Factually! with Adam Conover - On Animals and Humans with Susan Orlean

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Susan Orlean joins Adam to discuss our complex, often contradictory relationships with the animals we love (and those we eat). You can check out her new book, On Animals, at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again as I dive into some of the weirdest and wildest reaches of human knowledge with an incredible expert who's going to blow our homes. They become members of our family. They sleep in our beds. We spend tens of thousands of dollars on surgeries for them, even though we know that maybe doing so is not quite advisable. We can't help it because we love these animals so much that we literally share a habitat with them. love these animals so much that we literally share a habitat with them. Like sometimes I look at my dog and think, is she living in my house or am I living in her kennel? Because it smells more like the latter than it does like the former, frankly. Now that's what we do with dogs, cats, and other animals we keep as pets. But there's other animals we love, like cows, despite the fact that we have

also created a vast, stinking, earth-destroying industry to kill them and consume their flesh with our friends and family. It's a pretty weird contradiction. How is it that we can find animals cute and still throw them into a system that on its best days murders millions of animals constantly? Well, we will also go to such great lengths as a society, as individuals, to save specific animals or specific species. We'll pass laws to protect an endangered species, or we'll go to great lengths just to save a specific animal that we saw a picture of because someone told us a sad story about it. And then, after doing that, we'll go have a steak for dinner. My point is

our relationships with animals are pretty contradictory. And when you start to look closely at them, they reveal fascinating things about us as humans, what we value, what our strangest obsessions are. It is fascinating stuff. And on the show today to talk about it, we have someone I am so excited to bring on the show. She is without a doubt one of the very best nonfiction writers we have working in America today. And I am personally an enormous fan of hers. life-changing piece of nonfiction. She wrote one of my favorite books of the last two years, The Library Book, and she has a new book out called On Animals. I'm so excited to have her once again. Please welcome the fantastic writer, Susan Orlean. Susan, thank you so much for being here. It's such a thrill to have you on the show. Oh, thank you. I'm thrilled to be on. I've been such a fan of your work for so many years.

I just want to say before we get talking about your new book, that your last book, the library book, got me, as I think you said happened yourself in the book, got me using my local library again for the first time in decades, which is the L.A. Public Library. And I love that book so much. And thank you for writing it. That's all I want to say about that. Well, I accept that. And I actually feel like the collateral impact of the book, namely getting people to go back to the library, wasn't something that I had in mind as I wrote it. But as an after effect, I feel like, oh my God, this is fantastic. I wrote part of the book at the library because like a fool, I had been renting a WeWork space. And then one day I didn't feel like going to WeWork. And I thought, I guess I'll just maybe go to the library. I'm working at the library. And I thought, why was that? Why am I paying WeWork

for essentially the same thing, which is a desk and Wi-Fi? So I canceled my WeWork immediately and finished the book at the library. And the library also has, especially if you go to a central library like this LA Central Public Library that we have here in LA, it has almost every book that you could possibly want to read on the shelves. And you can just take them off the shelves, use them at your desk, and take them home with you if you want. I had the experience of going to the library and saying, hold on a second, I can take all these home? Like I had forgotten somehow. And it felt like magical that I could, that I could do that. And then I started having the experience again for the first time in

many years when I, when I want to do research for a new project, instead of just resorting to the internet, I went to the library and started pulling books off the shelves and I found so much more, I'm sorry, this is, this is turning into a PSA, which I didn't mean it to be. But, um, I, I, I had a really wonderful revelatory experience doing that. And I think a lot of people did from reading that book. Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things about the work that I do, quite honestly, is I like to encourage people to look at something that they may have overlooked. So there is a real mission attached to this. And it can sometimes be something extremely ordinary, like a library. I mean, that's not an exotic locale. But I think part of what I wanted to do is to say,

if you really look closely at these things, they're kind of amazing. And, you know, I'm also interested in introducing people to things they didn't even know existed, but there's something special about saying this thing you've overlooked is actually really quite amazing. Yeah. And that's a quality that I really love in your writing because it makes me reevaluate those things I've taken for granted in that way. So your new book is called On Animals.

And what is it now? Animals are obviously all over our lives. I live with an animal. I'm pretty sure you do as well. I'm sure many of our listeners do. What do you feel that we are neglecting about animals? What is that revelation in this case? This is a collection of 15 essays I've written over the last decades, and they examine everything from the American Humane Film and Television Unit, which oversees the treatment of animals on movie sets, to a teenage girl who was a pigeon racer, the story of Keiko, the whale who starred in the Free Willy movies. So it's a, it really ranges far and wide. And part of the purpose, of course, is to illuminate the lives of these animals that either in a big way like pigeons or in a very specific way, like Keiko, the whale who played Willie are stories about these kind of alien beings that

we coexist with. I think the bigger message is about humans and about seeing how humans seem deeply into humans in relation to these non-human creatures. Yeah. Like understanding what about humans through maybe we can get into one of the examples,, and to help us understand what you mean by that. Like, I'd love to hear about, and a lot of these stories I've, I have read in my, you know, past decades of being a New Yorker reader. But so I have a, I have a somewhat fuzzy in some cases, memory of some of them, but, but yeah, let's talk about some of them. I mean, the, the one about the, in the film and television industry, that's the industry I work in. Yeah. What, how do you cover that? Well, this is a perfect example of the kind of story that I love to do. I happen to be at the movies and as the end credits roll and then up pops the usual, no animals were harmed logo. And suddenly I thought, oh, well, wait, who, who knows that no animal? I mean,

how, what is, what does this mean? And who is awarding this good housekeeping seal of approval? And we know this phrase, but where does it come from? Yeah. So familiar that it can almost be a punchline. I mean, we all know it backward and forward. And suddenly I thought, wait a minute, what is this actually? And, you know, it couldn't have been more intriguing to do a little homework, discover that American Humane has this unit of people who go on set and monitor the way the animals are being treated. And partly this evolved because animals used to be treated so badly in movies. And, you know, if an animal died, it was just replaced by another one. I mean, I used to watch these, you know,

me and my partner Lisa love Westerns and we were watching the old Western Stagecoach, which is a wonderful Western, has these incredible horse stunts that they don't do now. But when you're watching them, she was like, you know how they do these, they strung up a metal wire and they run the horses through the wire and so the horses would be tripped

to simulate the horse being shot. And it looks incredible, but the horses would all, I mean, you're watching horses die when you watch the movie. Right. And, you know, this was something that was just done as a matter of course. Then there was a famous movie, Jesse James, in which a cowboy is shown riding his horse off a cliff. And in the movie, you only see the very beginning of the horse jumping off the cliff, but the footage got out showing the horse landing, breaking all its legs, being, you know, being euthanized.

And people were outraged. I think it was something about the vividness of this one image and realizing that this animal was just being sacrificed for a shot. And there was a big uproar. And I will say, as a side note, that children weren't treated particularly well on movie sets either at that time. Many adults, too. Many. I mean, currently we're having we're, you know, have a lot of awareness accident that children and animals were sort of lumped together because they were not being protected. And in the beginning, a lot of the focus was on horses because horses really, I mean, there were so many Westerns being shot and horses really were treated as disposable. And they were treated horribly. You know, it's a lot faster to trip a horse with a wire than to train a horse to fall on command. And so it was expediency. It was these movies were being cranked out, you know, a dime a dozen, pretty much.

you know, a dime a dozen, pretty much. There was a real uproar and a bunch of people, including Roy Rogers, signed a petition saying this is, you know, I never treat my horse this way. Trigger knows that if he does a good job, I'll pat him on the nose and give him a lump of sugar. And I never use a harsh word. I mean, it's actually this very touching letter that he wrote supporting this petition. And Gene Autry and a lot of other TV cowboys who said, no, this is really terrible. TV cowboys who said, no, this is really terrible. So there was a code written that meant, that basically said, you know, you can't treat animals in a cruel way. And over in, even though the focus was initially on horses, it slowly extended to covering really any living non-human being. And that's the way it stands now.

It protects worms, cockroaches. Really? Mice. Yeah. I mean, and some of what, you know, there was a little bit of tongue in cheek as I wrote the piece because some of the regulations seem crazy. But the feeling at American Humane is if it's a living thing, it should be protected and it shouldn't just be. In fact, I asked the head of the film and TV unit, if you use a cockroach in a movie, can you squish it after the scene? And she said, no, you can't squish it.

It's an actor. And I said, I said, well, if you have a cockroach in your kitchen and she said, then I would squish it. That's really, that's really funny. But so I remember from this piece that like, if you've got a scene with what, like a hundred cockroach, like a box of cockroaches is released. You can imagine a scene where you open a door and cockroaches run out or a horror movie where they run over people. That's right. They crawl over someone's face or something. They have to like count those and make sure that like nothing bad has happened to any of them in order to qualify for that. No animals have been harmed seal?

Yes. And, you know, they're very serious about it being literally true that this movie was made and no animal was harmed in the making of the movie. You know, and look, I think that we instinctively see a hierarchy of mammals to reptiles to down to insects and maybe feel. I mean, personally, if there were a mosquito in a movie, I'd be the first one to squish it. I mean, I have no sympathy for mosquitoes. But their attitude is, look, these are animals that are being used in entertainment and we are protecting them. And what happens to them when they leave the set is not as much our concern. But when they're on the set in a movie, they have to be protected. And the big concern, of course, is with mammals, with dogs and cats and bears and obviously horses. And in fact, I don't know if you remember the show Luck

that ran very briefly, and it was about a horse track and gamblers. And several horses were injured in the, I think the pilot. And horses, if they break their legs, generally have to be euthanized. They really can't recover. So they were, they were euthanized and the show went off. The show was canceled. I think a big part of it was that they got into so much difficulty filming these scenes with horses and not injuring them that they just felt they couldn't go forward.

Well, horse racing itself like hurts and kills horses. I mean, here in LA, there was like a constant couple of years ago, rolling controversy about the local Santa Anita racetrack that horses kept dying at this racetrack. And how can they stop the horses from dying? And it's like, well, at the end of the day, horse racing kills horses. Like they're bred to run really fast and they're very fragile and they're being pushed to their limit. And that's just what happens if you're doing that on a movie set. If you're having them run that fast, the same thing is going to happen, I suppose. Yeah. And I think that we all respond to real images of real animals in a movie versus CGI.

images of real animals in a movie versus CGI. But also, until recently, CGI wasn't good enough to replace real animals. Also, I don't know anything about what CGI costs, but I'm sure it's not cheap. And it might be actually cheaper to use live animals rather than a CGI animal. But there's danger inherent in some of the stuff we ask animals to do in movies. And that's where it becomes a pretty charged topic. The movie that I went on set to watch, which was actually hilarious, was a movie called Soccer Dog. And, you know, it wasn't, they call it light action, as opposed to medium action or heavy action. Because, you know, what the biggest challenge for the dog in the movie was to bounce a soccer ball on his nose. This is like out of the Air Bud series of movies, sort of that kind of movie. Got it.

Yeah. So it was a very benign environment and it was actually pretty entertaining to go on that set. It was actually pretty entertaining to go on that set. I mean, they had a representative from American Humane who was there overseeing it, making sure that the dog had water when he wanted water, got a break when he needed a break. And, you know, it was funny, even though it was also nice that the dog had a good time being in a movie. Mm-hmm. It is. That does sound very sweet and benign.

But you're right about how this illuminates things about humans and the way we are structuring our own world and our relationships with animals. Like what strikes me is that on the set, you've got this representative making sure that nothing bad is happening to any of the animals on set, yet I'm sure at lunch they're serving beef, right? And something bad happened to the animals before they got to set, right? You could, you can't kill a cow on set, but you can kill a cow at a meat processing plant and then bring it to set. And, you know, by the same token, like just to say a little more bluntly, you know, we're in the middle of a labor,

brewing labor dispute here in Hollywood. What about how poorly often, you know, crew members are treated, right? And, you know, the growing problem of, you know, folks falling asleep behind the wheel because they were forced to work a 20-hour day and not allowed transportation and, you know, that sort of thing. You know, it's interesting that like, okay, all these measures seem great. I don't want animals to suffer in this situation. But then it begs the question, why is this the situation that we care the most about to have a monitor there just to get this little slogan at the end? There's no slogan that

says no crew member was harmed in the making of the production or anything like that. And why isn't there? I'm trying to puzzle that out. Well, I think it's a very interesting part of this dynamic. And that is that we feel an important stewardship toward animals. We feel that as humans, we are above animals on the food chain. And so we are charged with caring for them in a way that we don't always find the capacity to feel that much care for other humans. And it seems so contrarian and weird. But to other people, you bring a whole host of issues and judgment. And somebody is having a hard time. Part of our brain thinks, well, maybe it's their fault that they're having a hard time. Maybe they contributed somehow to their woes and maybe they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take care of themselves. I don't think we, I think we can bring to animals a very pure sense

of empathy and care. I'm not saying this is a good human quality, but I'm saying, I think it is a human quality that we can look at animals with very little judgment. look at animals with very little judgment. And we aren't so good at looking at people with very little judgment. It's just not wired in the same way as our empathy for animals. And it may just be the sense of superiority that people feel or, and superiority is maybe not the right word, but we feel that we have much more power than animals do. So it's up to us to care for them. Yeah. But I agree with you that, you know, a lot of what I focused on in the book was the confusing and very complex way we relate to animals. That sometimes we are our best selves with animals, which of course is a good thing. But if we're at the same time not our best selves with other humans, it becomes a little confusing. Like, what does that mean about what we value? And I mean, the story I wrote about Keiko, the whale who starred in the Free Willy movies, was a perfect example. I mean, millions and millions of dollars were spent on Keiko,

who had been captured when he was a baby and had lived in captivity his whole life. And there was a desire after Free Willy came out and was a big success. And people said, well, wait a minute, what happened to the whale in the movie? Why doesn't he get to go free? And, you know, Warner Brothers was like, oops, we hadn't thought about that. I mean, seriously, they were completely caught off guard. They thought this will really activate people's interest in wild whale conservation. And then but people instead were like, hey, what what'd you do with that whale? Well, the movie is literally about a whale in captivity. And there's a little boy who says, oh, I want the whale to be free.

And then he jumps over the barrier and everyone cries in the movie theater. And so he has the natural question is, well, the whale made the movie. If that whale's in captivity, you you of course want the same thing for that whale. This is actually to me, one of the funniest moments that I wrote about because the producers were like, Oh, Oh, whoops. We hadn't thought of that. Even though it couldn't be more explicitly what the movie was about. Never underestimate the stupidity of Hollywood executives is something I've learned in this industry. And I think that really goes to show. Unbelievable.

So I'm sorry. Please go on. caught off guard and had to really backpedal and said, oh, oh, okay, we're going to raise money to move Keiko from this horrible aquarium that he had been in to a better aquarium. But, and that they spent, you know, several million dollars moving him from Mexico to Oregon and people still weren't satisfied. And they were saying, well, no, no, no, we don't want him in another aquarium. We want him free. Never in the history of orca human interaction has an orca been reintroduced to the wild. This has never been done.

Millions of dollars were spent trying to teach Keiko to be wild and to introduce him to wild whales, get him used to wild whales, teach him to eat, catch fish, even though he really preferred frozen fish from the commissary. You know, and this was, it was a cautionary tale. I mean, I would have loved Keiko to have gone free. It was not by any measure a very likely outcome. Yeah. How did it end? What happened?

He was moved to Iceland where the training continued to try to get him to spend more time on his own and to start catching fish. He was scared of wild whales, so mostly he avoided them. And then one day he thought, oh, wait a minute, they look like me. And he started hanging out with these whales. with these whales. He then left Iceland and cropped up in Norway, which is the only country that allows whaling. So not a cool idea, but he hung out, he played with children. He was, you know, he was so used to people. He was very friendly. He let kids pet him and hang out with him. He then returned to Iceland after his little sojourn. I guess he just wanted to come back home.

He came back to the pen in Iceland where he had been kept. And unfortunately, he caught pneumonia and he died. He was about 36 when he died, which is on the younger side for a wild whale to, to die. So his story was really poignant. He did have a little time in the wild though, which is more than most

captive animals ever have. Yeah. But that's such a man. What a story. I mean, there's so many dimensions to that. It's such an interesting thing for us to want for an animal that, you know, I don't know if you'd say he was domesticated, but for an animal raised in captivity who is intelligent enough to be trained, you know, and to become accustomed to that, for us to then want the animal to be wild, there is like, I don't know, when we're talking about what we value about animals, we do value their wildness so much, but sometimes in ways that don't make sense, I suppose. Right. I mean, the truth is there were a lot of people who privately thought that this endeavor was foolish, that a whale that had been captured when he was so young would probably never that had been captured when he was so young would probably never accustom himself to being wild.

But there was such a kind of tsunami of emotion toward him being repatriated to the wild that it was as if they couldn't stop. Yeah. And, you know, maybe the thing that would have made the most sense is keep him captive in the very, very best possible setting, but give up on the sort of pipe dream of him going wild. I think that might have been the wisest thing to do, but people didn't want to give up on this. They really were determined to have this story conclude in the kind of triumph of him, you know, heading into the wilderness. you know, heading into the wilderness. We wanted the real Hollywood ending. But that tsunami of emotion, as you put it,

is that's such a great way to put it because that is what we so often feel towards animals. You know, the reason I have, or part of the reason I feel I have a pet is to just be a love receptacle for something for me to put emotion into. And, you know, collectively that is so powerful. Like that tsunami of emotion is enough to get, you know, Hollywood film producers

who are very money conscious to have this outside observer and like, you know, screw up all their shooting days, make everything take way longer because they have to count all the cockroaches or whatever just to get that little credit. You know, they look at it and they say, well, we'll lose more money if we don't do it this way because people love animals so fucking much,

you know? And so that's such a powerful force. And yet, on the other hand, that's not powerful enough for us to eradicate factory farming, seemingly. Right. And that's where it gets very confusing and where humans seem to be able to maintain two realities simultaneously that they can feel deep emotion about one particular whale going free, but even in a more direct way, would not feel nearly as impassioned about contributing to the conservation of habitat. Because you don't have the emotional payback when you say, I'm going to work and donate money to habitat protection for wild animals. You think, well, where's the love in that? Where do you get the feeling of connection that you get when you think my goal is to see Keiko go free. Right. You know, and similarly, you can be passionate about seeing Keiko go free, but not question, as you say, something like factory farming. Somehow you don't connect all of these different experiences of the animal world in the same way that would seem logical, but we just

don't. I mean, I was just talking to my neighbor who is a huge animal lover and there's a gopher in her garden, eating her garden. And she said, I'm going to get a gun. I'm going to get a gun and I'll just blow that fucker's head off. And you're like, how could that, how could that be? You, you love animals. You, you have a cat or whatever. Right, right. How do you square that?

I know. And, I mean, look, I'm not saying I'm above this in any way. I have contradictions in my life that are absolutely along the same line. But, you know, we compartmentalize in ways, you know, and the animal kingdom is huge. Obviously, it's not, your dog is not the same as a possum with rabies. I mean, you know, there is, this is an enormous universe. And it seems absolutely fitting that you have different feelings about different members of this universe um that you can love a dog but like set a trap for a rat in your basement and that those things are not necessarily – they can coexist in the same human meat sack.

Yeah. And that contradiction within us is like what that story reveals. That is so cool. I really want to hear about more of these, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Susan Orlean. Okay. We're back with Susan Orlean. Uh, I'd love to hear some more stories, uh, from this book. I know you did a story on taxidermy, which is a very, a very strange topic when it comes to our relationship with animals, why taxidermy would be something that we would want to do. So, so explain, well, maybe it's not weird to have a

dead animal in your house than it is to have an alive animal in your house. I'm not sure which one I think is stranger. But tell me, tell me about this story. Well, this story came about in a funny way. I did not spend much time in my life thinking about taxidermy. And I was visiting a friend. He's an artist who paints a lot of animals, a lot of natural history sort of subjects. He had a five-inch thick taxidermy supply catalog sitting on his coffee table. Now, at that time, I thought that there were maybe two or three taxidermists in the world. You know, I just did not think of it as a thriving industry. And yet here was this huge supply catalog, which to me would be indicative of a large and robust industry. And I went home and I Googled taxidermy thinking, you know, the phone number of the one taxidermist in the world would come up. And instead I got like 11 and a half million hits.

And so, you know, I was taken aback thinking, OK, I guess I underestimated this. And lo and behold, one of the first things that popped up was that the world taxidermy championships were coming up in about a week in Springfield, Illinois. And I thought, I have, I have met my story and here I go. Let me just say, it sounds really fun to be you and to write about the things that you write about, to see something that I say, that's going to be my story. I'm going to go track that down. I know I'm going to meet some characters there. It seems like a really fun way to work. Oh, my God. It's the best.

It's the best. I love. I mean, what could be more fun than to see something that you don't know anything about and say, oh, I'm going to go learn about that. Oh, my God. Just to show up in a place that you would never go otherwise. I mean, in my life, as a, you know, who I am, the Venn diagram of my life, as one would expect, and taxidermy does not have a huge overlap. Right. So it's a place that in a million years, I would never have found myself. So it, oh my God,

I have the best job. And I love writing about things I know very little about. So I have that experience often of being in an environment where I look around and think, I cannot believe this is my job, that I'm in Norway with a whale, or I'm in Springfield, Illinois with a bunch of people stuffing rabbits. And yeah, I have the best job. I really do. I'm intensely jealous of you and what you do. But let's please tell me what you found when you went there. Well, it was amazing. First of all, part of what was so funny is it was being held in a Crowne Plaza Hotel, which is like the most generic kind of middle management hotel chain in America where very ordinary things happen like sales conferences. And, you know, it couldn't be

more boring and more ordinary, but you walk in and the first thing that you run into is a guy carrying a huge moose head and a guy carrying a giant mount of a beaver. And my favorite thing actually was waiting for the elevator because the door would open and you wouldn't know what animal you were going to encounter because people were carrying their mounts around all over the place. And so, you know, the elevator would open and there would be a guy with a tiger cub or, you know, a wild turkey on a log. And it was visually such a hoot. It was also really interesting on two accounts. Number one, taxidermists love animals. And I think, you know, you go into it thinking, oh, they deal with dead animals and that's so awful.

But actually, they love animals and they love looking at animals and they love making these animals look alive. So that's the other part of the observation, which was that they are doing the thing that we humans find the most intriguing and spooky and fascinating, which is to bring something back to life. And some of these mounts were so lifelike that you would get a little spooked. You know, you would see a snarling cougar and you kind of would inch away a little bit because they look so real. And so there's something of a black magic quality that I found so interesting that this was the, you know, look, as humans, this has forever kind of been our persistent question is can a, can something dead be brought back to life? So they're, they're sort of trafficking in this world of occult and spookiness that,

and religion, obviously where deep down desire and fear that we have of, of the reanimation of the dead. Yeah. And, you know, fascination and horror simultaneously. The other thing that I was really drawn to is, and it's something that I love writing about, and that is that there's a for perfection, that taxidermists are like so many of us, they want to master this thing that they're passionate about. They want it to be perfect. And, you know, it's funny, I do a piece of writing, I want it to be perfect. And then I forget that somebody who's doing a mount of a squirrel has the exact same impulse, which is, I want the squirrel to be perfect. I want the whiskers to be

really at the right angle and not sticking out too much, but, you know, at the exact angle that a squirrel's whiskers should be at. And that kind of unrequited desire to make something perfect really interested me. Yeah, that is a very universal human quality that I think about all the time, that for any human endeavor, there are people trying to do it perfectly, trying to do it the most excell it perfectly trying to do it the most excellently trying to do it the most quickly trying to do it whatever it is um and that and you found that again through looking at our interactions with animals that's so that's so cool did you feel you came away understanding taxidermy a bit more because i think it has a reputation as like why would people want that right that's a lot of people's first reaction.

And did you come away from it going like, you know, maybe I should get some taxidermy for my house? Well, I have to confess, I, you know, when you do these immersive pieces of narrative nonfiction, you the hunter gets captured by the game a little bit. And I thought, oh, my God, I want taxidermy. And I started collecting taxidermy. My husband was a little put off because you can, you know, you can get taxidermy that's really good and then you can get some that's really bad. And I mean, some of the bad taxidermy is almost more interesting than the really good taxidermy. Yeah, wait, what is bad taxidermy? What does that look like? Well, you know, where the expression, it looks like the animal was, you know, electroshocked or, you know, where its eyes are bugging out or it has a very weird stance, you know, where they

get the expression all wrong. Because it's almost half sculpture as an art or something where they're trying to create a scene and an emotion and a moment in time the same way a sculptor might in a way. Oh, exactly. In fact, taxidermy in the olden days was very static. You would just mount a deer head and that was that. And taxidermists call it fish on a stick, which I love. You know, just this absolutely expressionless, no movement, no motion in the animal's body. And then really starting maybe 20 years ago, they began doing very natural taxidermy.

And the desire was to make the animal really look not only alive, but as if it was in motion. The animals that the entire body is used. And also, you know, on a mount that was something other than just a square of wood. Yeah. You know, it's a panther mounted on something that looks like an icy rock. So it is absolutely sculpture. I mean, even in its crudest forms, it's sculpture. But the focus increasingly is on making something that is in itself artistic. And it's not just that it's

an animal, but that it's a piece of art. Yeah. And so you are now a taxidermy collector as a result of this. I was. I kind of maxed out. I had a fox. I had a couple of birds. I was sort of getting obsessed with it. And my husband said, sold the house that where we had the taxidermy and it was out in the country and it seemed appropriate to have taxidermy. And when we were packing up and I looked at the taxidermy and I tried to picture it in L.A. in my house and I kind of had an out of body experience. I thought, I don't know, that's like, that doesn't seem quite like the right setting for a fox, a stuffed fox. So I actually ended up selling the taxidermy. I mean, this is the nature of being a reporter who writes about a lot of different stuff. I mean, I have the flotsam and jetsam of many stories that have accumulated in my life. heard of where you develop an obsession and start to collect it and then suddenly shake out of it and say, well, what was I doing? Extremely, extremely funny.

And I do think that I love writing about obsession. So inevitably, I'm around people who truly believe they've found the single most important thing in the universe. And, you know, if you're really trying to dig into their minds and feel some understanding of what motivates them, suddenly you find yourself thinking, whoa, that's kind of cool. And this has happened to me with almost every story that I've found myself getting so close to the subject that I begin feeling that same urge. Like, wow, I kind of want to do that. I kind of want to do that. And maybe it's partly because the people doing it seem so happy. Like they are really into stuffing squirrels. And you think, wow, maybe that's the key to happiness. Well, even if your goal as a reporter is to understand someone else's point of view and to work your way into it, how could you not, once you understand it fully, adopt the point of view? If any point of view is commensurate with any other, of course that's what would end up happening to you. But it also, I don't know, your writing feeds this need in us, we look at other people and go, that person seems so happy doing that.

Why are they happy? Could I be that happy? Yeah. And definitely people who have a focal point of their lives have always fascinated me because when I wrote The Orchid Thief, you know, I met one person after another who felt that they had figured out the sort of key to feeling happy was being absorbed completely in the world of orchids and collecting orchids and thinking about orchids and going to orchid shows. And it's a very soothing worldview in a way. I mean, it makes things very simple because you have the answer always to the question of what's important what's life all about well it's about collecting

more orchids yeah there's something so there's something so transfixing about it and and i often when i'm thinking about people like that i wonder like is that's what's missing from my life. Do I, have I not found the perfect hobby that, cause I'm, I feel like a classic dilettante. I get interested in, you know, I mean, I'm very much a cliche. I learned how to bake sourdough bread over the pandemic. I got really good at it. I spent six months at it, you know, and then I got so good. And now I can bake a good loaf of bread. If you asked me to bake you a loaf of bread, I could do it, you know, but I sort of topped out and then I'm onto the next thing.

You know, I, I'm, I have, I have a hundred different things like that. I picked up birdwatching. I enjoy birdwatching. I do it a couple of times a month. I'm not, uh, flying around the country to do a big year, like in the, you know, famous book or movie about that. Um, and, but then I think, is that the wrong way to live? Should I instead devote myself to one thing? Do I have it within me to do that? Am I missing out?

Yeah. And I think that that has always interested me, that I feel like I am by definition and, you know, proudly or otherwise, I don't know, but I'm not a joiner. And I can't quite imagine saying I am a sourdough person. Like that is who I am. And I am, you know, I'm really into it. And I'm on sourdough message boards. And I'm, you know, this is my identity and I feel comfortable having my individuality sort of subsumed by this greater interest. So when I meet people, because I meet a lot of people for whom that is actually what they want. They enjoy, they find comfort in it. They find meaning in it.

They find identity in it to say, I am a fill in the blank, you know, whatever it is that is what their, the way their decision tree is built is always with this central principle. And I envy it. I don't think it's anything I could ever do, but I certainly envy the logical order that that would give your life. Yeah, man. Well, let's come back to animals for the end of this interview. Has you, you, I believe, did I not see you tweet that you have a puppy? Did I see this? Yes. Well, like you, I was playing pandemic bingo and I felt that besides doing a jigsaw puzzle and baking bread, a jigsaw puzzle and baking bread, I should get a puppy. So we already had a dog and a cat. And I suddenly felt like I had to get a puppy. And it made no sense. I certainly was pretty well padded with animals. But I it was like, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

with animals, but I, it was like, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Um, so we went and got a puppy who, you know, you get a puppy and you think, what was I thinking? Like, they're like crazy people. Yeah. But he is also absolutely hilarious and adorable and, and a huge, time sink i mean yeah i had sort of forgotten because my dog is 11 and she is completely trained and she's very chill and she doesn't require life i mean basically i say hi to her all day long and she hangs out with me and we're at peace. And the puppy is like somebody dropped a nuclear bomb in our house. And there's just so much to do. But do you, as a result of this, and I know you've done this reporting over many years, so you've been thinking of these issues for a long time, but when you are interacting with that puppy or when you're, when you're looking at your own desire for the puppy, do you have any insight into what exactly is going on, you know, to that, to the kind of

mystery of why we want these animals in our lives in the first place? You know, do you, do you look at that puppy and think, ah, well, you know, here's something I can draw from my reporting on that to help me understand what the fuck it is I'm doing right now. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, I adore my grown-up dog and I love my cat. Getting a puppy is, you know, a different experience. But the amount, the sensation of being in love with this puppy is so delicious. I mean, I love being in love.

I love that feeling of he's so cute. I just want to hug him and squish him and, you know, and kiss him. And it's just, it frees you up. And look, I have, I love my husband. I love my son. It's complicated loving people. You don't always have that feeling of just, you are so cute. I could just squish you kind of. And that feeling is so exhilarating. It's such, I mean, we feel good when we feel that pure affection and emotion and, and nothing, you need nothing more than to have that feeling. You don't need anything back. You don't, you don't calibrate according to whether you're a little bit mad at the person or not, or whether they clean their room up or not. It's, it's just, I mean, even when the dog is bad and we've had all sorts of trouble housebreaking this dog, you can't quite, it's like you, you, you forgive them. You sort of go beyond it and think, oh, he's so maddening. I can't believe he's still not housebroken. He's so cute. I could just squish him. And it's a great feeling. It's a, I mean, I think you feel enlarged by that emotion. Yeah. I mean, it feels diminishing. It feels like this way your heart is enlarged by that sensation of affection.

Yeah. Yeah, they are. It feels often that they are fulfilling some deep emotional need in us that we, as you say, we often don't even get from our own family members that like, you know, I mean, my partner, I don't don't even think that's the case. I think that if we had children, we would still want to have the animals because they are fulfilling something in us that is, that is separate from that. That's kind of, that's kind of irreplaceable. That is like, I mean, if I were to put on my, my evolutionary biologist hat, it's like they have somehow like tapped into this, this, this need, you know, where the, where the ants milking the aphids, you know, that they've, they've somehow parasitized us so that we, you know, because we have this desire for them. Um, just, I don't know the Michael Pollan book about the tulips and how the tulips took advantage of our need for beauty,

right. To propagate themselves. It's like that thing. But it's so, yeah, it's like necessary to human life in some way. Yeah, and it is really different. One could say more superficial than the love you feel for a human. But I would say rather than comparing them because they are very different, there is a way

that you are flooded with a sense of joy and pleasure when you, you know, your dog crawls in your lap while you're reading and snuggles with you. And it is, it's pure endorphin joy. It's as uncomplicated an emotion as I think you can have. And people are more complicated and our relationships with each other are more complicated. Maybe you feel that when you first meet someone and you first have fallen in love. And, you know, as you are with a partner for longer, it's been borne out by scientists that you feel different, a different kind of love for them. It's not the same as what you feel in the first six weeks when you meet someone and you're giddy and you're...

Limerence. Yeah. Yeah. Is the word I've heard. Yeah. It's such a great word. And I think with animals, you can keep having that feeling to some degree, that pure kind of giddy sense of, you know, even my 11 year old dog, I sometimes just look at her face and think, oh my God, she's so cute. I can't stand it. And it's, it's a great feeling. And I adore my husband and I don't look at him and go, oh my God, he's so cute. Yeah, no, it's true. You know, with Lisa,

whenever our dog is doing something cute, when she wants attention, she rolls on her back, you know, and puts her paws in the air. And every single time I can go, look at what the dog's doing. And Lisa goes, oh my God, look at that. And we'll like twice a day, we have the exact

same conversation and we never get sick of it. And that's not true of anything else in our lives that we could say the same thing over and over again. Oh, my God. I mean, this is a conversation that I have with my husband so often where we will look at our puppy and say, that dog is so beautiful. And we say it as if we have just discovered this. Yes. And yet we will say it twice a day. Yeah.

And then the next day, again, it's like this revelation. Oh my God, that dog is so beautiful. And you wouldn't do that if you had a painting, if you had a Picasso in your house, if you had a Monet in your house, you wouldn't say, look at the, we have the Mona Lisa hanging on your wall. You wouldn't say twice a day,

look at the Mona Lisa, it is so beautiful. But you would say that about your dog. Right, it gets you in some very primal way. And I think the feeling is very primal. It's something elemental where you just feel flooded with some joy. Because to me, it feels very joyful. joy that because to me it feels very joy joyful like yeah there's something where you just feel like giddy with the incredible discovery that the dog is so cute even though you said it six hours earlier and what's funny is all all that we're describing right now is these are these are facts

about humans not about animals themselves. This is our response to them, which is, I mean, that's really interesting to me because your book is called On Animals. It sounds like it could be called On Humans. That's a worse title. But you know, like that is what you're really writing about. Am I wrong? Oh, absolutely. You know, writing about animals completely subtracted from the human world is something that a naturalist might do, a zoologist, you know, where you would be, it would be a journal of observations of an animal behavior. behavior. Once you enter into some kind of relationship with the animal, even if it's a wild animal, it becomes so much a reflection of you as the observer, you as the owner of the pet, you as the zookeeper, you as the horseback rider and how you navigate that relationship across species, which is, you know, when you think about it, a pretty amazing thing that we have relationships with nonhumans. Some are very simple relationships. Some are very complex relationships. And we do it

without the power of language and without really knowing how their minds work. And yet we do. We do manage it somehow. And it tells you a lot about us, without a doubt. And it tells you a lot about us, without a doubt. Yeah. I mean, when you put it that way, it's like such an incredible thing that we do it at all, which brings us back fully around to the point you made at the beginning, which is your work illuminating these things that we take for granted and taking another look at them and appreciating them. I feel that you've really done that for me over the course of this conversation. I can't thank you enough for coming on to to tell us about the book, Susan. Once again, it's called On Animals. It's available, I assume, wherever people can get a book.

Yes, absolutely. Anywhere that you can get a book. And thank you for having me on the show. I've enjoyed this so much. Oh, I'm so glad. Thank you so much for being on, Susan. And next time you write a book, we'll have to have you on again or earlier. The deal. Well, thank you once again to Susan Orlean for coming on the show. Man, wasn't she incredible? Wasn't that an amazing interview?

I had such a blast talking to her. I hope you had a blast listening to it. If you want to check out the book, go once again to factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And remember, when you buy a book there, you'll be supporting not just this show, but also your local bookstore. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on.

You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on Factually. that was a hate gun podcast