While there are many reasons for the resilience of this myth, the most powerful one is the simple fact that humans today can and do engage in extreme levels of violence and aggression. If you read the newspaper, visit online news sites or turn on the television, you are guaranteed to come across some evidence of humans behaving violently toward other humans. While many animals aggressively hunt, capture, and eat prey, it is relatively rare for most animals to engage in intense, lethal aggression with members of their own species.

Many social mammals display some intraspecific (within the same species) aggression and violence, sometimes resulting in death. A male lion might seriously injure another male lion in a fight over access to a pride of females, two rams might butt heads until one of them staggers away seriously hurt, or a male baboon might repeatedly attack a female in his group, wounding her and injuring her infant. However, these events, while aggressive and violent, are not the main ways in which the individuals in these species interact. For the most part, death of opponents in these cases is neither the premeditated goal nor the outcome of the behavior. So, while intraspecific violence occurs, most species do not exhibit extreme aggression regularly and methodically. Humans are the only species that practice premeditated homicide and full-out war. That humans can, and do, participate in aggression and violence in ways that most other animals do not (and cannot) has led many to theorize that this aggression, this inner beast or demon, our Mr. Hyde, is part of human evolutionary heritage.

The myth of human aggression holds that we are indeed evolved to be killers, or at least aggressors who use the threat of violence as a major evolutionary tool. The mark of this evolved tendency toward aggression can therefore be found in our bodies and minds, especially those of men:

When we look at humans’ bodies and brains, we find more direct signs of design for aggression. The larger size, strength, and upper-body mass of men is a zoological giveaway of an evolutionary history of violent male-male competition. . . . (Stephen Pinker, psychologist)

There is the notion that aggression, the capacity for immense violence, evolved specifically because of the benefits it gave males, including an edge in competition with one another and between groups of males. Some make the argument for indicators of aggressive cores in our closest primate relatives and suggest that aggression and violence result in evolutionary benefits:

Thus, both the patterns of deadly violence in nature and the ethnographic record of simple hunter-gatherers clearly suggest that intraspecific human violence and the threat of it, while obviously undergoing transformations and varying in form through human history, are on the whole as old as humanity itself, indeed as old as nature. . . . (Azar Gat, political scientist)

In short, the myth of human aggression is that humans (especially males) have a specific and distinct tendency toward aggression and violence and that this is patterned in our bodies and minds and arose due to evolutionary pressures of competition between men and between groups. If this were true, then aggression and violence must be a core part of who we are as humans because over evolutionary time those with the more aggressive behavioral patterns or traits must have defeated opponents and mated more successfully than those who were more pacific.

It is obvious that human aggression is an amazingly complicated thing. There is variation in conflict styles and aggression across individuals, sexes, genders, societies, and time frames. Aggression is an important part of being human, but it is not who we are at our core. We now know that aggression itself is not a uniform or consistent discrete trait, so aggression per se cannot be favored by evolutionary pressures to form the basis of the human experience.

The other primates show us that we do not have specific, evolved patterns of heightened aggression, especially in males. Looking at the chimpanzee species demonstrates the potential for variability in the expression of aggressive and nonaggressive behaviors in our shared ancestors. War is common in the human experience today, but it is not a central part of our evolutionary heritage. We know that males and females differ in some facets of aggression, but a lot of those differences have to do with physical size and the social and experiential contexts in which they find themselves. We know that more aggressive, more violent, or more warlike males do not necessarily do better, either in humans or in our closest relatives.

Human aggression, especially in males, is not an evolutionary adaptation: we are not aggressive, big-brained apes. We know the regions of the brain and body that influence normal aggression. While our genes do not control or determine the normative expression of aggression, abnormal biological function can influence particular patterns of aggressive behavior. The nature of human aggression is not found in our genes, but understanding the function and variation in our biology can help us better understand the pathways and patterns of aggressive behavior. As a species we do not rely on aggression and violence more than cooperation; there is no pattern of evidence to support a notion that humanity is aggressive and selfish by nature. The myth of a human nature characterized by an intrinsic aggressiveness is simply not true.

And yet the popular press and much of the public (and some academics) hold the belief that there is a specific biology or a genetic basis for aggression, especially in males. Identifying the genetic key to aggression is not possible, because it does not exist.

It is pretty clear that in humans two parts of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex, are centrally involved with the expression of behavior, especially aggression. The prefrontal cortex is linked to other behaviorally important brain structures called the amygdala and the hypothalamus. In general, these parts of the brain receive a variety of inputs from other areas of the brain (vision, smell, touch, pain, sound, memory, language, etc.) and then interact in a sort of feedback loop to stimulate other bodily systems (such as hormones, neurotransmitters, and muscles) into action.

The prefrontal cortex does a bunch of other things as well, including playing central roles in introspection, recognition of emotions, regulation of emotions, and detection of conflict situations, and it acts as a trigger to initiate a variety of other neurological systems in regard to social interactions. The dorsal anterior cingulated cortex seems to be involved in the regulation of responses to anger, pain, and social rejection. From brain imaging studies, we know that individuals who are particularly aggressive often show lowered neuronal activity, reduced glucose metabolism, or even reduced density of gray matter in the prefrontal cortex than those who are not as aggressive. Studies of individuals who have received brain damage to the prefrontal cortex and amygdala reveal that they demonstrate more impulsive and antisocial aggressive behavior or have lowered abilities to control the expression of aggression.

Additionally, shock therapy in the 1950s and 1960s directed at the amygdala and prefrontal cortex resulted in lowered overall arousal rates and severely reduced aggression. In short, there are multiple studies which all point to the action of the prefrontal cortex, the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex, and at least the amygdala, as important areas for understanding the biological infrastructure of aggression.

There are a suite of molecules (called neurotransmitters) produced by the body which directly interact with these regions of the brain and are involved in the expression of aggressive behavior (among other things). They are the 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors (5-HT for short and involved with the neurotransmitter serotonin), the neurotransmitter and neurohormone dopamine, the metabolic enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), and a variety of steroid hormones such as testosterone, other androgens, and estrogen. None of these are a smoking gun for the origin and expression of aggression in general, but some of these are implicated, to some extent, as playing a role in the emergence of particular types or patterns of aggression.

Genes are basically just stretches of DNA that contain the code for either the production of a protein molecule (or parts of a molecule) or the regulation of other genes or of themselves. Genes come in multiple forms (alleles). While genes contain codes for proteins and their regulation, the relationship between genes and complex molecules like neurotransmitters and hormones is very complicated.

Dubbed the “warrior gene” in the press, the gene that codes for monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) has recently been a central player in the study of genetic influences on aggressive behavior. This gene is found on the X chromosome (the one you get from your mother), so that males have only one copy of it and females have two (males are XY and females are XX). The gene product, the enzyme monoamine oxidase A, interacts with the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and norephedrine, regulating their release and breakdown so that once they do what they are supposed to do they don’t build up or interact with other receptors, causing problems for communication between parts of the brain.

It turns out that there are at least four different common alleles for this gene that have the effect of increasing or decreasing the amount of MAOA produced. Lowered amounts of MAOA in the brain in some mice, rhesus monkeys, and humans, under certain conditions, is associated with increased aggression and reduced ability to control impulsive behavior. A noticeable number of mice, monkeys, and human males who had the low-MAOA-production alleles and who experienced severe social and/or physical trauma or abuse during early childhood development were more likely to express heightened aggressive and antisocial behavior as adults. Some low-MAOA humans also score higher on self reports of aggressive and violent behavior. However, in some cases the high-producing alleles are correlated with aggressive behavior in male children. In a famous case of a Dutch family who have a very rare allele where no MAOA is produced at all, three males exhibited extreme aggressive and antisocial behavior. Now, not all individuals with the low-expression alleles exhibit this kind of aggression, not even all of those with the low-expression alleles who had traumatic or abusive childhoods. In addition some of the high-expression allele carriers exhibited high aggression.

All of these studies were conducted on males because it is much easier to discover which alleles are acting as the males only have one copy of the gene. In females it is more difficult to identify the actual action of the gene because they may have two copies but only one is actually active; determining which one that is can be very difficult. Thus, while this gene is often invoked as an example of a male biological basis of aggression, there have been no in-depth studies of this gene in females so we do not know if it functions the same way. We should note that the enzyme MAOA operates exactly the same in the females’ brains as it does in males.

This research focuses on the variation in allele frequencies for MAOA and the relationship that its expression has to early social and physiological experiences during development and its variation in functional outcomes in different social contexts. In other words, this is an underlying genetic element that plays an interesting role in affecting the brain structures that are associated with the expression of aggression. But the behavioral outcomes of gene variation are totally dependent on the patterns in early life experience and the social context in which some carriers of the low-production allele find themselves. The bottom line is that if you have a low-expression allele and you undergo severe childhood trauma or abuse, then the likelihood of your having problems in the neurological infrastructure of aggression that result in higher aggression is higher than if you had the regular-production allele.

Most people have heard of serotonin, but most do not know that it is tied to the neurotransmitter 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT for short). Of all the well-known neurotransmitters this is the one best recognized for affecting behavior, especially aggression. The main way in which 5-HT relates to aggression has been determined from studies of the variation in the receptors that interact with 5-HT. There are at least thirteen types of 5-HT receptors and multiple molecules that interact with, and regulate, 5-HT in the brain. In general, it appears that serotonin concentrations in the brain, and the way they interact with receptors, can modulate aggression and violent behavior in mammals, including humans (although the vast majority of the research has been done with rodents).

In general, low 5-HT levels are associated with higher levels of aggressive or impulsive behavior and high 5-HT levels and/or manipulation of the 5-HT receptors in different parts of the brain can act to reduce aggression. Genetic evidence for these impacts comes almost completely from studies of rodents: mice or rats missing specific genes that affect 5-HT concentrations or the production of 5-HT in certain brain regions are more aggressive. But this is not true for all 5-HT, as manipulation of certain receptors and of concentrations of 5-HT in different parts of the brain have different types of impacts on aggression, anxiety-related behavior, and impulsivity. In the few studies of humans that track 5-HT relating to aggression there is a negative relationship between the ability of 5-HT receptors to bind to neurotransmitters and aggression, which supports the notion that this molecule impacts the expression of aggressive behavior.

One of the most interesting findings from the 5-HT studies is that, in rodents, different types of 5-HT receptors have different impacts on expressed aggression, depending on whether the rodents were exhibiting “normal” territorial aggression or impulsive pathological aggression stimulated by drugs or electric shock. This suggests that the various genes that code for the different 5-HT types are involved in different systems in aggression and that they might in fact have multiple, even mutually negating, roles in the production and expression of aggressive behavior depending on the social context and the type of aggression expressed. So while 5-HT is definitely involved in the expression, and probably the modulation, of the level of aggression, there is no evidence that this is where aggression comes from.

There is ALSO a strong popular assumption that testosterone stimulates or enhances aggression, especially in males. First off, it is important to note that testosterone courses through both male and female bodies, but that on average, males have higher circulating levels than females. Testosterone is a steroid hormone closely related to estrogen and a suite of hormones called androgens. Little is known about the underlying genetic structures that influence testosterone, but there is no doubt that some genetic variation influences the production and regulation of testosterone in human bodies.

The concept that testosterone produced by males facilitates and increases aggression is an oversimplification and there are very weak or inconsistent correlations between testosterone levels and aggression in adult humans. Even when external sources of testosterone are administered to adults their aggression does not tend to increase, nor is there an increase in aggression at puberty when human males undergo a significant increase in the production of testosterone and the development of male secondary sexual characteristics.

There is evidence that in competitive or acute stress situations humans can respond by increasing the production of testosterone but there is no strong or consistent evidence that these increases result in increased aggressive behavior. The increase does appear to enhance muscle activity and efficiency and might also result in lower sensitivity to pain or punishment in both men and women. This might make individuals more likely to participate in aggressive competition, but it does not increase aggression per se. In some experiments the levels of circulating testosterone increase after dominance interactions and social competition, but again this is not necessarily tied to overly aggressive behavior. Exposure to sexual situations and to communal competitive events (like team sports) also appears to increase testosterone in males. Interestingly, males who are fathers and or long-term married partners show lower levels of testosterone than do nonfathers or unmarried males.

Overall, testosterone seems to be associated with the efficiency and activity of a variety of muscular and other physical systems, some of which are implicated in the expression of aggression. But contrary to popular misconceptions, testosterone itself is not associated in any causal way with increased aggressive behavior or in the patterns of the exhibition of aggression.

Despite popular notions that certain genes or genetic elements control or regulate the appearance and intensity of aggressive behaviors, there is no evidence for any one-to-one genetic controls, nor is there evidence for certain molecules or systems in the body that predetermine aggressive outcomes. There is no gene or system in the body that can be identified as “for aggression.” While it appears clear that genetic variation in neurotransmitters and hormones can be involved in the ways in which we express aggressive behavior, there is no direct or casual link. Our genes cannot make us aggressive.

As the anthropologist Ashley Montagu sagely cautioned, “It is essential that we not base our image of ourselves on false foundations. What is involved here is not simply the understanding of the nature of humanity, but also the image of humanity that grows out of that understanding.” Humans are not naturally aggressive, but they do have a great potential for aggression and violence. If we believe we are aggressive at our base, that males stripped of social constraints will resort to a brutish nature, then we will expect and accept certain types of violence as inevitable. This means that instead of really trying to understand and rectify the horrific and complex realities of rape, genocide, civil war, and torture, we will chalk at least a part of these events up to human nature. This is a dangerous state of mind that traps us in a vicious cycle of inaction and futility when it comes to moving forward as societies invested in understanding and managing violence.

Sure, certain things spur aggressive actions, but the common notions about our inner, natural aggressive tendencies (especially in males) ignores the complexity of human biology, psychology, history, and society. It downplays the myriad ways in which aggression is initiated and maintained, and oversimplifies what we can mean by, and understand about, human aggressive behavior. And, most dangerously, it enables a kind of inevitability in our communal sense of aggression and society, especially as it relates to males. This need not be the case.

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.”