Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim (W.W. Norton, 368 pages)
With all the studies and books published on animal intelligence in the past decade, did we really need another one? Well, yes, it turns out we did. Brandon Keim, a science and nature writer who lives in Bangor, Maine, has found a new twist on the subject in Meet the Neighbors.
Culling from copious research, Keim takes a Mr. Rogers approach to animal science, reporting his findings while strolling through “the everyday landscape of a suburban neighborhood” and pointing out the various animals residing there. While this may seem a sophomoric endeavor to some, he argues otherwise, saying that the central question of our time is “How might an awareness of animal minds shape the ways we understand them and, ultimately, how we live with them on this shared, precious planet?” In other words, until we approach animals as compadres in the struggle, we are getting them, and our own moral development, wrong.
Challenge him at your own risk: No less than Charles Darwin was a fan of the lowly earthworm, about which he wrote a surprise bestseller. (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms is not quite as catchy a title as On the Origin of Species.) In this, Darwin’s final book, he wrote of earthworms, “they deserve to be called intelligent.”
Keim’s interest in the topic came from his realization that the birds he watched bathing daily in a local reservoir “were like locals at a coffee shop or the gym. They were my neighbors.” Since most Americans actually know little about their human neighbors, this might not be the best argument for learning more about squirrels and chipmunks.
A better argument comes from the quote by the writer and Whole Earth Catalog co-founder Stewart Brand, who said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” When Keim first came across this quote, he said, it “grated” at him, but he came to accept the hard truth in it: that we all make decisions every day that affect the lives of other creatures, whether it’s something as simple as turning over a stone and disrupting a small colony of insects, or clearing a wooded lot for a house.
“But we could turn the phrase a bit differently than Brand,” Keim writes. “We might as well be good neighbors.” This involves questions with ethical considerations, such as “what do we owe so-called pets, or animals who are sick or injured? How do we live with predators whose presence is not always welcomed?” In attempting to answer these questions, Keim walks us through a brief history of animal rights, from Aristotle to Peter Singer, at times including nauseating detail about animal cruelty, and the challenges that remain. (For example: “the federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to chickens or fish, who account for the vast majority of farmed animals.” And protections for wild animals mostly apply to endangered species.) This section feels a bit thin, coming so soon after the masterful treatment of the subject in Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, earlier this year.
But when Keim resumes his neighborhood walks (which aren’t limited to where he lives now, but include other places he’s lived and traveled), he uses his own experience to explore animals that don’t get as much sympathetic treatment, as, say, dogs or elephants. He takes up the neighborly cause for rats and cormorants, waterbirds that are among the most hated birds in the world, with contempt for them going back to the biblical book of Leviticus. While he once hated the bird, Keim sees a flock and envisions them as “returning home after a day’s work” with family, friends and acquaintances and thinks about what stories they would communicate to each other. He talks to an ecologist studying the effects of pollution who adopted a deformed baby cormorant that he named Cosmos and who later became something of a minor celebrity because of their media appearances.
He also takes up a subject that gets too little attention: the cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals that allows us to be entranced when a raccoon climbs an office building in Minnesota, becoming a social media star, and yet also considers that species a pest to be eradicated. The story Keim tells of a Canada man who raised and released a baby raccoon only to have the raccoon return two years later for a visit will cause you to reconsider hiring a pest control company — or at least any that don’t consider the animals’ welfare as well as the humans’.
Even the most ardent of animal lovers claim the right to kill animals in self-defense, but do we also have the right to kill them when they damage our property, invade our homes or generally fit the definition of “nuisance”? The law usually says so. But even when people try to deal with nuisance animals in a humane way — by trapping and relocating them, for example — that may turn out to be just a slower form of death.
The Canadian man who had raised the raccoon later went on to run his own “pest control” company with humane methods, and told Keim an amazing story about a client who had a raccoon living in a garage with a nest of babies. They couldn’t figure out how the raccoon was getting in or out until he one night watched the raccoon push the button that opened the garage door.
“As best as he could figure, she would go outside at night while the homeowner slept, then close the door when she returned in the morning’s wee hours, leaving her humans none the wiser.” It’s an astonishing story and bolsters Keim’s contention that understanding “the neighbors” makes us less likely to want to kill them, and more likely to want to find ways to live in harmony. B
