Bwanas and Sahibs

My brother Geoff is an amateur tiger conservationist, and he and I were talking the other day about a recent New Yorker article I recommended he read. It concerned a telegenic American couple named Mark and Delia Owens, whose passion for African elephants seems to have gotten out of hand. 
     Perhaps that is putting it mildly, as there's evidence that their troubled son shot an unarmed poacher to death as an ABC News team stood by, that Mark may have retrieved the body and dumped it into a nearby river, and that at least a portion of the ABC crew went along with the coverup.


There's less debate among conservationists than you might imagine about whether or not it is justified to shoot poachers on sight, especially when they're carrying AK-47's, and especially when whole species are being hunted to extinction for their parts, including several on which Chinese men are apparently willing to spend millions of yuan to avoid taking Viagra.
     But as Geoff and I got to talking, we returned to a beef we both have with Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS, when it comes to nature documentaries. We were brought up on Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom with Merlin Perkins, and Walt Disney's Truelife Adventures, and both of us recognize the extraordinary improvements that have been made to the genre. 
    We are agreed that no-one ever wrote a better documentary script than David Attenborough, and we thrill to the footage intrepid teams of cinematographers have captured for such series as Nature, Blue Planet and Life, including, recently, astounding images shot through falling snow of that most elusive of cats, the snow leopard, dragging its kill up a rocky Himalayan slope.


But our complaint is with the producers of a lot of other wildlife documentaries who, like the writers of historical romances set in exotic places, center their stories around white people instead of the real heroes of animal conservancy: local game wardens and animal conservationists. 
     With little remuneration and no fanfare; at risk to their lives; and often in defiance of their own governments; they are the ones who strive most courageously to sustain the world's wildlife. And yet, at best, they are relegated in most animal documentaries to bit parts: as loyal guides and faithful sidekicks to the sahibs and bwanas who come rolling in from L.A. with their film crews, safari jackets, lomotil, and little bottles of Purell: peppy, entrepreneurial, self dramatizing young people who have narrowly chosen animal conservation over skydiving or bungee jumping.
     We know of a few steadfast indigenes who have been featured, notably Geoff's friends Fateh Singh and the late Billy Arjan Singh, both tiger wallas of irresistible charisma, and I suppose a producer would argue that Western viewers need someone on the screen with whom they can identify. But it seems unfortunate and shortsighted to neglect the real heros of animal conservation and to understimate our capacity to identify with them.

No, not the New Yorker

My godson Giacomo, among others, tells me that text is too hard to read when it's white against black, so I'm now experimenting with black against white. (Takes you back to the Sixties, doesn't it?) And my nephew Nathan suggests that I introduce my cartoons to my blog, or vice versa. 


Four years ago, I drew about a hundred cartoons as I awaited  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Jovanovich and Schuster's verdict on one of my manuscripts. I still don't know what came over me; maybe it was turning 60. But suddenly cartoons were popping up all over the place, and I had to sketch madly to keep up with them.


I had tried cartooning when I was younger, but I was too self conscious to hit on a style. Now a style seemed to derive organically from my incompetence as a draughtsman. In any case, I thought some of them were funny, and I ran them by a bunch of my friends who seemed to like them too. Though you never can tell with friends, they emboldened me to send five or six a week to the New Yorker. That the New Yorker, upon whose doors I had once knocked until my knuckles bled,  had recently published a piece by my son Jake suggested to me that perhaps a new era had dawned and that the doors might at long last creak open for his father as well.


On the other hand, I sensed that the cartoons I was doodling belonged, if they belonged anywhere, to the New Yorker's pre Mankoff period. Robert Mankoff has been cartoon editor for quite a long period, and despite certain dependables like Roz Chwast, his selections have often made me feel either awfully dense or terribly, terribly old. I also knew going in that Mankoff deeply resented dabblers in his profession, especially writers who regarded their backhanded scribbles as irresistible.


When I started writing I used to deal with the vicissitudes of submitting to magazines by displaying my rejection slips on the wall. Esquire's was elegant, and the New Yorker's were encouraging and always courteous, and I proudly amassed such a vast display that when magazines began to accept my submissions I sometimes caught myself sighing disappointedly because I had been counting on another rejection to fill a gap in the exhibit.


It took the sting away then, but not this time around. As I lined Mankoff's rejection slips on the wall over my desk, I found them disspiriting, and since the New Yorker is just about the only decent venue left for cartoons, it wasn't as though I had a backup plan. So in the end I shelved them and put away my drawing pad and went back to work.


But now, as Nathan points out, I have my own venue. So here's the first of my cartoons, this one on the subject of free range chickens, the inexplicable subject of my first post. I seem to be greatly exercised about free range chickens. I mean, what's the deal with free range chickens?