Mr. Hornaday's War by Stefan Bechtel

Author:Stefan Bechtel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-02-01T01:57:19+00:00

CHAPTER 13

“A Thief in the Night”

In March 1887, Hornaday had returned from his heartbreaking bison trip to the Montana Territory so recently that his hunting boots, tucked in a back hall of his house in Washington, were still slathered with Montana mud. The mud would wash off. But the sorrow and sense of desolation evoked by what he had seen in the West was seared into his soul.

He had seen how astoundingly fast it could happen: a noble beast like the American bison decimated from herds of 10 or 15 million, down to less than 1,000, in twenty years. Twenty years! The worst instincts of humanity, put to work in the most efficient way possible, could achieve dark wonders in a virtual instant. Without armies of wildlife protectors, without a network of laws and the manpower to enforce them, and without some safe reserve, some last stand against annihilation like a zoological park—without that, he feared, all was lost.

It was out of this abject despair that the idea first came to him—suddenly, boldly, and fully formed, like “a thief in the night,”1 he would later write. There should be—there must be—a national zoological park in the nation’s capital, a place where breeding pairs of bison and other vanishing species could make a final stand against extinction and where ordinary people could come face to face with the whole marvelous phantasmagoria of nonhuman life. No one really knew if captive breeding of endangered species had any reasonable chance of success, but the war for wildlife was going so badly, in so many places, Hornaday felt that he absolutely must try. And now.

It seems a curiosity that, in his voluminous writings, Hornaday never dwelled on this in any great detail, but the zoo epiphany was evidence of a profound inner transformation. In seizing upon this last hope for the preservation of the wild, one could argue that Hornaday had reached the third and final stage of the sorrowful story of humanity’s contact with wilderness. In the first stage, indigenous peoples and early explorers existed in a state of perpetual immersion in the wild, from which they drew material and spiritual sustenance without causing it lasting harm. In the second stage, civilization began to control, exploit, and “conquer” the wilderness, through exploration and settlement, military and scientific conquest, and ultimately in a fantastic bloodbath of excess, the decimation of species, and the collapse of indigenous cultures. In the final stage, civilizations awoke to a sense of overwhelming cultural remorse, the birth of conservation, and the impulse to save wildlife by whatever means before it was too late.2

Hornaday was a man whose sprawling life, with its gnawing contradictions and transformations, straddled all three of these epochs of human contact with wilderness. As a young man, he was an explorer and adventurer into the nearly Edenic wildness of Borneo, Malaya, and the Orinoco, witnessing firsthand the last days of the first stage. As a taxidermist and specimen collector for Ward’s, he eagerly participated in the second stage, including its bloody excesses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.