar, a comparatively small country, has more than twenty distinct tribal affiliations, and the plateau people, the Merina, are offended at any suggestion that they look similar to people from the coasts, or the south. Within our own worlds, we recognize subtle differences between communities, based on neighborhoods that may be but a few blocks long. But still we have the impulse to assign character traits to whole continents worth of other people.

Similarly, most people assume that one lemur is like another, and can live anywhere that lemurs exist. Recognition of an animal’s need for certain trees, or a particular kind of terrain, is understandably beyond most people. When a lemur of a lowland rainforest species is placed in a forest on the cold plateau, it will not fare well, and will never find any others of its kind. Its existence will be solitary and short. Even when care is taken to provide an animal its native habitat, no individual—human or other—without experience in that habitat can be expected to assimilate and survive. Imagine a Los Angeles native being yanked from his comfortable urban existence, washed up on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and told to thrive.

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Brown lemur with guava. This is not the attack lemur. Photo by the author, 1997.

At dusk on our first day on Nosy Mangabe, as I returned barefoot from showering at the waterfall, Lebon called to me from the steps of the conservation agents’ cabin. He was picking through rice, culling the stones from it.

“Close the lab,” he suggested. “At this time of night, the lemurs sometimes try to steal things.” As he said this, a female brown lemur, Lemur fulvus, the most widespread of the non-human primates on Madagascar, scampered by on the ground. She made what I took to be a playful swipe in the general direction of my leg. I laughed, made noises at the animal to discourage her from getting any friendlier, and continued on toward the lab. There is a troop of brown lemurs resident in the camp area at Nosy Mangabe, and I took this animal to be one of them.

The next evening, as I again returned from the waterfall at dusk, the same lemur ran by my feet, grabbing at them but missing. The lemur also made a swipe at Jessica as she left the lab. She responded as I had, shouting at the animal unconcernedly, but in order to dissuade, so as not to encourage the lemur to develop a habit of such behavior. We never saw the lemur approach Lebon or Fortune this way, and they said nothing further to us about her. We were not even certain that it was a single lemur who was so playful, but perhaps several females in the resident troop who were a bit aggressive.

On the third day, I rose at five, dressed for the field on my tent platform, and took my toothbrush and paste to the place where the small stream pools. It is where we wash dishes, and clean our faces and teeth. I sat on a rock and bent down, splashing water onto my face. Dawn is a meditative time on Nosy Mangabe, still cool and subdued. The nighttime frog song is dissipating, the squabbles of diurnal lemurs and insects have not yet begun, and the understory is tinged a deep blue. My mind floated easily in this place so far from home, as I considered the work of the day ahead.

Searing pain suddenly enveloped my left arm. The female lemur raced by me, not two feet from my face, up to my right, where she perched in bamboo, eight feet away. I stood abruptly, uncomprehending. She made another movement in my direction, and as I picked up a rock to throw at the beast who bit me, I felt the blood flowing down my arm.

Twisting to look at my wound, I was horrified to find a deep open gash, looking more like a knife wound than an animal bite. The muscle, my triceps, was exposed, bubbling out of the wound, and bleeding profusely. Before I could internalize this, the lemur was coming at me again, on the ground, across the rocks. I kicked at her, and yelled, and she retreated. Hurriedly, confused, I splashed my arm with cold, clean water, and picked up my things. Walking slowly back to the lab, I couldn’t think, didn’t grasp how this fit into any bigger picture, refused to comprehend how bad it might be. I called to Jessica, told her I’d been bitten by a lemur, and showed her my arm. She was horrified by the wound. My fears were validated. I had indeed been ripped open by a wild animal, unprovoked. The wound would surely demand stitches; the behavior, an explanation.

I was dazed. The wound was open to the air, attracting the biting flies which pervade the forest during daylight hours. I slathered it in iodine and Neosporin, but this didn’t provide much of a barrier to the outside world.

“Can you stitch me?” I asked Jessica. She was pallid. She had never had stitches herself, had never even seen them. Despite this, I believed, naively, that she could sew me up without much trauma to either of us. Before proceeding, we got Lebon’s attention. He was just waking up, preparing to rake the camp, the one job that was done every day. He was suitably appalled with the situation.

“Do you know how to give stitches?” I asked him.

“Ah, stitches are very difficult, I think.” This was his polite way of saying “I can’t do that.” I had failed to include sutures in my medical kit, but I did have a set of sewing needles, including a thick, curved mattress needle. I appointed myself on a wobbly bamboo bench, held my arm over my head so Jessica could access the bite, asked Lebon to hold my wound closed as best he could, and told Jessica to puncture my arm with the mattress needle. After about two minutes of this, the needle was halfway embedded in my arm, no stitch was yet apparent, and all three of us were shaking. I suggested, much to the relief of Jessica and Lebon, that we abandon the plan.

“I’ll need to see a doctor,” I told Lebon. He would have to radio Maroantsetra to arrange for a boat to come pick me up. He looked alarmed.

“No need for that. Earlier someone was bit on the foot by the same lemur, but it was not bad, so you will also be better soon.” I was feeling unsure of my judgment, but did think I needed to get to a doctor. I waited for him to expand on his position.

“Perhaps,” he continued, “you should just sit here, wait for a few days, and see what happens.” He and Fortune were already demonstrating expertise at sitting around and waiting to see what happened, but I was not of a mind to follow suit. I did, after all, have a gaping hole in my arm, possibly inflicted by a sick animal. By this time my thoughts had turned to rabies, then to other infections, like gangrene, and all the possible nasty things that can happen as a result of a deep animal bite in a persistently hot, wet place.

“No, I must see a doctor. Now.” My mind was growing more confused, but I could repeat myself with some success.

“But it’s only six in the morning, and I cannot use the radio until eight, because nobody is on the other end until then,” Lebon argued. Even then, there was a chance that the communication wouldn’t be possible, as the radio was frequently low on batteries or shorting out.

“Okay, I’ll come back in two hours.” I started myself on a course of antibiotics, and retreated to the dock to lie down and consider my fate. My arm throbbed, and my thoughts raced, then flitted, from one incoherence to the next. Why would a wild animal attack a person, unless it was rabid? How did Lebon know that this was the same lemur that previously bit someone else? Could I go home now?

After two hours of this, I stood up, light headed, already imagining every ache as the beginning of the end. I staggered the thirty feet back to camp, and asked Lebon to radio Maroantsetra.

“Why?” He looked genuinely confused. I repeated my plan to go see a doctor.

“But,” he warned, “the park boat is not in town, so you will have to hire a private boat, which will be expensive.” The Projet Masoala motorboat was on the other side of the peninsula. There are only two other boats for hire in the area, and they are, as he said, quite expensive. For Madagascar. Even if they had been expensive by American standards, it hardly seemed relevant. I wasn’t going to risk my arm, perhaps my life, to save a few dollars. Finally I persuaded him that I was going to town, with his help or not. He radioed, and arranged for a private boat to come out and get me immediately. He was outraged at the price they would charge me for the three mile trip—the equivalent of $25 in Malagasy francs—and tried, again, to dissuade me. He knew I was being robbed. But he had no idea how little that mattered. The economies we live in are too different for Lebon to comprehend. I spent on a single boat ride what he and his family might spend on life in a month.

Jessica and I got to town as it was turning into a steamy, swooning day. Nosy Mangabe is always cooler than town. The forest, long gone from Maroantsetra, helps insulate against heat on Nosy Mangabe. Water surrounds the small island, and the waterfall is always there, beckoning. Maroantsetra, by comparison, is hot and dusty, cramped with people.

In town, Clarice’s compassionate nature came through, and she took us to a man I came to refer to as the good doctor. The good doctor’s French was easily understandable, even by me, but it was a relief to have Jessica there for translation help just in case. He worked in a small, cool building with bamboo walls and a thatched roof, and his manner was professional but amused. I watched carefully as he poured alcohol over all the tools he would use on me, then set them on fire to sterilize them. I carry my own sterile syringes in the field, but not a complete doctor’s kit, and there is always the fear of disease. AIDS is not formally recognized as a problem by the Malagasy government, but it is surely there.

Once the good doctor anesthetized my arm and had me lying helpless on his examining table, he began extolling the virtues of lemurs.

“Lemurs, you know, are smart and funny, quite clever, and beautiful, too.” I gaped at him, asked Jessica for a translation just in case I had got it wrong. I hadn’t. He continued, “They don’t usually do this sort of thing. You mustn’t hate lemurs because of this.”

“I love animals, that’s why I’m here in Madagascar,” I paused. This was true, but incomplete. “But I’d like to have this particular lemur for lunch.” He laughed.

“Oh no, we can’t eat lemurs. Some people do, of course, but it’s not right…” he trailed off.

“I don’t want to make a habit of it, you understand, just this particular one.” I wasn’t making myself clear. Having a lemur for lunch may have been the wrong way to convey that thought. I asked Jessica to step in and help me. The doctor seemed relieved with her explanation.

“Oh, yes, that particular lemur. What were you doing to provoke her? Did you try to pet her?” The good doctor was beginning to get to me. Did I try to pet her? A wild animal? Did I look mad? Was the rabies manifesting already?

“No, I was only sitting at the stream, brushing my teeth.”

“Ah, they love toothpaste. She probably wanted your toothpaste.” I cast a glance at Jessica, who is expert at looking simultaneously bemused with and removed from a situation. She was doing it now.

“Lemurs like toothpaste?” I repeated back to him.

“Yes,” the doctor nodded again, his needle in my arm. “Really, they like anything that’s sweet. They eat fruit, you know.” I was beginning to understand. This good doctor did know something of lemurs, and couldn’t put my story together in a way that made sense to him. It was possible that the lemur liked toothpaste, but I doubted it, as mint has a very particular aroma, and besides, she didn’t make a grab for my toothpaste, just me.

“Voilà, we are done.” I twisted to look at my arm, and was surprised how quickly he had put in several large stitches. “Come back in three days—I’ll check for infection again then. And don’t have the lemur for lunch.” He chuckled. We had come to an understanding. As long as I wasn’t living out on Nosy Mangabe with a yen to eat all lemurs, he could accept my ire at one of them.

Jessica and I walked back through town, and ran into Felix, perhaps the best of the local naturalist guides, along the way. Felix is the happiest person I have ever met, with the possible exception of his young son Alpha, who shares his father’s exuberance at all that comes his way. Felix is a young, smart, almost trilingual, forest-loving Malagasy man with no chance of ever living a life outside of Maroantsetra. He is just Felix, with no last name, and when I’ve asked him about it, his eyes grow distant, and he says his mother just called him Felix, that’s all. He is enchanting, with deep soulful eyes, a wide smile, and a laugh like wind-chimes. The story of the lemur attack on one of the two vazaha women living on Nosy Mangabe was already circulating through town, and he had come to find us and hear the story firsthand. I recounted it. He looked as serious as I’ve ever seen him, then announced,

“The lemur must have wanted your toothpaste.” My mouth hung open.

“You think so?”

“Why else would a lemur do something like that?” I had to admit he had a point. He continued. “You weren’t trying to pet her were you?” I almost yelled at Felix, even though he is the last person who could deserve my anger. NO I didn’t pet the lemur, NO I didn’t bring this on myself, NO I’m not the one acting unpredictably here.

“It’s the lemur!” I wanted to scream, “I’m the victim, not her!” Instead, I said, “No, I didn’t try to pet her. She’s rather mad, you know.” Maybe if I started saying that, it would catch on and circulate through town. The lemur’s toothpaste alibi would disappear into her madness.

The truth eventually did come out, emerging slowly from many sources. A woman in town had been keeping this lemur as a pet for a few years. The lemur was never socialized, never even allowed to climb trees. She didn’t know any of her own kind. Over time, she did seem to grow mad, and began lunging at the neighborhood children who tormented her with sticks and taunts. The lemur’s human owner wouldn’t tolerate such behavior, so looked for someplace to discard the animal. The woman was a member of Lebon’s extended family, and when she approached him, he was all too eager to help. This, he was sure, was a clear example of what conservation agents should be doing—saving poor lemurs, and putting them back in the forest. He had done this the day before I arrived on Nosy Mangabe.

Though I now recognized that the lemur was probably just crazy from having been chained up alone for years, she was still a threat. When we returned to the island that night, we went with instructions from Projet Masoala for the conservation agents: trap the lemur, and bring it to town. For the next two days, nothing happened. I was jumpy, scared at forest noises when I’d always been comfortable before. And the lemur continued making advances on Jessica and me. Raised among people, perhaps she mistook us for females of her own kind, encroaching on territory where before there had been only males.

Finally we gave Lebon and Fortune an ultimatum: trap that lemur, or we’ll find a way to do so, and it may not be pretty. The next day, a lobster trap showed up in a tree by the lab. I’ve never caught lobster myself, but I have a feeling that they are, well, different from lemurs. I laughed at the trap, and wondered how long it would be before I went into town again to find—-what? Twine? Lumber? How would I trap a lemur? I had no idea. But it seemed clear that I would have to.

When Jessica and I returned to camp that evening, the lemur was sitting in the lobster trap, eating fruit Lebon had given her.

The lemur and Lebon had a relationship, but nobody else could get close. I congratulated him on having caught a lemur with a lobster trap. He thought nothing of it.

After the lemur had been caught and caged, Lebon radioed for a boat to come get us. It was time for me to go in for my follow-up with the good doctor anyway. On the short, choppy ride across the bay to Maroantsetra, the lemur looked stricken in her lobster trap. She threaded her hand through the wire mesh towards Lebon, and he took her hand in his. They sat, hand in hand, for the ride to town.

Later that day, Lebon asked me if I knew why the lemur had to be taken away. I boggled at him, and, rather than sharing the rather obvious answer, I asked, “No, Lebon, tell me—why did this animal have to be removed?”

“Because,” he answered, speaking with authority, “if she stays here, she will get sick and die. As a conservation agent, it is my job to keep all lemurs healthy.” This concept of conservation—to simply keep all that is charismatic alive—had never before occurred to me. It scared me. The conservation agent charged with protecting a fragile nature reserve had failed to internalize the difference between protecting whole ecosystems, and protecting individual animals. Of course, many Americans make exactly the same mistake. One reason the cause of environmentalism is at risk in the States is because people erroneously think it pits spotted owls against working men and women. But spotted owls, charismatic as they may be, are only a proxy for the entire, threatened ecosystem that we hope to save.

Lebon’s vision of the lemur’s future was also sadly ironic. Information travels slowly, and with much mutation, in Madagascar, like a massive game of telephone. Early rumors that the animal was headed to a retirement home for old and disturbed lemurs in southern Madagascar were probably false, possibly started to soothe Lebon. It is far more likely, as later reports suggested, that the animal was put down. Tsimbazaza, the zoo in Tana, already had far more unsocialized lemurs than it could handle. And this animal would never successfully reenter lemur society. Killing it was the most humane thing to do.

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I have repeatedly entered the lands and cultures of the developing world and started making value judgments. Don’t tear down trees for crops that are pure luxury. Don’t hunt bats if you have other things to eat. Don’t take wild animals out of the forest and keep them as pets. Don’t tell me about conservation and saving mad lemurs, for I know better. Where do I get off?

Left to their own devices, pre-industrial people don’t tend to destroy the land they live on. The fisher people of Nosy Mangabe disobey the letter of the law regarding coming on to the island, but that law shouldn’t be enforced on them anyway. They smoke fish with dead wood they have collected, and spend the night camped on the beach, but they use this land well, as their ancestors have been for hundreds of years. They respect the land, and use it sustainably. Most importantly, this island was taken from the local people and made into a reserve some years ago—some of these fisher people were using this land as a base for their fishing, their livelihood, before it was ever designated a reserve. The land belongs to them. It does not belong to the Malagasy sailors who come off spice boats for fresh water and lemur meat, nor to the Western conservation NGOs who administer it with the best intentions, and certainly not to me, a foreign researcher who comes to look at frogs.

But the Western NGOs come in and declare, with the tacit approval of the Malagasy government, that this land is theirs to protect. Wisely, they hire local people like Lebon and Fortune to act as guardians. The guardians get the fancy title of conservation agent, so their friends and family in town don’t so easily see them for what they really are—policemen keeping local people off their ancestral lands. The problem is, these particular conservation agents don’t understand conservation. They, like so many in the Western world, make the mistake of believing that only those things that are big and cute and engaging should be protected, and they fail to protect all that doesn’t so easily grip their imagination. Lebon’s mistake in understanding is not so different from the one we make when giant pandas and lions and whales are paraded in front of us to evoke a visceral reaction of guardianship and compassion, and we respond with our pocketbooks. How much of our grassroots money-from-the-gut goes to protect eels, after all?

The customs of the local people usually make a lot of sense in context, even when the vazaha who effectively parachutes in from outer space can’t make sense of them. Problems tend to arise at the junction between native and Western culture, and Westerners shouldn’t point to these, nod sagely, and say “what would they do without us?” I desperately want vanishing Malagasy ecosystems to be protected before they are entirely lost, and I don’t know how best to help the cause. I do know, though, that going halfway is not the answer. Putting local people on the payroll and telling them that they are conservation agents, without insuring that they know what that means, is irresponsible. If these men don’t understand why we might want to protect a whole forest, rather than a single lemur—and why should they, at first?—it is our job, if we are already intervening, to insure that they learn.

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As my wound healed, so too did that part of my brain which had, in an instant, searing flash, turned on me and warned me repeatedly that lemurs were dangerous. On full moons when the water apple trees in camp were fruiting, the resident troop of brown lemurs spent all night awake in a long fruit fest, dropping the cores and bad fruit down onto the roof of my tent platform. Sometimes a lemur would scamper by on the ground, going after a piece of good fruit, and if I was in my tent trying to sleep, I would wake and tense in that moment, fearing, irrationally, that it would come for me too.

By the time I was again able to sweat during field work without wincing from the salt in my wound, and shower in the waterfall without constantly trying to keep one arm out of the spray, I enjoyed the lemurs fully again. The comic ruffed lemurs make such a production of a human going by, it’s almost impossible not to hoot back at them, egging them on with cackles as they peer out of the trees at the strange being on the ground. The brown lemurs did show a noticeable interest in the lab whenever we returned from town with bananas, and their spirit was contagious. Lemurs were again wonderful co-inhabitants of my small world, rather than unpredictable and treacherous foes. And it turns out that rabies isn’t known in lemurs, so I probably was never at risk of turning up rabid. All the same, I’d rather not put my arm to the lemur test again.

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Next week: Chapter 10 – Weather is Everything