But that didn’t keep the show from being canceled – or critics from speaking out. Even before the third horse death, PETA charged that “two dead horses in a handful of episodes exemplify the dark side of using animals in television, movies, and ads.” Like all filming in the U.S., “Luck” was shot under supervision of the American Humane Association’s Film & TV Unit, the people who certify that “No animal was harmed in the making” of a film or TV show. (That’s a statement about animal welfare, not animal rights. If you don’t think animals should be filmed for entertainment at all, you’re not going to like AHA. Founded in 1877, it also promotes the welfare of children.)

Moreover, this latest incident shows just how much the treatment of animals has changed in Hollywood since the motion picture industry began.

The early days were rough. Take Thomas Edison’s elephant electrocution as a starting point. Topsy, like the producers of “Luck,” was charged with causing three deaths. The third was a cruel trainer who tried to feed her a lighted cigarette. Naturally, she killed him. Edison electrocuted Topsy with alternating current to show how dangerous it was, part of his feud with Nicola Tesla, and released “Electrocuting an Elephant” (1903). This seems unfair and crass to most people today, but the idea was to find the most merciful way to kill Topsy.

Beginning in the 1920s the motion-picture industry boomed, developing new genres as it went. In those days you could do almost anything to an animal (or an actor, for that matter). As many as 100 horses died in the making of the 1926 version of “Ben Hur.” Early Hollywood was an anarchic world, with upstart production companies launching grandiose projects on every side. Filmmakers did whatever struck them as a great idea.

With the advent of sound in 1927 profits took off. The studio system arose, concentrating filmmaking in a handful of dictatorially efficient corporations employing thousands and turning out movies at a tremendous rate. Animal actors were part of the process. Dramas, comedies, adventure stories, musicals, biographies – all would use animals, but the genre that used the most was the western.

The popularity of westerns was particularly hard on horses. Westerns were a staple in ’20s and ’30s Hollywood, and then boomed in the 1940s. In the early days, people were more familiar with horses, more attuned to the dangers of a runaway team, or the dangers of a horse and rider falling. Directors showed lots of falls. They used pitfalls, or tripwires to make horses fall, and there were also some stunt horses, who would fall at a signal. Trained horses jumped through windows or through flames. They leapt over wagons. They rampaged through saloons. All this was at the regular cost of injury or death.

Sometimes individual horses became known, and they were protected because of their fame, and because the actors loved them. Western star William S. Hart had a famous pinto, Fritz. Beautifully trained, Fritz would fall on command, lie down to act as a shield in a gunfight, even play scenes with a monkey. “Singer Jim McKee” (1924) had a scene in which Hart rode Fritz off a cliff into a gorge, but the actor didn’t want to risk Fritz, or a stunt horse, so a fake Fritz was constructed. Hart was filmed galloping to the edge on Fritz, at which point, on cue, the horse did a fall to one side. Then he was led away and replaced by the fake Fritz, held up with wire. When the wires were cut, the two toppled into the gorge. Hart was “badly shaken” by the fall, wrote Petrine Day Mitchum in “Hollywood Hoofbeats,” but once edited, the footage of falling man and “horse” was chillingly spectacular – so much so that the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Organization, aka the Hays Office, called Hart in to explain why he had been so cruel to Fritz.

Fritz was one of the exceptions to the rule. Most Hollywood horses were less famous, less recognizable, and often disposable. In 1939 two horses were killed in the filming of “Northwest Mounted Police” and two more in “Jesse James.” The horses in “Jesse James” were wearing movie blinkers with eyes painted on them. Unable to see, the horses had no idea they were running off a 75-foot cliff over white water until it was too late. The footage was impressive, the stuntman was well-paid, and the horses were dead.

This was the single biggest turning point in the history of Hollywood’s treatment of animals. Word about the deaths got out and there was a tremendous furor. In reaction to the outcry, the Hays Office worked with the AHA to write guidelines for animal performances. Starting in 1940, the AHA was granted access to sets. The Hays Office, well known for prissy extremes such as insisting that marital bedrooms feature twin beds and that Betty Boop dress more modestly, also banned apparent animal cruelty. Films were submitted to the office before release to get a certificate of approval and often changes were demanded before a certificate was issued.

In 1968 the Hays Code was dumped, mostly because it was ridiculous. Now you could have actors curse. You could ridicule the clergy. Married couples could be shown in the same bed. It was good news for the movies, but not for animal welfare. The end of the Hays Code contributed to the rise of the New Hollywood, a golden age of moviemaking. Younger filmmakers were creating realistic and daring movies, with more subtlety and less dependence on formula, contributing to a cinematic renaissance and a move toward realism and location shooting — and, sadly, more problems with animals.

“Through the final days of the ’60s and then into the ’70s, it was bleak. We were banned from film sets. There was a push for a gritty realism in those days in filmmaking. And they didn’t like to be told they could or could not do something with animals,” says Karen Rosa, vice-president of the AHA’s Film & TV Unit. She calls those “the dark days.” Because the AHA wasn’t on set, they couldn’t prove that two mules were killed on the Spanish set of “Patton” (1970), in a scene in which Gen.Patton shoots two mules blocking a bridge, but throughout the 1970s, the AHA’s list of “unacceptable” movies cites a litany of “animals killed for entertainment,” “horses wire tripped,” “mistreatment of animals,” and “live snake sliced into pieces.”

Gritty realism produced two of the most notorious animal welfare abuses in Hollywood history: In “Apocalypse Now” (1979), a real water buffalo was slaughtered with a machete (though it has been claimed that the buffalo was going to be slaughtered in this manner anyhow), and although the movie got great reviews, it caused a lot of upset. Before it was released in the U.K., the RSPCA protested that it violated the Cinematograph (Animals) Act.

“Heaven’s Gate” (1980), the notorious flop, came out a year later — such an expensive failure that it put United Artists out of business. It wasn’t a good gig for animal actors, either. Chickens died in staged cockfights. A horse was killed in an explosion. Horses were killed or injured in a battle scene. Other horses were allegedly bled to provide gore for humans to be smeared with. It was also claimed that cattle were killed and gutted so their innards could double for those of human actors. The AHA, which hadn’t been allowed on the set, led a boycott of the film, with picket lines. The boycott was taken up across the U.S. by local humane groups — and this time there were no voices sticking up for the artistic merit of the film.

Once again public anger led to sweeping changes. The Hays Code didn’t return, but AHA monitors came back on sets through a contract with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and the “No animals were harmed …” disclaimer came into being. Importantly, these inspectors gained significant independence from the industry itself. The AHA Film & TV Unit isn’t paid by the individual producers of film and TV shows, but gets most of its budget from a yearly grant from the Industry Advancement and Cooperative Fund (IACF).

In 1988 the AHA published a set of guidelines for film and TV production. Since then, they say, the incidence of accidents, illnesses and deaths of animals on sets has sharply declined, although there are still occasional violators, especially when filming takes place overseas (some of Werner Herzog’s films, which often include scenes of simulated animal cruelty, have aroused suspicions). Before production even begins, the AHA reviews scripts, looking for potential problem situations, and advises the producers on how to handle the animal action they plan. The disclaimer has become a part of popular culture. Frequently mocked, it has probably also created a widespread awareness of animal welfare as a significant issue. (But see YouTube for counter-examples. No, I’m not going to give URLs.)

AHA’s guidelines evolve, sometimes in the light of new research, sometimes in the light of experience. “There was a time when we allowed tranquilization for the sake of entertainment, as long as it was done by a licensed veterinarian, as long as the the veterinarian stayed present,” says Rosa. But on a film shoot in the late ’90s a bird was tranquilized on a set. “It was very warm … and the bird didn’t make it. We just said, you know what? No.” The guidelines were changed.

There have always been people in Hollywood who care about animals and want to see them treated well. Now they know they can call in the AHA. On the set of “Horse Whisperer” (1998), a distressed crew member collared the AHA monitor. A horse with a bloody wound, she reported. In the corral! Nobody even seems to care! They went to the corral. There stood a horse with a bloody wound. And on the far side of the corral were four similar-looking horses. Each had an identical bloody wound, all superb examples of prosthetics.

Animal actors today have it cushy compared to the early days of Hollywood. AHA doesn’t have to look out for tripwires or pitfalls. “We want to make sure that they’re not stressed, and they’re well rested,” says Rosa. “I read these articles about horse racing and they’re talking about levels of drugs in the horses’ systems. We wouldn’t let the horse run even three-eighths of a mile for filming with drugs in its system.”

After the second horse died during “Luck’s” shooting, the AHA increased its precautions. They insisted that a second, independent vet do health checks on the horses on the days they were to perform. They demanded X-rays of the horses’ bones to check for unsuspected weaknesses. They asked Rick Arthur, a veterinarian and director of the California Racing Board, to review their protocols. “I thought they were actually very good precautions,” he said. “They were greater than those ordinarily found on the racetrack, and they were greater than those on any filming previously.” But horses are prone to do silly things, he says. Like rearing up and falling over backward.

The photographs are intense – images of the men proudly hoisting a dead leopard, smiling and holding a sawed off elephant’s tail next to the animal’s body, posing with a dead bull and waterbuck and an enormous, strung-up crocodile.

PeTA unsurprisingly jumped at the opportunity to get a little free press from the episode, sending out a statement that “Like all animals, elephants, buffalo and crocodiles deserve better than to be killed and hacked apart for two young millionaires’ grisly photo opportunity.” And even Donald Sr. told “Access Hollywood,” “I’ve never liked it (hunting). I’ve never liked that they like it… I’m going to talk to them about it. I’m not a fan of the whole situation.”

Yet the younger Trumps stand by their actions. In a joint statement, the brothers defended themselves, explaining, “We are both avid outdoorsmen and were brought up hunting and fishing with our Grandfather who taught us that nothing should ever be taken for granted or wasted. We have the utmost respect for nature and have always hunted in accordance with local laws and regulations. In addition, all meat was donated to local villagers who were incredibly grateful. We love traveling and being in the woods — at the end of the day, we are outdoorsmen at heart.”

Those of us who eat meat– and have respect for cultures where hunting is necessary for survival – understand that the cow that made your lunchtime burger didn’t peacefully stroll onto your plate. Most of us are deeply disconnected from the vivid reality of slaughter. The animals we eat had to die, and that means somebody had to kill them. So if the Trump brothers’ escapade put food on the table for the locals, is that such a bad thing?

In and of itself, it’s not. The Hunting Legends site, which says that “Africa is God’s country” and that “God doesn’t bless mediocrity, he blesses excellence,” would like to dispel the image that “To often we as hunters are critisized and referred to as killers.” [sic] Hunting Legends says its efforts instead play a role in conservation and wildlife population control. “We create jobs for local hungry people, we feed them,” the company says. It also, tellingly, explains that guests “hunt our old & mature male animals, which are beyond their prime productive time.”  But if you want to shoot an old leopard, it won’t come cheap – rates for the experience are around $750 a day and the leopard will run you seven grand. The company will decorously share the cost of an elephant or crocodile upon request.

But there is something wildly smug about the Trumps’ mention of how “grateful” the “villagers” were for their bounty – a sense that the poor natives were lucky those big strong millionaire’s sons came along to feed them. And their noblesse oblige doesn’t play so well when Trump Jr. retweets a fan’s sentiment that “Most of the people hating on you is because you are young, rich and successful. … rock on!”

There’s nothing wrong with feeding people, and wildlife conservation does, realistically, sometimes include population control. That’s a fact of life whether you’re in Zimbabwe or the Trump’s playground of Manhattan. But if you want to feed those locals, maybe you could just, I don’t know, let them do the hunting. And if you call yourself “avid outdoorsmen” when you’re really just picking off the weak in a theme park for geriatric mammals, you’re just pathetic.

Still, you’d like to think it’s possible. You want to believe in an animal that can fit you inside them — that you might be consumed not piece-by-piece, mouthful-by-mouthful as sharks and bears would eat you, but wholly; to be encased as your full self, womb-like. You want to believe in big animals like you did when you were a kid. You want to be powerless as you are leaning into hurricane winds or with your eyes closed or looking into the ocean.

In 1947, Natural History magazine published a newly discovered letter from 1891 penned by a man aboard the ship Star of the East that told of a fellow crew member surviving 24 hours in a whale’s stomach. Here is the story in brief:

The Star of the East was sailing around the Falkland Islands. The crew spotted a bull sperm whale and  lowered the boats to give chase. As they approached, the whale turned on the boats and attacked. It stove the boat, scattering the crew in the water. All were accounted for except for one, a young whaleman by the name of James Bartley. All assumed Bartley drowned.

Sperm whales would rather eat squid, which require little chewing, and not the hairy, bony things we are. That’s not to say sperm whales haven’t swallowed more than squid. In the 1960s, biologist Malcolm Clarke and his colleagues examined the remains from 2,403 stomachs of sperm whales caught by whalers off the South American coast. Aside from the hundreds of squid remains, he found seabirds, lobsters, seals, driftwood, coconuts, stones, rays, swordfish and sharks. While finding a tiny coconut in a whale’s stomach is enchanting, there’s nothing so striking as the image of a sperm whale eating a shark. It disturbs me the way turducken does, like as a close cousin to cannibalism. More terrifying, with sharks in the diet, Americans who might have been swallowed by sperm whales would have had another thing to worry about: sharing the stomach of your predator with yet another predator. To be eaten after being eaten. To be the –en of the turducken.

In my initial foray into books about the dangers of the Yankee Whale Fishery, I found a pretty standard account of whalemen entering a whale’s mouth and then quickly being spit out. The whalemen either fell in the mouth from their perches in the whaleboats, or the whale, after smashing the boat with its flukes and snapping randomly at the debris floating in the water, chomped down on an unlucky swimmer. In 1771, for instance, a female sperm whale dragged Marshal Jenkins underwater when he fell from his boat, but she quickly resurfaced to spit him out. Job Sherman fell into a sperm whale’s mouth in 1860, Peleg Nye in 1863, Albert Wood in 1847. A November 1880 issue of New Bedford’s Shipping News tells of Wood, at the bow of a whaleboat floating over an angry whale, losing his balance and tumbling headfirst into the mouth. He landed straddling the lower jaw. The whale clamped down, dragged him underwater while smashing the boat with his fluke — immediately killing the boat steerer — then freed Wood, who bled heavily from his groin into the frothy water.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library isn’t really open to the public like a regular library. You have to set up an appointment, and when you get there, you hit the metal handicap button that is the secret buzzer for a librarian a few levels up.  You wait in the street, seagulls shrieking above you, for the librarian to come to the door. He opens it a crack and asks you, “Yes?” like gatekeepers do. You explain you have an appointment. You sign the guestbook.

The inside of the library is full of polished wood. Antique oars line a wall; there’s scrimshaw in a chest, wooden boat models in display cases, books behind glass-paneled bookshelves. The spines of the books are webbed in faded gold designs looping around gothic font titles. Four paintings of moments in the whaling industry hang on the cream-colored walls: one whale ship pictured at dawn, one with a ship’s trypots burning at night, one with men stripping a whale of its blubber, and one of a French whaleboat getting smacked by a whale’s flukes.

After the librarian let me in, he pointed to the back, and called, “Michael!” I heard a disembodied voice rise from deep in the stacks, “Send him back.”

Michael Dyer is the maritime curator at the Research Library. He works at the end of a nook hidden behind bookshelves lined with whaling logbooks. He spends his days going through logbooks, the now brittle and ink-smudged paper trail that whaling captains and crew left behind centuries ago. For this I told him as I shook his hand and settled down in a chair across his desk that he had the best job in the world, and that I envied him.

I asked him if it was true, if there was a whale out there that could swallow us. He shook his head and waved dismissively. “Sperm whales’ throats are small. They can’t swallow people.”

“The Bartley story?” I said.

“Apocryphal.”

His voice was soft and low, tacked with a Southern accent. He has blue-green eyes, scraggly eyebrows bristling behind a pair of glasses. It looked as though frost had settled over his head, turning only the tips of eyebrows and hair white. He certainly fit his role. Later that day I saw him walking New Bedford’s cobblestoned streets sucking on a pale wood pipe.

“And the Gardner story?”

“That one’s very true. He was bitten, not swallowed. Edmund Gardner’s great granddaughter – she’s still alive, she’s in her late 90s – told me personally, that her mother remembered putting her hand in the dent in Edmund Gardner’s head when he was a very, very old man.”

“So no swallowings?”

“There’s a picture I want to show you,” he said, turning to his computer and opening files. “Come around here and I’ll show you. It’s an old pencil drawing of men getting chewed up.”

In his search he found a different drawing of a sperm whale with a whaleboat in its mouth. The whale had attacked the boat from the bottom instead of the more common attack called “jawing over,” where the whale torpedoed upside-down and open-jawed along the surface. I thought of looking over a gunwale to see a 15-ton animal materialize in the water beneath me. I imagined the water might be still, the boat rocking under a gray sky, my fellow crew members hunched over their heavy oars. Someone might whisper, “Where is he?” and a few moments later the water would boil and a 30-foot jaw would appear on the side of the boat. We’d be thrown upward, the sky and sea blurring in the sound of snapping wood and bones. I can’t think of anything scarier than a predator underwater. I still get scared when eelgrass brushes my toes in shallow water. A few years ago, as I paddled around a tropical beach, a curious sea turtle bumped into me and I screamed so loud through my snorkel that my mother came running down the beach, thinking shark.

Michael couldn’t find the pencil drawing he was looking for.

“Well, there are thousands of stories of men getting chewed by whales. If you want true stories, they’re here. You can ferret them out of the logbooks. It might take a while.”

If, I’ll pretend for a moment, you were swallowed, it would happen like this: You would first be chewed.  Sperm whales’ teeth are 8 inches long – longer than most blades in your knife drawer. Then you would be gulped to the fauces, the back of the mouth, and forced down. Here is where Bartley apparently touched the quivering sides of the throat. You would also touch the throat, perhaps claw at the sides of the throat like you would sliding down an icy slope. There would be no air, and you’d suffocate in acid and water, but, we’re saying, you somehow survive. Imagine a black and mucous-smothered tube sock slipping over you.

- – - – - – - – - -

Sperm whales’ jaws aren’t only for chewing and swallowing. In fact, with so much squid in the diet, they probably do very little chewing at all. A teacher once told me that the jaw of a sperm whale might be used as a tuning fork to aid their singing, like the metal kind you knock against your guitar and hold to its wooden body. Their mouths, when they weren’t chewing Americans’ limbs, were musical, judging pitch in the cold and dark depths from where they sang.

Whaling logbooks are lovely. One from 1857 had powder-blue paper. Most are creamy brown. The writing is slanted far to the right, and difficult to read, sometimes impossible. Most of the ink is dark brown. Some is light brown. Some is black. You open them up on green foam wedges as to not over extend the binding.

The logbooks are part-business documents, part-journal, and sometime get personal. In Daniel Kimball Ritchee’s logbook from the ship Israel, there is the imprint of a pressed flower on the first page. The image is brown, but you can see the veins of the petals, and the little black dots of snuffed pistils. Behind that is a pencil drawing of a whale. And over that, a little poem:

Oh where are the Friends that to me were so dear

Long Long ago, Long Long ago

Where are the voices I delighted to hear

Long Long ago Long ago.

- – - – - – - – - -

Some single entries are stories in and of themselves. Scanning the pages of the 1860 logbook from the bark Triton, I found this: “Wednesday the 13^th of March In 1860. Light north wind. One watch on liberty. Employed getting potatoes on board. Discharged William Popess, who proved to be a hermaphrodite.”

I went through each of the 10 logbooks referenced by the notecards. None mentioned a full swallowing.

* In the Indian Ocean. The whale struck the third mate with his tail and thinks a rib broken in the right side.

* On a Saturday in May, 1848 a man was struck and killed by a whale. Struck and then killed him t…..”

* On December 8, 1836 the Larboard boat got stove and the cook’s leg was broken and another man was crippled.

* Thursday, June 23^rd 1869. Larboard boat struck and got stove. Joe Williams got hurt.

* July 23^rd, 1843 The mate got fast to a large whale – a regular hard customer – the Capt. and 2^nd Mate soon after fastened. The whale came near killing the Captain. He hit the Boatsteerer on the head with his flukes and knocked him overboard. Did not hurt him much, got the whale dead by 10 at night.

If I’m not sure whales ate Americans, I am certain that Americans ate whales. Some still do. I had whale meat stew above the Arctic Circle in a small, candlelit restaurant on Norway’s Lofoten Islands. It tastes, I described to my parents in an embarrassing and gushy email about “swooping fjords” and “stunning seascapes,” like beef soaked in shrimp-water.

Most would not eat whale meat. “Sailors were a persnickety bunch,” Michael told me as I chatted with him in the afternoon, “and they wanted their salt pork. They wanted their meat. And if they didn’t get their meat there would be big trouble. There were mutinies that happened because sailors didn’t get their meat.”

The best-known scene of an American eating a whale comes from “Moby Dick.” Stubb, the second mate of the Pequod, orders a harpooner to cut him tender, muscly ridgeline just before the tail, the tapering extremity of the whale. When Stubb is given his whale steak, he eats it by the light of lanterns filled sperm whale oil. This is a frightening thought, to have meat illuminated by light fed by the animal’s fat, the calm yellow flame at a dinner table flickering over the muscle.

The meat, after going down Stubb’s throat and into his stomach, would be digested by his stomach acids and pass through his villi and out to his blood, which flowed to his muscle. It would have fueled him the next day to hunt the whale, it would have been in the heat of his stiffening muscles as he tossed the lance, in his twitching leg muscles pressed against the loggerhead, and the tightening of his vocal chords as he screamed at his crew to ‘heave’ towards their prey, another sperm whale.

People don’t produce ambergris. The whale would have ended as foul-smelling excrement leaving Stubb, hunched over the precarious head at the bow of the Pequod.

Having exhausted the index cards in the file cabinets, I took another approach. I went the Holy Grail of whaling logbooks, “History of the American Whale Fishery,” which the Research Library keeps handy on the tables.

The “History” includes 492 pages of tables of “Returns of Whaling Vessels, Sailing from American Ports, Since the Year 1715.” At an average of 52 entries per page, that makes for about 25,000 logbooks accounted for. The tables include name of the vessel, its class, tonnage, captain, managing owner, whaling ground, date of sailing and arrival, sperm oil / whale oil / whalebone barrels and pounds. At the end of the table is a column titled Remarks, where any odd occurrences – a particularly profitable voyage, a mutiny, or a whale killing a sailor, among others – are noted.

After compiling all references in “Remarks” to whalemen “killed by whale,” I took steps to discover if the killing was by swallowing. (I excluded “drowned by whale,” as third mate G. Thing was on Christmas day 1846 aboard the ship Florida.)

If I found in the “History of the American Whale Fishery” that the ship Milton, sailing out of New Bedford, was carrying a certain Mr. Porter, second mate who, on 5 October 1872, was “killed by a whale,” I would then go to Judith Navas Lund’s “Whaling Masters and Whaling Voyages Sailing from American Ports: A Compilation of Sources.” Lund’s book is big and maroon, longer than it is tall, and lists every logbook in the Yankee Whale Fishery and where it is located. I would then find the ship Milton listed under Vessel; I would then mark down the logbook number, ask the librarian if he had that logbook in the Library; he would say “yes,” and retrieve the 140-year old book from somewhere deep in the stacks; I would put that book on the green foam wedges, find the entry for 5 October 1872, and read the following:

Fine weather and light breeze. Mr. Porter, second officer, struck a whale he stove the boat and killed Mr. Porter. He was only seen in a seconds and appeared to be lifeless. Mr. —, 3^rd Officer is off duty from injuries received from a humpback.

If I weren’t so lucky, if the librarian didn’t have that logbook – it could be Nantucket, or Martha’s Vineyard, or Peabody or lost altogether – I would take another tack. For example, after finding that in June 1843 second mate William Lacky of the Candace was “killed by a whale,” I’d go to Lund’s book and see, sadly, that the Candace’s logbook for those years is not present in the Library’s collection; I would then go to a short maroon volume of Dennis Wood’s “Abstracts,” Volume 6, Index, which is an index of logbook summaries from each vessel. “Abstracts” is around 250 pages of tables reading Ship Name, Rig (Ship or Bark) Tonnage, Dates and Volume – Page. After finding the ship Candace, I would then go to Dennis Wood’s stack of larger, elephant folio and equally maroon “Abstracts” – listed by Volume, Part, Pages; the Candace is mentioned in Wood’s 1832 – 1847, VOL. 1 PT. 1, pp 1-300 book. At the end of this, I would read the abstract, where there would be, I found, no usable information, no mention of William Lacky, and certainly no mentioned of a swallowing.

After I would fail again and again at finding any proof of a swallowing, I would settle back into my chair, defeated. My back would burn from leaning over logbooks and indexes of logbooks and indexes of indexes of logbooks, my eyes strained from trying to read illegible photocopies of century-old chicken scratch penned out on the rolling sea; I would feel thinned, liquidated, oozing onto the desks of the Research Library, dissolving still further, lapping against whaling logbooks that had been touched whalemen from so long ago.

The second zoo story is a tale of redemption, coming in the form of a big Hollywood holiday release, “We Bought a Zoo.” Directed by Cameron Crowe and loosely based on a book by Benjamin Mee, “We Bought a Zoo” stars Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson and is a delightful if overly sentimental Christmas film. Mee (Matt Damon) is mourning the death of his wife and losing touch with his kids. On a whim, he decides to change their lives by buying a zoo that is in serious disrepair. Through hard work, borrowed money and lots of struggle, Mee and his friends manage to refurbish the zoo, get a new license and reopen. Along the way, Mee finds emotional healing through his connection with animals.

The two zoo stories are inverse images of each other. The only thing they have in common is that both can make you cry. But I think there’s a lot we can learn from both stories.

We had a hard year in America. Foreclosures, unemployment, homelessness, depression, occupations in cold and wet tents, rubber bullets, pepper spray. We seemed a country turned against itself. This past year felt to some of us like we were on the brink of destruction, and we maybe felt a tinge of the despair Terry Thompson may have experienced as he released his animals into the world, and turned the gun on himself. As a country, we seem fallen, lost.

Animal rights advocates, and even many animal welfarists, decry the keeping of animals in zoos, especially the unregulated, private ones like Thompson’s. And I have to confess that when I see images of animals pacing in cages, mutilating themselves, being gawked at by human observers, or lining the road like they were in Zanesville, part of me agrees. My heart goes out to suffering zoo animals mostly, I think, because I feel fully identified with their precarious place in the world. But there are other truths that beg for consideration. The first is that we are losing our wild animals at a rate nearly a thousand times faster than background natural extinction. Global warming, climate change, deforestation, human development and human overpopulation are putting the lives of all wild animals in grave danger. Wild animals have no more room, no more resources. We humans have taken everything. We have doubled our population in 20 years and are now consuming not twice as much of the earth’s resources as we were in 1990, but 10 times as much.

We should continue to pour resources into conservation, but at the very same time we need to recognize that the vast majority of these efforts are failing. Failing miserably. The harsh reality is that if we cannot find ways of accommodating and controlling wild animals in places like zoos and sanctuaries, we will lose them for good. Extinction really is forever.

The real Benjamin Mee, author of the book “We Bought a Zoo,” knows this; the zoo upon which the Hollywood movie is based is in Britain, and Mee specializes in collecting captive bred endangered animals. Eventually, he says, he would like his zoo to exclusively house the endangered and extinct-in-the-wild animals. He fully understands that reintroduction of these animals is difficult, in most cases probably impossible. But keeping them in this world in conditions where they can flourish is, to my thinking, a laudable goal. Responsible zoos like Mee’s never take animals from the wild, but breed captive animals through international stud books and zoo alliances. These captive animals can’t replace the ones squeezed out of the wild, but they go a very long way in teaching people about other species and the need to conserve whatever we have left.

The second truth in this mix is this: the kind of freedom animal rightists advocate is built on a notion that no longer seems tenable — for animals or, for that matter, even for humans.  The idea of complete autonomy and self-determination for animals underwrites a worldview where individual freedom trumps everything, even the goals and goods we all ought to be holding together and in common. In the strictest sense of the word, animal rights means that no animal should ever be used for human purposes whatsoever. No meat, no pets, no circuses, no sport, and certainly no zoos. Indeed, one of the major animal rights organizations that works to permanently close down all zoos, even the good ones, is named “Born Free,” a reference to the story of Elsa, a lion cub raised by humans Joy and George Adamson, and immortalized by the 1966 British film of the same name. Even though Elsa dies soon after her release, the moral of the story is that it’s better to be dead than in a cage.

This kind of valorization of autonomy, and the radical individualism that follows from it, misses the fact that it is precisely our enmeshments that make us who we are and give our lives meaning. We are all part of many different systems, economic, environmental, familial, etc., and it is our shifting presence in those systems that makes us visible, that allows us to be known. America may have been built on an ideology that values personal freedom over any and all connections, but that is exactly the ideology that leads us to free-market capitalism, neoliberalism, global domination, and winner-takes-all social Darwinism. In the name of “personal” liberty, corporations (which are now considered “persons”) are granted constitutional power that gives them license to perpetuate economic inequality, and has produced the dominant 1 percent.  The greater good, whether it’s configured in the frame of the “commons,” the environment, the proletariat, or the biomass, is losing ground.  (Many of us, obviously, think it’s time for a different reality.)

There are bad zoos out there; of that there is no question. Animals who are not treated well, lacking the kind of attention that will allow them to thrive. But the final truth worthy of consideration here is that there are really good zoos out there too. They do exist. Places where animals have enough room, good food, an existence where their “freedom” is somewhat curtailed in return for care, connection and belonging. “We Bought a Zoo” portrays one of those places. It is an experiment in learning how to live with and appreciate one another, not through dominance and power, but through attachment and connection.

Terry Thompson was completely alone in the world with his animals; Benjamin Mee had a lot of support from a lot of people who really valued the lives of the animals in their care.  They didn’t always know what they were doing, they made a lot of mistakes, but working together they listened to their animals, built them bigger enclosures, found better food, habitat enrichments, and better ways of caring for them. Most of all they didn’t give up hope — on each other, their animals, or the world.

That’s not just a useful model for zoos, but possibly for where we we want to go as a country, too. We need to resist the dark impulse to retreat from society — like the isolated individualism of Terry Thompson — and instead embrace a different model where interdependence and care are paramount. And we need to extend that circle of care to all animals, and to the planet itself; I do not want to be part of the generation that proclaims the last tiger is gone, or the last grey wolf, or the last polar bear. We really can do better. As Mee, played by Damon, says in the film, “It’s a really great dream. And there are lots of cool animals in it.”

At a time when overly sweet dog books crowd the new release shelves, Derr — whose other works include “Dog’s Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship” — presents an accessible and informative history that’s sympathetic and illuminating. Over the phone, Derr discussed the dog’s evolution, what the Dog Whisperer misunderstands, and why your pet always goes instinctively for your guest who doesn’t like animals. An edited transcript of our conversation is below.

It seems like people devoted to studying when the wolf became the dog are basically interested in answering the question, “What is a dog?” At the very least, that’s a question they need to address before they can get very far — and it’s a subject you address consistently throughout the book. So, what’s the most convincing answer?

It’s a good question. Certainly for trying to find out when the dog became a dog, or when the wolf became a dog, it is important to define a dog. I think for a long time, due to archaeological stuff, the one thing that seemed obvious was [the dog's] small size. But now it’s clear, from recent studies of big canids they’ve been finding in Belgium and other places in northern Europe, that smallness wasn’t it.

So what was the thing that set the dogwolf — I like that term — apart from the wild wolf, the wolf wolf? [A "dogwolf" is a wolf that is "genetically and behaviorally" dog-like, Derr explains in the book.] I think ultimately we’ll get to a sense of what that is. I don’t think we’re there right now. I don’t think it will be derived purely by studying genetics; I think we have to understand behavior and culture, too. And that’s difficult.

One thing that makes it very difficult is that when you look at studies involving early homonins, invariably things that we thought were unique to Homo sapiens – such as fire use or organization of space — maybe weren’t. So it’s hard to tell what even makes us unique from, say, Neanderthal or Homo erectus – other than a bigger brain and more robust body. And that we survived and they didn’t. (But they lived for a very long time, Homo erectus did.)

I think we’re going to have to use all the tools we have available to try and understand this. Archaeology alone won’t do it; genetics alone won’t do it. Certainly the changes in our view of animals will help us understand it, because we have to accommodate the fact that we’re dealing with animals that are making decisions.

The other thing that we have to try and figure out behaviorally for the dog and for the human is how fast these things happen. I mean, you can fracture a wolf pack in no time; you take out the breeding pair, and you’ve got no wolf society there anymore, right? So I think when you have these dogwolves crossing into human society, you’re dealing with change that’s occurring behaviorally, perhaps, pretty rapidly. Certainly biological time is much quicker than geological time.

I’d also like to ask about your sources. You mention a number of studies, and some interviews: Did you do a lot of new research for this book? Or were you able to rely on information you’d collected over the years, in the course of writing your other books about dogs?

I have done three books on dogs now, starting with “Dog’s Best Friend” in 1997 — and I’ve been following this stuff since around 1990, when I did a big cover story for The Atlantic Monthly called “The Politics of Dogs,” which was on the overbreeding of dogs for show and commerce. …

I’ve been following all this stuff since then, and for this book I made a conscious decision that I would just go back and review the scientific literature; I didn’t concern myself overly much with various other things. The whole business about neoteny [the supposed "retention of juvenile traits until adulthood" in dogs] I try to dispel once and for all, but otherwise, my goal was to try to look at these dates and places that have been proposed for the domestication of the wolf, and see if it’s possible to match them up to hominins — to naked bipeds — and see what was going on at the time.

The curious thing — or maybe it’s not curious — is that all the [proposed] dates and places [for the emergence of the dog] do put these wolves in a vicinity with people. And so through my own thought processes, I came up with several notions for this book. One is that the dog is an evolutionary inevitability — that wherever you have wolves and people, let us say, you’re going to end up with at least a dogwolf or dog-like wolf. And so in that sense, you’re never going to find a place for the dog to have occurred; … you have [the dog developing] wherever you have these wolves and humans.

Recent work, from the past 20 years, has overturned the notion that animals are simply stimulus response machines. We know that dogs aren’t, for sure — and we know that wolves aren’t, for sure. And so then I start trying to consider what happens when you put two, let us say, sentient animals together — and how they interact. That’s where all this came from. So I made a conscious decision to base the material that I had on the available scientific papers, and to rely on myself for the rest of it.

It’s clear that many theories about early dogwolves are difficult to prove one way or another — largely because of a lack of concrete evidence. (Even DNA evidence does not always clarify matters.) Do you think the picture will become any clearer as research techniques become more sophisticated?

DNA sometimes seems to muddy things up, doesn’t it? There’s a lot of stuff with the DNA that I think will become clearer. I’m not expert in that, but I talk a lot to [Robert K.] Wayne, who is kind of the leading person in this field, and to other people.

Regarding the DNA evidence, let me say two things. My first dog book came out in 1997, and right after that, Bob Wayne and his group published a date for the origin of the dog that was at the far end — 135,000 years ago. The archaeologists had a hissy fit. A lot of other so-called experts also had hissy fits, and said this couldn’t possibly be true. The curious thing about that date is that despite all kinds of other evidence … Bob himself has never backed off from that 135,000 year date. I saw him just in February, at a symposium where I was talking on this subject, and I asked him point-blank if he’d ever backed off that date; he said no. He hasn’t put it forward with great regularity, because it’s it’s a little out there — but what it shows is that basically as soon as Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, began to encounter wolves, you probably have this dogwolf appearing.

That’s one curiosity. The other thing is, a lot of the early DNA work was based on mitochondrial DNA, and it’s based on a lot of assumptions which are not necessarily true. There’s work coming out now that shows that the way that the mitochondrial clock is [interpreted] may not be accurate. … That’s why I say basically the dog was kind of invented on the fly. Wolves and people met on the trail, and they just have been walking ever since, is the way I put it.

You present the idea of “interspecies co-evolution” between humans and dogs. How is this sort of co-evolution different from other symbiotic relationships in nature — the oxpecker and the rhino, for instance? Is the human/dog relationship you describe different primarily because it takes place over such an extended period of time?

Well, of course it’s really long-term. There’s this whole notion that the dog comes from this sniveling, garbage-eating, whiny creature that had once been a wolf and somehow then, when it became a dog, went back to being a kind of bold creature; it doesn’t make much sense to me, and it never did. And then Steve Budiansky a few years ago claimed that dogs were basically just parasites. So symbiosis [is a complicated term].

“Mutualism” is probably better — I prefer that term to “symbiosis,” at least initially.

One thing that surprised me was your argument that in order to live among humans, dogs have to suppress or delay their instinct for fear. I would have thought it was some sort of natural aggression, rather than fear, that they’d be holding back.

I believe it’s fear. [Of course,] other people disagree. …

For one thing, we haven’t selected against aggression in dogs. Some dogs are highly aggressive — far more aggressive than any wolf you’ll meet. Fighting dogs, for one thing; and we also raise dogs to be aggressive in other cases — we haven’t tried to discourage that in the bulk of time. And so what’s more important, it seems to me, is fear: there’s this period in the development of humans, we know, probably — and it’s certainly true for dogs. There are several major periods before the dog is a year old, when if you don’t address the fear, or the fear is not dealt with, then it can become problematic.

It’s likely that this book will appeal more to dog-owners or dog-lovers than to people who don’t often interact with dogs. But do you think questions of the nature of dogs’ ongoing relations with humans, over the course of our evolutionary  history, should be interesting to people who don’t have an express interest in dogs? If the co-evolution theory holds water, presumably insight into human-dog relations would be helpful to a greater understanding of human history?

Increasingly now, as we become more and more urbanized, dogs are a connection between us and a natural world — a different world. And a different way of seeing the world. Which many of us don’t avail ourselves of, by the way. I once gave a talk to a group of Beagle Brigade handlers — you know, the little beagles in the airport? — and I asked how many of them had actually gotten down on the floor during the arrival of one of those big jumbo jets and tried to see the world the way their dog saw it. People can’t smell as well as dogs can, but they can at least try to see the world the way they do. My one dog who died of a brain tumor used to sit at a window on the stairwell and stare out the window. I couldn’t tell precisely what he was staring at, but I sat there and looked out there too, just to try and figure out — to get some idea of how this other animal sees the world. I think at its best, that’s what the human-dog relationship allows us to do: expand our understanding.

I know that dogs also serve a great value in helping break down the isolation that people sometimes feel, either toward other people or to other animals. Dogs are tremendous ambassadors, as you probably know — your dog doubtless has an innate capacity to find the person who’s visiting you who is least likely to want to have anything to do with the dog…

Yes — where does that instinct come from?

Well, how many times does your dog win that person over?

Every time.

It’s seduction, isn’t it? It’s an uncanny ability. What purpose does it serve from an evolutionary standpoint? I don’t know. It sure as hell breaks down a lot of isolation that people feel, and it gives them an experience that they wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise. Does the dog consciously do that? I don’t know how anybody would convince me that dogs aren’t aware of what they’re doing. Dogs are very aware in many cases of what they’re doing. But why they’re doing it? I don’t know.

I sometimes think dogs understand us better than we understand them. But the remarkable thing is that [dogs and humans] do understand each other to such a degree. We can understand a dog’s bark, and what his or her body language means, probably better in some cases than we can understand the behavior of other people.

If we could return for a moment to my earlier question, about what insights an understanding of our “co-evolutionary” relationship with dogs offers us more generally: Is it true that we can learn a lot about human development by studying the history of our encounters with dogs? You discuss things we have in common, like certain pack behaviors. Can you talk a little about how the concept might be useful for better understanding humans?

Well, first, there’s been a huge misunderstanding of pack behavior — so let’s just make sure we’re in agreement on that one. The Cesar Millan “you are pack leader” or “you have failed to be pack leader” routine is based on this notion of what a wolf pack is that grew out of studies of captive packs, which were made up of unrelated animals thrown together in these wolf parks. And people studying them saw that the males — unaltered males, unrelated males — fought for status. And they developed this notion of the “alpha wolf” — the biggest, meanest wolf — leading the pack. (It happened to fit, as an aside, with our views of what corporate America should be like. But let’s forget that for a minute.)

But when the researchers — David Mech is the most prominent wolf researcher — finally went and looked hard at wild packs, guess what they discovered? It wasn’t based on fighting at all; it was based on mutual cooperation. Why? Because the pack was an extended family. Ma and pa were the alphas by definition, because they were the breeding pair. Then you had the juveniles, the two- or three-year-olds moving out, and the puppies. And they worked cooperatively. And in fact, the alpha male often deferred to other animals in the pack. Why? Because not fighting is more important to social cohesion than fighting, if you follow me. Chimps, on the other hand, are known to be a rather violent sort, and wage war in various ways; they’re not as socially minded in that respect as wolves.

The early unit that humans had was the extended family — small family groups traveling around. And so I think there’s a kind of mix there that allows for this movement of wolf into human society, much more easily than other animals might do it. I mean, if in fact the wolf gained its dominance through fighting, then you’d be hard-pressed to see how humans and wolves would have gotten together to produce the dog; it’s more likely they would have gotten together to produce bloodshed.

And can we go further, to say that humans adopted certain behaviors from dogwolves — as dogwolves adopted human habits — over the long term?

Well, that’s a little harder to prove.

But possibly?

Possibly. I mean, logically, yes — but can you prove it?

To my mind, much of this is a thought process. Let’s look at what the animals would be doing; let’s look at what the people would be doing. Now, of course, we can’t project ourselves back tens of thousands of years very easily. But culture is really a conservative thing. I don’t mean “conservative” in the political sense; I mean, it conserves. And preserves, and has continuity. That’s why we use dogs today much the way people thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago — probably back to the dogwolf — used animals. You know, as companions; less as beasts of burden now than anything else, but we tend to use them for racing, much to the dislike of certain animal groups (I’m talking about sled-dog racing, not greyhound racing); and for hunting (even detection dogs really are just hunters). We use them for basically all the [same purposes our ancestors used them for], and maybe sometimes more.

I think the relationship that works between dogs and people has remained much the same, too. And this I believe is important and overlooked: many times dogs are abused, and they’ve been treated horribly — often in societies in which people are treated horribly, too, it must be said. So we have to weigh these things relatively. But invariably you’ll find that there are some people who just seem to get it with dogs. They can get inside the mind of their dog. There’s a woman trainer here who can seem to teach a dog to do anything she wants. She just understands them. And she never is cruel to her dogs; they learn, in other words. We know from more than a century of learning theory that if you want to teach an organism something, you are positive — you reward it. You don’t beat on it; you don’t flagellate it. And so my thought is — and there’s some evidence for this (not a whole ton of evidence, because there’s not always a ton of evidence for anything relating to dogs) — that throughout this relationship, the people who really succeed best are people who have that kind of ability with regard to the dog. And the dogs have that kind of ability to really understand people. They just relate to each other, in a really fundamental sense. You were asking earlier about what keeps the relationship going — this keeps the relationship going. The ones that break down, where you have a violent dog that bites and maims your child or the child next door, that is the opposite end of that spectrum. And God knows dogs occupy the full thing, just as people do.