Feral and free - An interview with George Schaller

[Guest guest]

Interview: Feral and free

05 April 2007

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.

Michael Bond

 

He describes himself as " a 19th-century wanderer with a scientific bent " .

Better known as the greatest living field biologist, George Schaller

earned his reputation through painstaking studies of mammals all over the

world, from the Himalayas to the Amazon rainforest. He has spent most of

his professional life in the field, often living in tents or cabins with

his family. His penchant for rare and remote species has taken him in

pursuit of gorillas, tigers, giant pandas and blue sheep, and has seen him

immortalised in Peter Matthiessen's best-selling book The Snow Leopard. He

has helped establish some of the world's biggest wildlife reserves,

including the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska and the Chang

Tang Reserve in Tibet. Michael Bond talks to him about his life in the

wild.

 

You've spent a great deal of time studying animals in places few

scientists have been to. Do you think of yourself as an adventurer as well

as a biologist?

 

Adventurer, no. Adventures imply screwing up in some way, through bad luck

or bad planning. I very much try to avoid adventures. Some people have

described me as a feral biologist. What I enjoy doing is exploring unknown

areas in search of wildlife and habitats.

 

When did you first realise you'd be able to make a career out of following

your passion?

 

Being a naturalist is the only thing I have ever been interested in. I

started out collecting birds' eggs, keeping snakes, salamanders, opossums

and other creatures. But it wasn't until I got to the University of Alaska

in the early 1950s that I discovered you could turn a boyhood pastime into

a profession. I spent long months out with graduate students learning and

just being in the wilderness. That was wonderful. So I stayed with it.

 

Where have you felt in the middle of nowhere?

 

Partly it's a matter of mind. I can feel it in the Serengeti in Africa,

where my wife and two small sons and I lived for three years in the late

1960s. Walking across the plains, alert for lions, with wildebeest herds

around me, and no sign of people - that can give you the feeling you're in

the middle of nowhere. There's no place like it. In this day and age where

else can you stand on a hill on the edge of the plains and see a million

large mammals in front of you. It's a Pleistocene vision you cannot

recreate anywhere else. On the Chang Tang plateau in Tibet, on the other

hand, you most definitely are in the middle of nowhere, because you know

you don't have society to support you. That feeling of being responsible

for yourself is very valuable. The last trip I took there, last November

for two months, we were in the northern Chang Tang and we drove for 1000

miles across country and saw quite a bit of wildlife and never saw a

person. You can climb on a hill and horizon gives way to horizon and you

know that as far as you can see in any direction there are no people at

all. Of course most people wouldn't want to go up there because it's at an

altitude of over 16,000 feet and it's chilly in winter. It was a

marvellous experience and it's the kind of thing worth fighting to

preserve for future generations. There are very few places like it.

 

You say that you can't help becoming emotionally involved with the animals

you're studying. Why?

 

When you're isolated in a different culture, a different country, you have

to have an emotional attachment to what you do. You have to like the

people, the country, the animals. Without emotion you have a dead study.

How can you possibly sit for months and look at something you don't

particularly like, that you see simply as an object? You're dealing with

individual beings who have their own feelings, desires and fears. To

understand them is very difficult and you cannot do it unless you try to

have some emotional contact and intuition. Some scientists will say they

are wholly objective, but I think that's impossible. Laboratory scientists

wasted years putting rats in mazes to show they were learning. They never

got close enough to a rat to realise that they were not going by sight and

learning, they were following the scent trails of previous rats. By

overlooking this simple fact they wasted years of science.

 

Not many people have looked into the eyes of a gorilla, something you have

done in the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda. What is that like?

 

I felt a very definite kinship. You're looking at another being that is

built like you, that you know is a close relative. You can see and

interpret the expression on their faces. In other words you have empathy

with what they're doing. To try to know what an animal is thinking is

impossible at this stage in our knowledge of species, but often you can

interpret their responses on the basis of your own. Besides, they're

beautiful, they're individuals. You can recognise all of them by their

faces. It's simply like you're dealing with another culture.

 

Have you ever felt threatened or frightened by an animal?

 

Fear is mostly in retrospect. If you do something careless, like getting

too close to a tiger or a bear and frightening the animal so it becomes

aggressive, you respond in the best possible way, and you know that in

most instances the animal gives you the benefit of the doubt. It's only

afterwards that you shake your head and say how stupid you were.

 

One time in India when I was working on tigers I was walking through the

forest and I got to a rock and I felt uneasy and I didn't know why.

Obviously the tiger that was lying on the other side of the rock suddenly

felt uneasy too because he looked over and there our faces were about five

feet apart. I backed off and climbed a tree a few feet up and sat on the

branch. The tiger came and sat underneath it and looked up at me

curiously. I clapped my hands and told it to go away and it did. With rare

exceptions, animals are not aggressive, they want a peaceful life just as

I do.

 

On a couple of occasions I've felt threatened by people. Several times in

the Congo in the 1960s local soldiers pulled us over and pointed their

guns at us. We smiled and said hello, how are you. I'm very good at acting

submissive. The last thing you want to do is be aggressive, with people or

animals.

 

Your efforts have helped gain protection for many wildlife reserves across

the world. How have you managed that?

 

Natural history is the basis of all conservation because you need

knowledge. I go out and collect information on wildlife, the people, the

condition of the habitat, and I give it to the government departments

concerned and make suggestions. Then I try to follow up. Sometimes it

works, sometimes it doesn't. One of the real mistakes in the conservation

movement in the last few years is the tendency to see nature simply as

natural resources: use it or lose it. Yet conservation without moral

values cannot sustain itself. Unless we reach people through beauty,

ethics, spiritual or religious values or whatever, we're not going to keep

our wilderness areas.

 

Profile

 

George Schaller is vice-president of the Wildlife Conservation Society in

New York. His many books include The Year of the Gorilla, The Serengeti

Lion, which won a US National Book Award, and Stones of Silence: Journeys

in the Himalayas. A collection of his stories, A Naturalist and Other

Beasts: Tales from a life in the field, is published in April by Sierra

Club Books.

 

From issue 2598 of New Scientist magazine, 05 April 2007, page 46-47

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