Reports of people being badly injured or killed by animals are an interesting part of the news ecosystem. They tend to fall into preset genres that deliver reliable moral lessons. There’s the “idiot tourist comes to Yellowstone, wants a selfie with a bison, gets gored or trampled”. Then there’s the “alligator in a normal Florida context attacks a person or a pet who should have been more careful”.
There’s a genre for shark attacks: surfer mistaken for seal! Man-eater on the loose! There’s a genre for bear attacks: mother with cubs, person got too close. Mountain lions, too: jogger stalked! Child attacked! Shy creature’s hunting instinct activated! People getting bitten by venomous snakes in North America, though that starts to need some extra narrative oomph to make the news (snake-handling preacher gets bitten! dumb exotic animal collector mistakes mamba for rat snake!) The occasional “killer bee” story used to make the news a lot, along with maps predicting the spread of “Africanized” bees. Nothing’s changed about the underlying reality but it no longer seems to warrant reporting for some reason.
Readers who approach any news armed with a more precise actuarial or statistical knowledge of risks posed by animals tend to find these stories frustrating. There are no news stories for “mosquito bites person, world waits to see if the victim catches a serious disease”, no news stories for “man bitten by black widow spider while cleaning out junk in dark corner of garage”. Not even the local paper reports a deer or moose hitting a car causing a fatal or serious accident. And classically, “dog bites man” is only a reportable story under the most extreme conditions. The encounters that are most dangerous and common are either not newsworthy because they’re common or because no one even knows they’ve just been endangered—the one deer tick you didn’t see, the one mosquito carrying equine encephalitis amid the itchy bumps from sitting out at dusk, the hornet sting that drives someone into anaphylactic shock.
What makes the other animal encounters newsworthy is that they deliver a consistent message about place and experience that fits into what an American audience already think it knows about the world. Plus the animals in question fit our conception of what is dangerous: a big predator, an ornery herbivore, a poisonous creature. Australian wildlife gets attention whether it’s fatal or simply gross (plagues of mice and cane toads overrunning human habitations) because American audiences are primed to understand Australia as “land of poisonous animals and weird creatures”. Fatal or serious bites from vipers, kraits and cobra in rural South Asia do not get attention in the Western press because they’re imagined as everyday mortality and the individuals involved as anonymously unknowable. (Many such bites go unreported to any authorities, so that much is in fact true.)
The striking thing, however, might be what goes unnoticed even in the reportage. Take the alligator-kills-man story that’s in American newspapers today. I was primed to read it as Yet Another Florida Man story: dude goes into lake that has big warning signs about alligator danger to fetch a Frisbee, gets eaten. Silly Florida Man!
Only if you read the whole story do you see that it’s really not about alligators and it’s really not about a person heedlessly courting unnecessary risk. The victim is described as a “transient” who was gathering disc golf frisbees lost to the lake from the course that comes close to the lake at one basket in order to resell them to players. When you get to that point, you realize that it’s a story about the desperate situation of some people who are homeless and the variety of things they do in order to have some money in their pocket—a story which belongs in a very different actuarial table and which is so banal that it falls out of what the newspapers are willing to cover. “Homeless person takes risks for a few dollars, is killed” doesn’t qualify for “wacky story at the end of the local news broadcast at 11pm”.
Gored-while-seeking-a-selfie stories about bison coexist with a less-reported story, which is “too many bison being kept in an overly confined habitat because ranchers outside of Yellowstone see them as a threat to their cattle herds”. (As well as, “National Park advertised as a place to come see charismatic megafauna, so no surprise that some people ignore what the rangers say.”) Much as other stories of animal encounters are about habitat fragmentation or about the rise of species that actually flourish in Anthropocene-shaped habitats as much as they are about a human being’s mistakes or misbehavior.
I was telling someone the other day about the medieval and early modern history of putting animals on trial and they were astonished. Like many contemporary listeners, when they hear about this history, they regard that as an almost-unbelievably archaic vision of animals, a marker of how “modern” and evolved we have become in our sensibility that we would never think of such a thing. But after the kind of attack that makes the news, government officials who administer parks or wildlife will often invest considerable effort to hunt and kill the animal involved. The evidence that animals that have preyed on a human (or human pets) once will then habituate to humans as food is actually quite contestable. (Not the least precisely because we tend to hunt down animals that have or might have killed or hurt a person, so we rarely actually get to see whether that change of behavior follows.) It is really not that far off putting an animal on trial to spend considerable effort hunting a predator that killed or maimed a human. We do it with predators and not usually animals like bison precisely because we map intent differently in ways that are very anthropocentric. The large herbivore didn’t intend to kill a person, we believe: the person just got too close. (Trust me, in quite a few cases in Southern and Eastern Africa, elephants that kill or hurt people very much intend to, within whatever cognitive framing of “intention” is plausible for elephants.) The predator meant to kill a person, in our eyes.
Some animals are “of the environment”—so getting bitten by a rattlesnake is generally seen just as an environmental injury (you stepped in the wrong place, you lifted the wrong rock, you didn’t listen to a warning sound). Some animals are seen as “autonomous from the environment”: that alligator that hangs around the golf course, that mountain lion that stalks in the foothills above the housing development, that bear who keeps breaking into mountain cabins.
We even put animals on trial in more ordinary ways. (Mary Roach’s book Fuzz: When Animals Break the Law is a great tour of how many ways we still put animals inside legal and moral discourses.) After all, I blame the groundhog who has settled in along the back field between my street and the college’s parking lot for coming after my garden. I see him as intending to come for my vegetables. But do I blame the slugs or the cutworms? Not really, though I’ll flick them off if I see them.
Genres of news stories are important and also inevitable: they become part of the tapestry of a familiar and inhabited world. They fuel water-cooler conversations at work, monologues on the night-time talk shows. They help us feel wiser, smarter and more prudential than all the foolish people doing stupid things: we wouldn’t go there! we would know better! But it’s worth the effort sometimes to make the familiar strange: to ask deeper questions about commonly reported events and about the events that never get reported. Sometimes that suggests that our regular genres are concealing as much as they uncover.
Image credit: Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash