Animal People Meghan Ann Brown Iowa State University
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Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2015 Animal people Meghan Ann Brown Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Environmental Sciences Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Zoology Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Meghan Ann, "Animal people" (2015). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 14646. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/14646 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Animal people by Meghan Ann Brown A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing and Environment Program of Study Committee Debra Marquart, Major Professor Barbara Haas Matthew Sivils Michael Dahlstrom Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2015 Copyright © Meghan Ann Brown, 2015. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A LION: A FOREWORD iii CHAPTER ONE. THE FURSUIT OF HAPPINESS 1 CHAPTER TWO. ANIMAL LOVER 19 CHAPTER THREE. CAPTIVE WILD 37 CHAPTER FOUR. OVERKILL 53 CHAPTER FIVE. THE RESURRECTION TRADE 72 CHAPTER SIX. UNBRIDLED AMBITION 89 CHAPTER SEVEN. VICIOUS CIRCLE 110 CHAPTER EIGHT. THE SECRET LIFE OF BONES 134 ENDNOTES (By Chapter) CHAPTER ONE 148 CHAPTER TWO 151 CHAPTER THREE 157 CHAPTER FOUR 160 CHAPTER FIVE 163 CHAPTER SIX 165 CHAPTER SEVEN 171 CHAPTER EIGHT 183 iii THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A LION: A FOREWORD Imagine you’re at the zoo, standing in front of an enclosure that contains a magnificent lion. You gaze into his lantern-yellow eyes and he stares back at you. What do you see? If you’re like most people, your answer may be simply, a lion. You may be humbled in the presence of a powerful predator, despite the supermax security that imprisons him. You might be reminded of famous lions: Born Free, Disney’s The Lion King, Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. The sight of a lion might call to mind iconography assigned to lions: the symbolism of lions in heraldry, the attributes of bravery, strength, kingliness, and power. The people you’ll meet in the following chapters see something else. Something startling, specific, and strange. The furry fan sees a satisfying alter ego: not just a secret identity, but a super identity. Just as earlier humans adopted animal totems they hoped to emulate, contemporary furry fans take on the identities of anthropomorphic animal characters, hoping to represent or imbue themselves with positive attributes: physical prowess, beauty, charisma. Lions are brave, lordly, powerful, astonishing, and charismatic. Rough tawny fur is a satisfying alternative to vulnerable skin. When the shy systems analyst puts on his lion costume, the world is his savannah, and he is king. A zoophile looks at a lion, with his rippling muscles and Fabio mane, and thinks that’s the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen. She can’t remember a time when it wasn’t this way. She’s never been into boys…or girls, for that matter. She doesn’t read romance novels or watch pornography. She trawls YouTube for videos of lions mating. She imagines herself beneath the male, his teeth on the nape of her neck. One afternoon, she iv discovers to her delight that there are companies selling realistic dildos in the shape of animal penises, including a model called “Leo’s Lance.” When a taxidermist looks at a lion, she sees what’s under the fur. With a knowledge of anatomy that rivals any surgeon, she is part mortician, part sculptor, and part entrepreneur: she knows how to skin a lion, how to preserve and recreate all of his intimate details: fierce arcs of whiskers, cavernous nostrils, delicate eyelids. The lion reminds her of her obsession: to summon the uncanny illusion of life out of foam and fur, plastic and clay. She longs to mount the lion in an elaborate pose, paused mid-stalk, mid-leap, or mid-sprawl, and keep him that way—forever. The exotic animal keeper believes a lion’s nature will submit to his nurture. Where others see an apex predator, he sees an enormous, phenomenal house cat. He can buy a bottle-fed lion cub from any number of exotic animal brokers across the nation, and once the animal gets big enough to be dangerous, he might resort to keeping his lion in a horse trailer or boarded-up barn with his neighbors none the wiser. His desire to own a lion—or a wolf, or a cougar, or a python—reflects his need to belong to something wild, and have it belong to him. He wants to steep himself in the lion’s savage beauty, bury his face in his harsh mane, and hear his thundery purr. A trophy hunter sees a goal. She stares at him with longing. She envisions how much more complete her life will be, once the lion is dead at her feet, especially if he is very large and magnificent. He might even earn her name a place in a record book. She will pay thousands of dollars for the chance to shoot him. But after she fires her rifle, she feels a strange sad hollowness seeping back into her ribcage. When she approaches his still-warm body, she kneels beside him with her face in her hands. v Furry fans and trophy hunters, horse show competitors and dogfighters, exotic pet owners and taxidermists…they all have one thing in common: each belong to a subculture obsessed with animals. These animal people have taken their relationships with animals to the extreme. Animal People is an ethnography of animal-obsessed subcultures: their hidden worlds, their desires, their culture, activities, and gatherings. These essays examine the impacts of these subcultures on individual people and animals as well as the human and animal worlds, exploring how animals function as vehicles for human desires and why humans are drawn to extremes in our relationships with them. We can recognize subcultures by tightly-focused common interests, unique styles of dress, use of distinct language, and participation in special communities, conventions, or gatherings. The shared interest held by members of a subculture might be fairly common, but people in subcultures participate in those interests to a greater extent than most others. For example, millions of people enjoy Star Trek, but relatively few of them are “Trekkies” who attend Star Trek conventions dressed as their favorite character. After discovering several fascinating animal subcultures—zoophiles, taxidermists, furry fans, and pit bull advocates—my curiosity about why people respond to animals the way they do brought me to a field of study known as anthrozoology—also known as human- animal studies—the study of human relationships with animals. As a formally recognized discipline, anthrozoology is a relative newcomer, but scholars have been studying the relationships between humans and nonhumans for hundreds of years. The term suggests a neat hybrid of anthropology and zoology, but human-animal studies are remarkably interdisciplinary, drawing from and branching into sciences, arts, humanities, religion, philosophy, ethics, and politics. Among other things, vi anthrozoologists study the human-animal bond, the history of domestication, social constructions and representations of animals, the ethics of human exploitation of animals, and the health benefits and detriments associated with keeping animals. Why do some people want to kill a lion and others want to be a lion? Why do some people want a pet lion and others want to have sex with a lion? What makes people respond to the same animal in such vastly different ways? Sociologists have largely overlooked animal-related subcultures, but there’s a lot to be to learned from knowing them. The nine subcultures described in these chapters represent the enormous variety, breadth, and depth of human relationships to animals. They have taken their relationships with animals to the edge. 1 CHAPTER ONE. THE FURSUIT OF HAPPINESS A clot of cars forms on Penn Avenue just outside the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburgh, but unlike any traffic jam I've ever seen, this one has a weird air of gaiety. The July sun jangles in a brilliant blue sky and glitters off of skyscraper windows. Beneath the sloping white wings of the convention center's twin roofs, cars slow down and faces crane to look. The green walk sign flashes on at the corner of Penn and 11th Street, and a tiger— actually, a man in a tiger costume—saunters over the crosswalk to the rhythm of honks and cheers. On his tail marches a small menagerie: a woman wearing a pair of feathered wings, two teen girls in cat ears and tails, a man whose jaunty plush fox tail bounces behind him. Wolves, tigers, hawks, dragons, and deer surround the hotel attached to the David L. Lawrence, moving in and out of its revolving doors in packs, flocks, and herds. At Anthrocon, the world's largest convention for “furry fans,” thousands of people from around the world gather to celebrate and act out their animal alter egos.1 Welcome to the jungle: furry fans pack the lobby of the Westin Convention Center Hotel, standing in small talkative groups, lounging, waiting, coming and going. Most of them wear some form of creaturely accoutrements: hats and headbands with ears, tails safety- pinned to seats of pants, dog collars, gloves with claws and paw pads, wings.