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Wired Kingdom
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Animal
Matters
Animals matter. “Some of the most fascinating people I have ever met
are animals.” So wrote Walt Disney, but the stats are still surprising. Last year, 134m people visited zoos and aquariums
in the US: more than attended all major sporting events combined. The
WWF (the Wildlife Fund, not the wrestlers) raised $250m for wildlife conservation,
largely from individual donors. Even more telling: 60% of households
have a dog or cat in the family. 50% of pets receive holiday presents.
25% of dogs sleep in their owner's bed (you know who you are). 30% of dog owners are more
attached to their dog than to their best friend (and 10% more than their
spouse). But evidence of our aching need for animal
companionship doesn't stop there. Look at trends in high-tech toys.
6m Tamagotchis were preordered for US sale after sales of 4m in Japan. Furby sales in the first two years were in the tens of millions. Sony's digital dog, Aibo, costs nearly 10x as much as a real dog, but 3,000 of them sold out in 20 minutes. 100,000 have been sold since. Tiger sold 10M Poo-Chi robot dogs last year. Cloning of pets has emerged as a real business. Weird, huh? The human yearning to be in touch with animals is very deep indeed. So how will this improve creative technology?
Of Animal Attractions, the Galapagos, and Gorillas
How wouldn't it. To gaze into the eyes of an animal (especially a nonhuman one), even for an instant, is to experience an awesome connection with another living being. This transcends the species gap. It may be hide-and-seek with a puppy. Or frolicking with a dolphin (and having the odd feeling that the dolphin's brain is considerably larger than your own). Or peeking out of a tent and being face to face with a polar bear. Whether playful, inspiring, or terrifying (if you're seen as lunch) — the power of these encounters can't be conveyed in words. You have to feel it firsthand: not on a movie screen, not in virtual reality, but in real reality. That poses big technical challenges.
Joe Rohde, the visionary behind Disney's Animal Kingdom (www.animalkingdom.com) tells a story that hammers the point home. Disney builds theme parks in a big way. Frequently the themes are rooted in stories from movies. Often they involve animals other than mice. But Joe's idea to annex another humongous piece of Florida, remake it to look like the African veldt, and transform a fifth of it into an outdoor safari zoo with no visible cages, was, even by Disney standards, a mad proposition and a sprawling challenge to technologists. Neverthless, he got a green light to at least explore the idea.
Well, time went by, corporate interest and budgets for Animal Kingdom were sagging, and Joe went in for a fateful last pitch. In a little conference room sat Frank Wells and Michael Eisner who ran the company. And there was Joe, who began by putting up a few viewgraphs to show the layout — vast parking for 6000 cars, the concessions, five theaters with 4000 seats, 100-acre safari habitat — and a high-minded mission to raise environmental awareness. He tried to explain the riveting experience of making eye contact with an animal, and how it had to be live and couldn't be captured on film. But as the dollars ran up, executive eyes glazed over. It sure was different from Hollywood formulas. And its prospects were not looking too good.
Joe's specs made Noah seem like a piker (4 million plants, planted by hand; 3000 species of grasses; 1000 animals representing 200+ species; no cages; 14m visitors per year; a manmade baobab tree so big it could fill the Astrodome) and he reemphasized how crucial it was for visitors to make contact with the animals. Wells and Eisner weren't buying. Just then, the door in the back of the room opened, very quietly, and in walked an 800-pound Siberian Tiger. The “suits” froze. The tiger strolled over, sat down a few feet from Eisner, and stared at him, licking its chops. Eisner stared back. The tiger, well aware of its place in the food chain, was not fazed. It stared right back, growled, and glared at Frank Wells. Wells looked back. And all the while, Rohde was banging on about the ice cream stands, the 14-storey-high “tree of life,” the simulation rides. Eisner and Wells did not take their eyes off the tiger, not for a second (they're not idiots). After a few minutes, the tiger got bored and left. “Any questions?” asked Joe. Wells and Eisner got it. Budget approved.
And that's a great lesson in how to get things done in corporate America. But ultimately it says something much more powerful about how we connect with animals.
"If I have seen farther than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants:" a tiny lava lizard gets a better view, standing on the head of a marine iguana, Isabella Island, Galapagos (photo by M. Hawley)
There is a place, utterly unique on Earth, that stretches these sensations beyond imagination: the magical, otherworldly Galapagos Islands. The karma of the Galapagos really defies description, but one story comes close. Setting foot there is a bit like visiting a zoo, except you are the animal on display. The friendly critters who live there are watching you. Or teasing you. A mockingbird flits over and lands on your head. Take a swim and seals join in with you. Penguins, who are so comically awkward on land, streak past in the water like little F-15 jets. What an impact these encounters have. Visiting the place blew Darwin's mind and inspired The Origin of Species, one of the most momentous books in all of science.
But it's said that one island in the archipelago is different. There, the birds and seals run away and hide. A visitor, taken aback by such un-Galapagos-like antisocial behavior, asked what was wrong. “A few centuries ago,” his guide said, “hunting was done on this island, and only here. The animals learned to fear man — and they never forgot.” Perhaps that one island was a lot like the rest of our world.
Just as this article was going to press, in the third week of January, a tanker with 240,000 gallons of diesel oil ran aground by San Cristobal island at the eastern end of the Galapagos (www.galapagos.org) and began leaking. Seals 35 miles away turned up with gooey oil in their fur. The extent of the damage is not yet known, but the consequences of such a poisonous wreck could be catastrophic in that singular, fragile ecosystem. It may be an extinction event for many species. The Charles Darwin Research Station is now urgently soliciting funds for help online.
Sadly, this is part of an all too familiar pattern. On the other side of the world, in the Virunga rainforest that straddles the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and Zaire, fewer than 650 mountain gorillas remain. Vital habitat is being destroyed as sprawling human populations encroach. Conservation workers use satellite maps and GPS systems to track gorillas, but they are often killed by marauding soldiers. Amid the regional wars and horrific genocide, gorillas seem to be of little consequence. Yet everyone I know who has met the gorillas in the mists of Virunga considers it to be a life-altering experience. Our closest kin in the animal world are on the verge of extinction: except for homo sapiens, all great apes — orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos — are severely endangered. Gorillas are regularly murdered for “bushmeat” by poachers. It might as well be cannibalism: 98% of our DNA is the same. Greg Cummings of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund sends monthly newsletters, and keeps an online presence at www.dianfossey.org (which has also been a boon for collecting sorely needed donations). There are a few rays of hope, but more often than not, it's bleak news of more murders.
Extended Eye Contact
These examples — Disney's Animal Kingdom, the Galapagos, and the gorillas in the mists of Virunga — illustrate some of the intensity as well as the hazards of our interactions with our animal friends in their environs. Recently, new technologies have enabled us to be there, with the animals, without risk of interference.
Cinematographer Daniel Zatz learned a powerful clue when he was in the field struggling to capture good footage. He just couldn't get close enough to film the wildlife: the animals ran away. One morning, frustrated after hours wasted, he laid his videocamera on the riverbank and went to get a sandwich. Upon return, he noticed that bears were strolling around near the camera. Birds were practically perched on it. That told him all he needed to know: the camera wasn't the problem; he was. So he took web cams a step farther with www.SeeMoreWildlife.com: with cameras in delicate places, like elephant seal breeding grounds or grizzly bear fishing spots, viewers on line can watch them in their native situation. You can even steer the camera to get a better view. This system has the side effect of making it harder for poachers to do damage, because thousands of people who care are always keeping an eye on things.
Meanwhile, Greg Marshall of the National Geographic has spent the last ten years perfecting the Crittercam, a tiny submersible video camera that can be worn by marine animals. It's a simple idea, not unlike a quarterback's helmetcam on Monday Night Football. And suddenly it's become possible to ride on the back of a tiger shark, or dive thousands of feet with sperm whales, seeing the world from the point of view of those animals. The first video I saw was taken of penguins by penguins in the antarctic. What a ride! And goodbye, union cameramen. It turns out those penguins are terrifically talented National Geographic photographers.
Now if we could just talk with the animals...
Doctor Dolittle, and Man's Best Friend
Irene Pepperberg has been teaching African Grey parrots to converse in basic (you might say, “pigeon”) English. And recently, she and her students at the Media Lab got them on line. You might envision parrots in a sort of chat-room Turing Test, but what she and her team actually did is invent systems that can potentially enrich the parrots' lives. Being cooped up in a cage is no fun. Their Interpet Explorer lets the birds use a smart perch with a kind of joystick and LCD screen interface to access music, watch videos of other parrots or friendly trainers, and potentially make contact with other birds (see http://www.media.mit.edu/~impepper/petprojects/index.html). And her colleagues Bruce Blumberg and Ben Resner's work with dogs (see http://www.media.mit.edu/~benres/research.html) allows dog owners to use the internet to stay in touch when you're far away. For instance, you can remote-control a squeeze toy, dispense treats, speak to the dog, and watch through a video link.
That phrase “man's best friend” exists for important reasons. Animal friends have names. They develop personalities. They play. They mope. They dream (as any dog who sleeps in their owner's bed knows). They enrich our relationships and teach us lessons, especially in a world where, too often, humans behave worse than beasts. And animals possess real feelings, too. Is a bird sad when it's singing? Or a kitten when it swats a ball of yarn? A dog with a bone? One very real feeling is loneliness. When you come home, is your dog just a teensy bit happy to see you? There's a sense in which all of that joyful barking, slobbering, the wagging tails, that unalloyed happiness at being reconnected is somehow offset by the sadness of knowing that the dog's life will only last 1/7th as long as its human companion's. My heart broke when our malamute, Tasha, passed away with her head in my hands eight months ago. She was such a sweet, affectionate dog. It was not unexpected (she was old and had lived a long and happy life), but the sadness and sense of loss were more than I'd imagined, and the frustration of being able to look at each other, and pet her, but not speak to each other, was almost unbearable.
Will technology ever produce a linguistic bridge to the animal world? It's still a fantastic question. But whether it does or not, our pet relationships are a powerful motivation to use technology to connect more deeply with the animal world. To ask why it's useful to build interfaces with and for animals would be like asking Darwin, why go sailing? But what's extraordinary, considering the fragile nature of our ecosystem, and how much we stand to learn from animals, is how we have scarcely begun to creatively evolve communication technologies that involve animals. The work of Zatz, Marshall, Pepperberg, Blumberg and others is leading edge, and points the way to a much richer understanding. I also like to remember that "pet" isn't just a little noun. It's also an important verb: it's the way you touch and caress someone you love. And being in touch, really in touch, with real animal friends, whether technically mediated or not, really matters.
Most dangerous man on campus: the author commutes to MIT with his friend and mushing pal, Tasha (photo: S. Joffe)
