Where the wild things aren’t

ITHACA, N.Y., the Patent Office — On a recent afternoon when it was my turn to look after the girls, I shooed them out to help our neighbor Gary with his gardening, propped my feet up on my desk, surfed The Guardian’s home page and found myself looking at giant pandas. It was a photo essay on a Chinese conservation center. I noticed that several of the adult pandas were wearing cheap gloves and sneakers. “Keepers who interact with the pandas must wear costumes in order to mimic conditions of the wild,” I read, surprised. I’d heard of condor orphans raised by bird puppets, but pandas? Their vegetarianism, their sad-mime demeanor, their eccentricities — like doing headstands while peeing on trees in their amorous season to leave their scent closer to nose level — all suggest souls more refined than those of bullet-headed buzzards. Would they really accept a man as father figure — on the strength of a half-assed Halloween costume?

Fifty meters from the window of my study, my 2-year-old Freya had tackled Gary’s dog Rudy in an effort to hug him. Layla, two years Freya’s senior, loomed over Gary’s koi pool with a shovel held aloft like a triton. I think of these girls as advanced in their way. But maybe they too could be taken in by such a ruse.

The goal of the research center is to release captive-born pandas back into the wild, but honestly, come on. The first releasee, a male by the name of Xiang Xiang, meaning “lucky,” celebrated freedom by climbing a tree and taking a fatal fall right back out of it. Might there be a safer, more fulfilling niche for them in the ecosystem?

Indeed, why not carry the genius of the Chinese research center to its natural conclusion and find work for them as au pairs? Donning masks of their own, they could return a favor to the species that raised them. This has the elegance and symmetry of higher math. And mammals of all species have an innate gift for this sort of work, as anyone who’s read about wolves in Plutarch or watched a toddler fall into a gorilla enclosure on YouTube knows full well.  

And how much added value does the extra oomph of human intelligence create in a babysitter, anyway? Last summer we hired a sharp-eyed someone called Mercy as a nanny. Detecting that Freya was agreeable, preverbal and mostly stationary and, more important, that Layla was none of these things, Mercy washed her hands of the latter and set herself up as sole spokeswoman for the former. This made her job as morally gratifying as it was physically nontaxing. “Make her a proper lunch!” she’d bark if someone dared offer Freya a carrot. Or “I need something to blow her nose,” at which I was to stop minding Layla long enough to fetch Mercy a tissue. She liked to fight for the underdog from a seated position. 

Looking up, I caught Gary’s beseeching eye as Layla dragged him toward our toolshed. Freya was trying likewise to drag Rudy, but he had dug his heels in at the property line and was presumably being electrocuted by his electronic collar. Affecting contemplative absorption, I pretended not to notice these developments. Had I learned a trick or two from Mercy last summer? Paid to come along for a seaside holiday, she was an example to us all of the virtues of relaxation. She declined the master bedroom with sea view and instead based all operations on the ground floor, a shrewd move providing a pretext for shooing us out of the house entirely so we wouldn’t “disturb Freya.” Those bold enough to eventually re-enter would find Freya asleep or crawling around and Mercy at her ease on the sofa, reading a book on Zen Buddhism, chewing her toothpick like a fat Cohiba and glowering until you slinked off.

Arthur C. Clarke 50 years ago called it a scandal that prehistoric man had domesticated various species and put them to work, only for modern man to drop the ball. (“We haven’t added one in the past 5,000 years.”) He was right, but no scandal is beyond atonement. If dolphins can go to work for the U.S. Navy, surely their terrestrial cousins can zip into dad suits and help out with the kids. “With our present knowledge of animal psychology and genetics,” Clarke argued, we can “solve the servant problem.” In today’s economy, endangered species don’t need the wild; they need jobs, and God knows we the people need better help. Every nanny I’ve hired outearns me. This is an industry in need of disruption!

Outside there was now a level of screaming I couldn’t ignore. Gary was running out of our garden, hands raised in surrender. Rushing out, I found Layla squatting at the edge of the lawn relieving herself and shouting his name. “Wipe huh, Gawwy, wipe huh,” concurred Freya as she gave chase. Rudy was by this point in full frenzy, leaping at his invisible wall. Where is a calm, composed giant panda in a man mask when you need one?

During a reflective moment during bath time later that evening, Layla confessed that Gary was her great love.

“Yeah? What do you love about him?”

“He’s just so ... I don’t know. So sensible.”

Fathers of daughters will understand when I say that after a stab of jealousy, I took this personally. 

Gary has some flowers he’s proud of, so he’s erected little cylindrical steel fences around each. The effect is weird, like the plants were actively carnivorous and had to be caged. But he’s done it to protect them from deer. It makes sense.

Now about these deer. I used to think I knew what deer were: nervous but graceful creatures, mostly solitary. They met your gaze from a distance and then vanished, in flight silent but for a faint whoosh in the undergrowth. I don’t know if I got this idea from Animal Planet or from “The Norton Anthology of Poetry” or what, but upon moving to Ithaca, I realized it’s totally wrong. Deer are languid, dull-eyed things with the stealth and elegance of one’s fellow shoppers at Walmart. They remind me of Mercy, albeit sans toothpick. Around here at least they have tags, like merchandise on clearance.

Which they are, in a way. With more than a hundred of them per square mile in our neighborhood, sensible people decided it would be kinder or quieter to capture and sterilize than, say, to gun them down. The downside to this humaneness is that for the time being, here they still are. They idle; they trespass; they seem to be waiting for one of their number to screw up the nerve to ask for a cigarette. Once I bumped into one while trying to get into my car, and I swear to God I even said “excuse me” three or four times, but it just stood there until I gave up and got in through the passenger door. Noli me tangere, my ass.

They’ve lost their edge, these beasts. They’ve gone suburban-soft. But which of us hasn’t, here among the caged crocuses and invisible dog walls? Why is it that the more intolerably wild our children seem to us, the more intolerably tame we seem to ourselves? The strangest, most arresting image in that photo essay is of a lean human in a panda suit and mask standing in a cage with a water bowl in his hand while a real panda crouching outside looks in at him through the bars. Why does everyone from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the guy in the panda suit dream of returning things to the wild, anyway? It can’t be done. Alas.

Meanwhile, does a sensible person dream of sourcing domestic labor from animals on far-off continents? Or does he take stock of his surroundings and figure out what can be done with the near at hand?

I read an article once about a deer that had been taught to eat pasta, turn lights on and off, fetch ice from the fridge dispenser and drink coffee. Teach a creature much more than that and it starts thinking around corners, like Mercy and me, and the whole project goes to hell. Clarke thought bioengineered chimps were the future’s answer to the servant problem, but he also worried they’d be smart enough to start trade unions, “and we’d be right back where we started.”

With these deer, methinks, he’d worry not. Numerous as they are, they do not appear on the point of organizing. Dressed in dad jeans, chunky sneakers and flannel shirts, they’d be passably humanoid, striking the right note of dignity, impassivity and parental servitude, and maybe even begin to look like a child’s dream of the sensible.