Letting nature take its course…

The story Roberson tells in this week’s comic isn’t made up. It took me some seearching but I at last backtraced a vague but powerful memory of my youth of watching a documentary film where baby birds were dropping dead in a drought. It’s the kind of thing that sticks with you even as all the hows and wheres and whys fade away, and yet I had so much trouble finding any sign of it that I began to wonder if it was just a nasty figment of my imagination, conjured up in the mind of a man writing a comic at least in part about the dark side of reality television. I’d say reality television is just a very biased and manipulated version of a documentary, but a lot of the documentaries I’ve seen don’t seem much better. In fact, reality television might actually be the lesser evil in comparison since it doesn’t have any agenda beyond creative editing to make someone look stupider than they are because the producers have decided they’re the comic relief dummy of the show.

But back to my search. I was on the verge of giving up. It didn’t really matter anyhow, right? Zombie Ranch is a work of fiction, so why not just make things up pertinent to my point? Why did I feel such a need to validate that this documentary did, indeed happen and did, indeed leave a mark on my impressionable young mind that still burbles occasionally to the surface decades later?

And then, Eureka. I found it. Animals are Beautiful People:

An ironic title, given the memory that led me back to it. Other memories flooded back. They showed this in class in Junior High. It wasn’t all horror, far from it. In fact we all snickered at the depiction of the annual pilgrimage of the wildlife of the African desert to a certain spot to chow down on fermented fruit, basically spending a few days getting smashed out of their minds drunk in a way human festival attendees might find very familiar. Getting to watch something like that in school, sanctioned by the adults, felt deliciously naughty.

But then towards the film’s end, your soul paid the price. In the midst of a sudden drought, a lake had dried up into cracked earth within a matter of days, leaving the pelicans that had nested there stranded. Well, they could fly of course, so they weren’t technically stranded — but dozens of their just-hatched chicks could not. It was definitely not business as usual, but the adults waited as long as they could before thirst drove them to abandon the hatchlings. I captured some images of what happened next and sent them to Dawn as references… the entire flock of those fuzzy baby pelicans set off across the baking sands on foot, and the documentary crew filmed them as they died. It was all very artistically done, with narration drier than the former lake speaking of the tragedy unfolding and literally referring to it as a “death march.”

Nature is cruel. But more than that, I just could never get over the fact that a whole film crew, presumably well hydrated and supplied, was observing the doomed migration like indifferent gods. It’s the kind of thing that really calls into question the traditions of non-interference with the subjects. Could you help? Should you help? Is this letting nature take its course, or is it ghoulish voyeurism? To borrow from particle physics, we might be changing the outcome just by observing, much less anything more. Compound this with the claims that a lot of scenes in these films are deliberately staged including the aforementioned drunken fruit party and you’ve got a real double standard potentially going.

Now rounding up a flock of pelican chicks and transporting them to wetter environs would probably have been a logistical nightmare that could end up with them dead regardless, but if you had been part of that crew, could you have held that camera over those little dead bodies baking away? And if you did, would that stay in your brain when you tried to sleep that night? Hell, it’s stayed in my brain and I was only watching it play from a shitty VHS tape years after the fact and thousands of miles distant. Imagine being there, sipping from your canteen as those chicks dropped in their tracks, one by one, gasping their last breaths as their all too brief lives were burned away. Would you justify it as the right thing to do? Would you be so callous and hardened that you step through the aftermath just finding the best angle to capture their bodies?

I suppose it’s the same sort of hardening that allows people to clean up battlefields without wondering who the dead were or what dreams they had cut short. Or the hardening that lets people ranch zombies. But man, I’d be terrible at the job, and maybe that’s a good thing, too.