Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

There are plenty of bad things going on in the world. No doubt plenty of bad things will also happen in the future because many bad things also happened in the past but humans will be humans just like they always have been and no amount of chatting about it will ever change things. It seems to have been this way for thousands of years for no actual reason that I can make sense of. I am more than capable of ignoring it completely but when it crosses the line and drags in animals who are just getting on with things, I start to get more than a little itchy.

I read an article this morning about Laika. If you’re not familiar with the name - and that’s quite likely because time has a way of erasing tragedy - Laika was the first animal to orbit the earth... and they knew she wasn’t coming back.

In November of 1957, the Soviets put Laika inside the Sputnik 2 aircraft to see if she could survive it. The little terrier sure could - even though everybody knew there was no way she was going to survive re-entry.

Their grand plan was to help her die without pain by feeding her poisoned food after a week in orbit, but plans have a habit of not turning out quite how you think. The sensors they had implanted showed that during launch, her breathing quadrupled and her heart rate tripled. Eventually, the life support malfunctioned and temperatures got to 104º where she promptly died of overheating and panic.

It’s a sad, sad, story not made any less sad by thinking some commemorative stamps would right the wrong.

Perhaps it’s that she had a name and many of us share our homes with dogs that makes it a heartbreaker because I do not feel the same about the 32 primates the Americans have sent to space. I assume they knew how badly they would be thought of by sending a dog, but a primate? Nobody is going to be able to relate to that, so let’s get it on...

Once again, I come back to what I always do - humans are geared up to understand stories. You might not know it but we all tell ourselves stories minute by minute in order to make sense of the world. Maybe if Laika had been nameless, just “Dog #23,” nobody would have cared. That’s how we work. We name a thing, we care about it. No name, no conscience. We can watch cattle trucks roll past and not flinch, because none of them are called Daisy, but the moment a creature gets a name, we make it part of the story.

And once you’re part of the story, you can die tragically.

Maybe the sadness is in not being given choice. She was just chosen from the street as a dog nobody would miss. There’s the story. Somebody chose her out of probably hundreds of street dogs in the Soviet fifties, named her, dressed her up, bundled her in and said goodbye. The fact that she got a lot of treats the day before launch doesn’t make it any better at all.

But the nameless primates? Nobody cares what snacks they had. They all had names but I’ve chosen to leave them out to illustrate a point. As soon as I tell you one of them was called Baker, he becomes part of a story you can understand and begin to put traits to. If I tell you Baker was a chimpanzee, you can picture him now and he becomes something more solid.

But Baker was actually a squirrel monkey... and thus, if you don’t know what a squirrel monkey looks like, Baker finds himself pushed further back into the shadows as a character you can’t quite grab hold of.

As humans, we seem to be trapped in a feedback loop where only mirrors earn sympathy. Maybe that’s why every tragedy has to be retold as a story — because without one, it’s just data, and data doesn’t make us cry. I know Marilyn Manson isn’t the go-to guy for wisdom, but the lyric “the death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is just a statistic” couldn’t say it better.

(Let me pause for a moment to see if he stole it... yep, it’s actually from German satirist Kurt Tucholsky who nobody has ever heard of but Stalin apparently had light enough fingers to make the quote famous in the first place).

To me, it seems to me like a story from yesterday rather than 60 odd years ago. Hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of dogs must have died in the years between then and now in all kinds of ways. This leads me to think it’s the absolute anomaly of the situation that makes Laika stick out. Anybody can run over a dog by accident and according to the papers, people are mean to animals every day of the week but nobody plucks a dog from the street and drops them into a Sputnik without thinking very hard about it.

So maybe it’s not the act itself that pisses me off, but the reasoning behind it — that we’ll sacrifice anything if we can file it under “progress.” Laika wasn’t a monster or a martyr; she was just a dog who trusted the people feeding her.

You can dress it up as science, exploration, the greater good — but in the end, any of those is just another story they hope we will tell ourselves to sleep at night.

And much like all good stories, we’ve learned absolutely nothing from it.