On Animals E-Book

Susan Orlean

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'Every essay in this book is magnificent... Mesmerizing.' New York Times 'How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,' writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career. These stories consider a range of creatures - the household pets we dote on, the animals we raise to end up as meat on our plates, the creatures who could eat us for dinner, the various tamed and untamed animals we share our planet with who are central to human life. In her own backyard, Orlean discovers the delights of keeping chickens. In a different backyard, in New Jersey, she meets a woman who has twenty-three pet tigers - something none of her neighbours knew about until one of the tigers escapes. In Iceland, the world's most famous whale resists the efforts to set him free; in Morocco, the world's hardest-working donkeys find respite at a special clinic. We meet a show dog and a lost dog and a pigeon who knows exactly how to get home. Equal parts delightful and profound, enriched by Orlean's stylish prose and precise research, these stories celebrate the meaningful cross-species connections that grace our collective existence.

Leseprobe

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and on Twitter @SusanOrlean.

‘Every essay in this book is magnificent... Each animal’s turn in the warm spotlight of Orlean’s gaze gives readers a chance to learn something enthralling about even the most ordinary of creatures... Mesmerizing.’ New York Times

‘Beguiling, observant and howlingly funny.’ San Francisco Chronicle

‘Her rich storytelling is almost soothing... Orlean is committed to investigating the dizzying multiplicity of roles animals serve – employee, best friend, harbinger of climate change – and the places where those functions intersect.’ Los Angeles Times

‘Original, perceptive, and clever... Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates.’ Boston Globe

‘A close read of her new book suggests that beneath the surface variety of subjects and locales in her writing, there’s an underlying unity: heedless, headlong enthusiasm... She is a moth drawn to moths who are drawn to the flame... Ms. Orlean has a rare knack for finding these people, and an even rarer one for starting them talking... Do not underestimate her curiosity, or the sharpness of her eyes.’ Wall Street Journal

‘Spectacular... Orlean strikes a perfect balance between hilarious and informative.’ Star Tribune

‘In appealing prose, Orlean displays her fascination and love for animals... Her appreciation of the friendship, strangeness, colors, textures and just plain mystery of animals is infectious and nicely documented.’ The Columbus Dispatch

‘A broad meditation on how the connections we make, or fail to make, with animals mark us profoundly along our human journey... Orlean’s tone is conversational and self-questioning.’ USA Today

‘Entertaining and informative... Orlean’s prose dazzles... Animal lovers will find much to savor.’ Publishers Weekly

‘Delightful... Another winner featuring the author’s trademark blend of meticulous research and scintillating writing.’ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘Vibrant... A revelry for readers wild for animals... Orlean’s deep pleasure in learning startling facts, her often wry tales about her personal life, her omnivorous attention to detail, and her juggler’s skill with words yield vivid, provocative, amusing, and wondrous stories.’ Booklist

‘Fabulously fun... Orlean is such a virtuoso of unexpected joys and delights that she can make even the story of a lost dog read like a thriller... Orlean’s high-octane enthusiasm never wanes... Orlean’s readers will find themselves completely diverted by On Animals’ irresistible menagerie.’ BookPage (starred review)

‘Orlean’s curiosity is boundless, as she explores the fascinating diversity and beauty, as well as the endearing peculiarities of a range of creatures.’ The Saturday Age

ALSO BY SUSAN ORLEAN

The Library Book

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a WomanWho’s Been Everywhere

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup:My Encounters with Extraordinary People

Lazy Little Loafers

Saturday Night

This edition published by arrangement with Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Susan Orlean, 2021

These pieces originally appeared in slightly modified form in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and as an Amazon Original. For more detail see page 239.

The moral right of Susan Orlean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Interior design by Carly Loman

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-548-9E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-547-2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For John and Austin,and for Ivy and Buck and Leo and Cooper and Molly andDuffy and Laura and Beauty and Helen and Tweedand Mabel and Sparky and . . .

Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.

—John Berger, Why Look at Animals?

CONTENTS

Introduction: Animalish

The It Bird

Show Dog

The Lady and the Tigers

Riding High

Little Wing

Animal Action

Where’s Willy?

Carbonaro and Primavera

Lifelike

Lion Whisperer

The Rabbit Outbreak

The Perfect Beast

Lost Dog

Where Donkeys Deliver

Farmville

Acknowledgments

Essay Credits

Illustration Credits

INTRODUCTION

Animalish

Even before the cats, before the dogs, before the chickens, before the turkeys, before the ducks and the guinea fowl and the betta fish and the Black Angus cattle, I was always a little animalish. I don’t just mean as a child, since all children love animals and come by being animalish quite naturally. I don’t just mean as a young girl—that golden moment when I, like millions of young girls throughout human history, fell into an adolescent swoon over horses and, to a lesser degree, puppies. I mean that somehow or other, in whatever kind of life I happened to be leading, animals have always been my style. They have been a part of my life even when I didn’t have any animals, and when I did have them, they always seemed to elbow their way onto center stage.

Has it been a simple matter of mathematics? That is, have there been more creatures in my orbit than in other people’s? Or do I merely notice them more and draw them a little closer than someone else might? There has certainly been an element of serendipity. I seem to have a higher-than-average tendency to find animals in my path. In 1986, when I was relocating to Manhattan, I resigned myself to what I assumed would be a life with very little animal adjacency except for the occasional dog or two. The day I moved into my new apartment, I unpacked a few boxes and then decided to go outside for some air. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, I collided with a man who was walking a pet rabbit on a silver leash. I spun to a stop, flabbergasted. The man didn’t register my surprise; he was too busy trying to manage the rabbit, which was huge, coffee-colored, and ornery. Each time the man took a step, the rabbit braced against the leash, stretching it taut, and only then, with a cold look in its eye, would it give a flabby, half-hearted hop.

“Please, Rover, please,” the rabbit’s owner called out, in an aching, exasperated voice. “Now, that’s a good Rover. Come on, boy! Hop!”

I grew up wanting animals desperately. When I was young—four or five, or thereabouts—we had a cat, but she lived outside and came by the house only to collect her meals, a visit so brisk and purposeful that it made her seem less like our pet and more like a representative of some off-site cat charity who was dropping by to pick up contributions. Wanting a dog started early for me, but my mother was afraid of dogs, and she threatened to stand on a chair squealing and flapping her skirt if we ever brought one home. Consequently, we remained dogless, and I suffered. At regular intervals, I offered—or, more precisely, begged—to walk the neighbors’ dogs, but we lived in the suburbs, and most dogs had roomy yards and weren’t in need of walking. On Sundays, I read the pet section in the classifieds as if it were a love letter, circling ads and showing them to my parents. My father would say, “Ask your mother.” My mother would shudder and say, “What would I do with a dog?”

At last, though, my brother and sister and I wore her down. We devised a marketing strategy. We had come across an ad for Black & White Scotch that featured a pair of adorable dogs—an ink-black Scotty, hand- some and sharp-looking, and a West Highland white terrier with a merry face and the cleanest, brightest fur in the world. Since my mother’s dread of dogs included fear that a dog would spread a haze of permanent dirtiness throughout our house, we thought the dazzle of the Westie’s whiteness might do the trick. And it did. We ended up with a Westie puppy in a matter of days.

I loved our Westie, but to be honest, I had set my heart on a German shepherd, since I’d imprinted early on The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, and like most of the world I wanted a dog just like the star of the show. But I was thrilled to have a dog of any sort. Around that same time, I also got a mouse as a gift from a classmate, a boy with a permanently runny nose and pockets overflowing with twigs and rocks and leaves. How I convinced my mother to allow me to keep the gift mouse, I’ll never know. The little creature was a beautiful butterscotch color, with soft white feet and ruby-red eyes. I named her Sparky and pretended that she was some kind of championship show mouse, and I made a bunch of fake ribbons and trophies for her and I told people she had won them at mouse shows.

You might think that with my champion mouse and my clean white Westie, I would have been satisfied, but I still felt I had animal work to do; I didn’t have a pony yet, for instance. I began campaigning for one, unsuccessfully. In the meantime, one afternoon, I took Sparky over to my classmate’s house so she could have a playdate with his mouse. The next thing I knew, Sparky built a nest in her cage and populated it with five baby mice, which were small enough to waltz right out of the cage without even brushing the bars. When my mother saw one of Sparky’s babies skittering across the kitchen floor and disappearing under the dishwasher, she really did jump on a chair squealing and flapping her skirt. I had crossed the line. There would be no more animals added to my collection while I was still living at home.

As soon as I got to college, I decided I wanted a boyfriend and a dog. I knew having a dog while in college was crazy. I had a wild schedule and a rented apartment, and no idea of where I would be after I graduated— life conditions that don’t bode well for pet ownership. But now that I was away from home and away from our family dog, I missed having a pet. Plus, it seemed like all of my friends in Ann Arbor had dogs. As for the kind of dog I wanted, my tastes had changed. Rather than a German shepherd, I wanted an Irish setter. I didn’t know any Irish setters personally, but I used to moon over another liquor ad—I think it was for Irish whiskey—featuring a man and woman in Kelly-green trench coats, walking a pair of leggy red-haired dogs. I was a not-so-leggy red-haired person, and the dogs, with their elegant, anxious faces and hair that matched mine, seemed like the perfect companions for me.

I started perusing the classifieds again. Sometimes there were Irish setter puppies for sale, but they cost too much for me to even consider. Then, one September day, I put on a pair of jeans I hadn’t worn since I’d come back from Europe, where I’d gone on a summer school program. The pocket felt stiff. I reached in and pulled out a wad of paper and unfolded it. The wad was $300 worth of traveler’s checks that I’d forgotten I had. By all rights I should have spent the money on books and rent and tuition, but finding it like that, by accident, made it feel like a windfall—as if an unseen and benevolent force had just tossed three hundred gold coins into my upturned palm. I took it as a sign and called one of the Irish setter breeders in the newspaper and bought a four-monthold puppy that I named Molly.

My parents were dismayed. “What are you going to do with a dog?” my mother wailed. I told her I knew the responsibilities of owning a dog, and then pointed out that she should at least appreciate the fact that I had gotten a dog rather than a pig. I wasn’t kidding. Someone had recently shown up on campus with a tiny Vietnamese potbellied pig, and I had seen it running around, wearing the same kind of bandanna all the campus dogs wore around their necks. The day I brought Molly home, I had noticed this little pig rooting around the bushes near the undergraduate library, its yellow bandanna splattered with mud. For a fleeting moment, I thought to myself, Wow, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to have a pig? No, I thought in the next moment, don’t even think about it. Unfortunately, positioning my dog acquisition as mature compared to the pig option did not reassure my mother. After a long silence she just sighed and said something along the lines of “Well, for heaven’s sake, Susie. You and your animals.”

Now and again, I have been asked—and have asked myself—the obvious question: Why animals? There’s no simple answer. I’m curious about animals. They amuse me. They keep me company. They’re nice to look at. Some of them provide me with breakfast food. I think I have the same response to animals that I would if Martians landed on Earth: I would like to get to know them and befriend them, all the while knowing we were not quite of the same ilk. They seem to have something in common with us, and yet they’re alien, unknowable, familiar but mysterious.

Molly was twelve when I moved to Manhattan. I worried that the transition would be hard for her, since she had never lived in an apartment or ridden an elevator. I also worried that it would be hard to find an apartment that allowed dogs. Finding dog-friendly rentals had been the bane of my years since I had left Ann Arbor, where, like all university towns, centuries of slovenly, apartment-trashing students made dogs seem like responsible renters, and no landlord seemed to mind them very much. After graduating, I had moved out west, where the deer and the antelope play, and I’d expected dogs to be as ubiquitous and welcome as they had been in Ann Arbor. To my surprise, most landlords turned me away. I was also looking for work as a paralegal, which was the only thing I thought my BA in English qualified me to do, and it was around that time that I learned the hard fact that most employers, especially law firms, did not encourage workers to bring their pets to the office. I was getting an education at last; I was animalish, but the rest of the world might not be.

I assumed Manhattan would be even worse when it came to finding a place to live that allowed dogs. Back then, I was married to a man who had just finished law school, and we moved to New York so he could join a Midtown firm. We decided we would look for apartments without mentioning that we had a dog. Instead, we would try to charm the landlord, who would be so impressed by us that he would take the eleventh-hour mention of our quiet, elderly dog in stride.

We found a great two-bedroom on the Upper West Side, and sat down with the landlord to introduce ourselves and make our pitch. He was a blustery, red-faced Irishman whose thick glasses made his eyes look like blue pinpoints. We told him how much we loved the apartment. He seemed to approve of us, and after a few moments he pulled a pen and a blank rental agreement out of a drawer.

“Let’s see, now,” he said, turning to my husband. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a lawyer,” he said, a little proudly. In our plan, we would emphasize this fact. Being a lawyer sounded so stable, so tenant-worthy, that we imagined if someone with those impeccable credentials just happened to own a dog, well, that would be a trifling thing.

The landlord put down the pen and slid the rental agreement back in the drawer, slamming it shut. He crossed his arms and leaned back. “Sorry,” he said. “No lawyers. I don’t rent to lawyers.”

I felt faint. “But we have a dog!” I blurted out, nonsensically. “A twelve-year-old dog!”

“That’s nice,” the landlord said. “Dogs are fine. It’s just lawyers that aren’t okay.”

After a frantic search, we finally managed to find an apartment that allowed both dogs and lawyers, and we settled in. I had come to Manhattan thinking it would be lonely for Molly. But almost everyone in our building had a dog—at least one dog, that is. Some had more than one. A woman who lived in a studio apartment on the ground floor had four huge gray Weimaraners. Their combined body mass must have taken up at least three-quarters of her apartment. My upstairs neighbor had a Great Dane, which he assured me was a perfect apartment dog because it liked to laze around most of the day. The cats in Manhattan were hard to count because they lived invisible lives, but I saw enough empty Friskies cans in the building’s recycling bins to know there had to be dozens living there. And then the dog parks—so many of them, and so full, so much of the time! Our apartment was wonderfully close to the Met, but I was more taken with the fact that it was close to the Central Park Zoo. Before moving to Manhattan, I had pictured the city empty of all creatures save for the churning mass of humans. I do not know where I got this idea. The irony was that I have probably never been around so many animals in my life.

My animal encounters in New York were many and, in some instances, mysterious. One day, out of the blue, a canary showed up in my apartment (I still don’t know how or why). I found a cheap parking lot where I could store my car and discovered, after the fact, that it was right next door to a riding academy. Of all the millions of parking lots in New York City! It was just the sort of thing that made me feel like I was destined to be around animals, or they around me, whether by design or by accident. I loved that each time I went to get my car, I breathed in great whiffs of horse and hay. This was not what I thought living in Manhattan would smell like. Once in a while, a riderless horse got loose from its stall and came bursting out of the barn and into my parking lot, weaving in and around the parked cars, wild-eyed and agitated. The parking lot attendant, a tiny, wizened man, chased the horses back to the stable with a big broom. Every few weeks, a blacksmith showed up to work on the academy horses. He parked his van on the sidewalk and set up his forge and tools and proceeded to shoe horses all day as cabs and cars rumbled by. The blacksmith had evidently gotten tired of being asked questions by the people walking past—there are so many questions that come to mind when you happen upon a person shoeing horses on a Manhattan sidewalk, after all—so he wrote out a big list of answers to the usual questions (“1. no. it does not hurt them. 2. once every six weeks. 3. iron nails.”) and hung it on his truck. If anyone dared to speak to him, he gestured toward the sign and refused to glance up.

My dear dog Molly died during my first year in the city. I was so broken up by it that I thought I might never get another dog. It was peculiar to suddenly be in the city without one, because I had gotten so used to spending a few hours every day in the park with her, and felt she was my passport into the distinct and somewhat private nation of Manhattan dog owners, who spoke their own language and had rituals to which she had given me access. Now, dogless, I felt like I was in exile, hurrying past the big dog runs in Riverside Park where we had spent so much time.

I got divorced around then, too, so I was very single, alone for the first time in almost twenty years. Sometimes my mind wandered to dark, dark questions. What if I fell in love with someone but he hated dogs? What if he had no interest in someday owning a goat or a donkey? What if he liked dogs, but only poufy little rag dolls? What if he was—god forbid—allergic? No, I’d scold myself, don’t even think like that.

But I met someone I really liked who mentioned, on our first date, that he had lost custody of his dog in his divorce and was miserable about it. I took this as a good sign. Also, not only did he know what Scottish Highland cattle were, but he said he hoped someday to have one, not because he was a rancher (he was actually in finance) but because he thought they were beautiful. Could I really be this lucky? We sailed along in the early stages of our relationship. Then our first Valentine’s Day loomed. I figured on flowers. He told me he had gotten us tickets to see The Lion King on Broadway. Sweet, I thought. The tickets, John explained, were for a later date. On Valentine’s Day itself, he said he’d just like to come visit me. Then he added that he had invited his best friend, Rick Lyon, to come over, too.

I found this odd, but with new boyfriends you just never know. I put on a cute skirt and dangly earrings and tidied my apartment. When John arrived, he looked me up and down and suggested that I change into something more casual. I was already a little peeved about Rick Lyon joining us—where was the romance in that, I wondered. Being told to dress down rubbed me all wrong. I stomped into my bedroom and came out in black pants and a turtleneck. “Nice, but I’d go even more casual,” John said, after appraising me. I was furious. I retreated to my bedroom and changed into a dirty sweatshirt and jeans. When I came back into the living room, John was rolling up my rugs.

“What are you doing?” I asked sourly.

“I forgot to mention that Rick is bringing his daughter,” John said, rolling another rug. “I’m just worried about your rugs. You know how babies are—and she’s a real animal.”

Did I mention that I was peeved? I was now seething. The only thing that kept me calm was telling myself that this was likely to be our last Valentine’s Day together. Plus, I made it clear that I expected John to put the rugs back after our guests left.

At last, my doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” John said, pointing me to a chair. “Just, uh, wait.”

I stared at the ceiling. I heard the door open and close. When I looked back a moment later, a lion was sitting in my foyer. Not Rick Lyon. A lion, an African lion, tawny and panting, with soft, round ears and paws as big as baseball mitts, stretched out on my rugless floor. The lion’s owner and three off-duty police officers stood behind the lion, holding his leash. The lion glanced around the apartment and then fixed his golden eyes on me. John took a video of me at this moment, and the look on my face is a lot like what you see on people in those Publishers Clearing House ads who have just been told they’ve won $20 million. I found out later that John had met the lion’s owner in a chance encounter. After John told him how much I loved animals, the man offered to bring the lion for a visit. He watched me gasping and sputtering with the kind of amused satisfaction you might feel if you had the ability to shock and delight someone that way.

The lion ate two raw chickens that we served to him in a salad bowl and then he allowed me to stroke his back, which radiated a coiled, heated energy I’d never felt before or since.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” John said.

I think my relationship with John was sealed more by our acquiring a puppy together than by our marriage ceremony, which took place the following year. Our new dog, like Molly, had red fur, but he was a Welsh springer spaniel, with a spray of freckles on his nose and white patches highlighting his deep chestnut fur. Cooper was just as happy in the city as Molly had been, but then he struck the jackpot, because John and I decided to move to the country. The move was not exactly a whim. Living in a rural place with lots of animals had always been something I wanted to try, and before marrying John, I made sure he felt the same way. John had sold his company and was working on a book, which he was able to do from anywhere, and then our son was born, and the next move seemed obvious.

Imagine a person who loves pastries, and has always had only limited access to pastries, suddenly moving to Paris. That is what moving to the country felt like to me. There were animals everywhere. Wild, domestic, half-wild; with fur, with feathers, with fins; precious or affordable, or, quite often, free. Everyone had dogs, and everyone had cats—a few in the house and another uncounted population in the barn. Most of my neighbors had horses. Sheep abounded. My son’s preschool was in the middle of a goat pasture. The goats belonged to the preschool teacher’s father. Sometimes, in the middle of teaching the kids how to count, the teacher would notice that one of the goats had climbed the fence and was nibbling on the playground, so she had to run outside and shoo the goat back into the pasture and then run back inside to continue the lesson.

Now, with enough land for lots of animals, where would I begin? It was almost overwhelming to be in the company of so many creatures. It made me feel like I needed a niche. I had always assumed that I’d get a horse the minute I had room for one, but I was intimidated by the amount of work I knew a horse would be. I decided I should start smaller. Goats seemed like a good size, and they seemed easier to manage than horses. Besides, there were so many goats to choose among. Every day, when I dropped my son off at school, I lingered for a minute debating the goat question, because the teacher’s father always had some goats for sale. I had a hatchback. Right after dropping Austin off, I could buy the goat, put it in the back of the car, stop at the feed store on the way home—wait, no. Impossible. I needed fencing, and I needed to buy Goatkeeping for Dummies first. Feeling confused, I headed home, goatless.

Some years ago, when I was traveling in Nova Scotia, I spent the night at an extraordinary bed-and-breakfast. It wasn’t just the gorgeous Victorian farmhouse, the matelassé bedspreads, or the freshly churned butter at breakfast. It was the perfectly curated collection of animals on the property. There were ten or twelve different species, all of them exceptional. Instead of merely having sheep, the owners had exotic black sheep with horns as curly as Slinkys. They didn’t have chickens; they had Javan peacocks and Chinese ringneck pheasants. The horses were Normandy Cobs and Walkaloosas. The place was enchanted, and all the animals seemed to have been lifted out of a fairy tale.

I often thought about that Nova Scotia farm and began to wonder whether my paralysis in the face of so much animal abundance was the result of a conceptual failure. In other words, I wondered if I needed to have a theme. It seemed so random to have a goat, a duck, and perhaps a barn cat. Where was my organizing principle? The Nova Scotia farmers had been riffing on exoticness. I didn’t dare go that route, since I wasn’t experienced enough to take on livestock I could barely identify.

I picked up my red-haired son at school one day and drove home to be greeted by my red-haired dog. How had I missed the fact that I already had a theme? The farm of color-coordinated creatures! It made no sense at all, except in my fugue state it seemed logical to me. I told my husband that evening. He approved in part because he was already researching Scottish Highland cattle, which are usually russet red.

I was still shy about getting horses, but around this time I became inflamed with a desire to have chickens. As much as I had a general feeling of affection for all animals, I had never really been a bird person, so this poultry urge felt like it had come out of the blue. As it turned out, it came out of the blue to me at approximately the same moment it was coming out of the blue to thousands of people around the country. The desire for homesteading—even within city limits—had seized the nation. Chickens were the ideal starter farm animals, a perfect, easy accompaniment to other homesteading activities like making one’s own yogurt and knitting.

Chickens are not just an ideal starter animal: They are also something of a gateway animal, leading very quickly to more chickens and often to ducks and turkeys and guinea fowl. Once you have invested in a coop and some fencing, it’s hard not to slide into thinking you have plenty of room for a few more of something. Once I got chickens, I found myself acquiring at a healthy clip. One day, I went to CVS to buy shampoo and came home with four guinea fowl thanks to a “For Sale” sign I passed as I was driving home.

The guinea fowl were not red (they were black-and-white). This was a critical deviation from my Red Animals plan, but by the time I got them I had realized there was something a little insane about that plan anyway. Or maybe I had just gotten so comfortable with my new life among the animals that I no longer felt the need to have a theme. Our other animals came into the picture by a variety of means. The turkeys were a gift from a friend. (Once people know you like animals, you do get those kinds of gifts.) We got cats—some on purpose, to rout the mice in the basement, and some by accident, when they showed up on our doorstep and refused to leave. I ended up with ducks because my neighbor asked me to babysit his flock over the winter and then seemed to forget I had them. The donkey—a species I have always loved and find irresistible—is for the moment just a donkey IOU, given to me by John as a birthday gift. I used to always hope I’d get jewelry on my birthday. I have changed. John got his cattle—ten Black Angus for now, but he still daydreams about Scottish Highlanders.

We don’t have as many animals as some of the people I know up here. A farm nearby, for instance, has two thousand goats. But for nonfarmers, we have a pretty full house. Much of the time it bears a resemblance to a three-ring circus.

Recently, I got two new chickens. I had been visiting a friend and she gave them to me as a sort of luncheon favor on my way out the door. Chickens don’t make friends easily, so I kept the two new birds separate from the rest of my flock, divided by a wire fence. There was some initial squawking and pecking through the divider and then they started to ignore each other. After a week of this peaceful coexistence, I assumed they were ready to live together. I opened the divider between the pens. Within approximately one second, the old chickens, led by my hen Mabel, set upon the new ones in a rage, and they would have killed them if I hadn’t intervened. Two of my cats had sat outside the pen and watched the chicken fight with barely concealed glee. Then they noticed that a stray cat that had recently been hanging out in our yard had wandered over to watch the chicken fight, too. The three cats, disagreeing about which of them was entitled to see this fabulous dust-up in the chicken coop, froze in rigid fury and began yowling at each other as if they were plugged into amplifiers. This went on for an eternity. Meanwhile, Prince Charles and Camilla, two of my guinea fowl, showed up. I was surprised to see them, because I had kicked them out of the chicken coop earlier in the week when they were bullying the chickens. They honked and flapped in an irritated way, picking up right where they left off. Our dog came running out to see what the commotion was and became hysterical with excitement at the sight of the fighting chickens and the swaggering guinea fowl. The dog lunged for Prince Charles, who flew over the fence and into the chicken coop, where he immediately started pecking Mabel. Camilla, who is rather meek, stood by and then began pecking a spider to death for her lunch. By then, Gary, the more belligerent of my cats, grew tired of yowling at the stray cat and wandered into the bushes for a moment, killed a rabbit, and then gave herself a bath. In the middle of this pastoral tableau, John arrived with the day’s mail, which included a package of thirty thousand baby predator wasps that will be released in the cow pasture, where they are supposed to eat the flies that have been pestering the cattle. I suddenly felt I needed a break from the peacefulness of my animalish life, so I went inside to play Scrabble online.

The art critic and philosopher John Berger once said that we like to look at animals because they remind us of the past and particularly of the agrarian life we used to lead that included the regular presence of animals. I agree, but I also think we look at animals because they’re funny and companionable and interesting. Some of my animals have jobs. My chickens lay eggs. My dog scares the FedEx man. The cats, by their arrogant disregard of duty, serve to remind me that I have to schedule Terminix to come and chase the mice out of the basement. All of these creatures serve a purpose, even if that purpose is to have no real purpose other than to give a warm, wonderful, unpredictable texture to my life every day. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve wanted to write about animals as long as I’ve wanted to have animals. The first book I ever produced was a manuscript written in pencil on a scratch pad, bound with staples, called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon. It was the story of a myopic pigeon who has relationship troubles on account of not being able to recognize his friends. Once he is properly diagnosed and fitted with glasses, he repairs his friendships and feels better about himself. I wrote the book when I was five years old—I’m not sure I was quite that young, but that’s the family legend, anyway. After Herbert, I wrote a million horse stories, mostly as an attempt to conjure a horse into my life. When I began writing professionally, I always had a soft spot for stories about animals. These always turned out to be stories about people, as seen through their relationships with animals, as much as they were about animals. Writing the animal part of these stories was challenging. People can be figured out, but animals are enigmatic, so the best we can do is try to understand them through the lens of people living with them or using them or raising them or wanting them.

The closest I ever came to writing about an animal exclusively, removed from the context of the people around it, was a profile I did of a show dog named Biff. I decided to write the story because I wondered what life was like for the canine equivalent of a supermodel. As much as I was interested in Biff’s entourage—his owners, his handler, his groomer—I wanted to try to get to know him, not as a reflection of the people around him but as an individual living being. To do this, I felt I needed time alone with him. This request is often a point of friction when you’re writing a story about a celebrity. The writer wants one-on-one time, but the celebrity’s posse is wary, wanting to provide a mediating buffer to protect the celebrity from too-close scrutiny. In this case, though, I insisted. I wanted to get to know Biff independently, I explained to his owners, to get a sense of who he was when he was on his own. Finally, grudgingly, they agreed. They suggested I hang out with him while he was at his handler’s house. The day of the meeting arrived, and I drove out to Long Island, where his handler lived. She led me out to her garage, where she had a special dog treadmill called a Jog-Master. She clipped Biff into place on the machine, turned it on, gave me a skeptical parting look, and said, with an arch tone, “I’ll leave you two alone.” I settled into a chair and pulled out my notebook. Biff trotted along on the Jog-Master, panting lightly and mostly ignoring me. A few minutes passed. I closed my notebook and put it back in my bag, after making one note in it: Dogs don’t talk.

I’ve written about domesticated animals and wild animals, and while I enjoy writing about both, I’ve found myself more intrigued by domesticated animals—and perhaps most interested in animals that straddle these worlds. My most recently published story in this book is about rabbits, a species to which I had never given much thought, and what I found most fascinating was the fact that rabbits fit in just about every animal category. They’re wild as well as domesticated; they’re pets as well as meat; they’re beloved as well as being considered pests. One of the oldest stories in this collection is about Keiko, a wild orca who was captured as a baby and sold to a Mexican aquarium. Some years later, he was tapped to play a whale in the movie Free Willy, which is about a whale living in an aquarium who is set free by a boy who befriends him. After appearing in Free Willy, Keiko was returned to his aquarium, but audiences rose up in protest, demanding that he should be freed, just like the whale in the movie. The trouble is, Keiko had been in captivity for so long that he had neither the skills nor the desire to live on his own, and the machinations to try to convince him to return to the wild were extraordinary.