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Goldfish surgeons? Pets on Prozac? A Hollywood agent for bugs? A law requiring farmers to spend ‘quality time’ with their pigs? Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction is this funny, spritely, often provocative collection of five decades of animal stories from The Wall Street Journal.
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The Warm and Fuzzy Side of The Wall Street Journal By Ken Wells In the summer of 1998, I found myself in Zambia paddling the Zambezi River in a canoe, hoping to run into a hippopotamus. Well, “run into” is an exaggeration. I was actually hoping to get a look at a hippo from a safe distance—say, 50 yards away. My guide had informed me that hippos, if inclined, can swim as fast as a trotting horse and that they usually swim that fast on two occasions. One: when they’re running from you. Two: when they’re coming after you. I didn’t want to be too close should the latter occasion arise—enraged hippos have been known to bite canoes in two. I was working, after all, on a feature that was to run on the Journal’s front page. There was no use getting mauled on the job. Ah, the things that we at the great, gray Wall Street Journal do to properly report critter stories. When I joined the Journal 21 years ago in the San Francisco bureau, I expected to write about many things—stocks, bonds, the environment. But I hadn’t expected this newspaper’s infatuation with animals and animal stories. Yet when Ken Slocum, my bureau chief at the time, assigned me my second feature for the paper’s front-page “middle column,” he sent me out to Idaho to write a piece about modern-day falconry. “I myself cut my teeth on critter stories,” I recall Mr. Slocum telling me. He had, by that time, been at the paper about 20 years (and, by the way, had briefly owned a lion, but that’s another story). I can’t say for certain when the Journal’s animal infatuation started. I do know that animals, and people’s relationships with them, had become a staple page-one feature by the early 1960s. One explanation is that the modern Journal was edited in its formative years mostly by solid Midwesterners who came from places where hunting, fishing and raising livestock were common. Beyond that, the Journal’s stylized page-one format—the middle column in particular—makes it a perfect vehicle for telling a critter tale now and then. And then there is writers’ seemingly innate knowledge that almost everybody loves a shaggy dog story. Glynn Mapes, the Journal’s page-one editor in the 1980s, ran a lot of critter features during his watch and later wrote a number of memorable ones. Mr. Mapes, now retired, explains the allure: “I guess it’s because animals are always fascinating, sometimes cuddly, and they don’t ever give you any back talk. One can’t say the same for humans.” As important, however, is that animals are often in the news. While most of the Journal’s animal coverage tends to the humorous (it is hard not be amused by stories about pets on Prozac, people who breed fainting goats and laws that require German farmers to spend “quality time” with their pigs), not all of it does. In 1997, Geraldine Brooks penned a moving story about the plight of chimpanzees retired from the Air Force space program. And Jim Sterba, in a piece last year, plumbed the provocative question of whether feral cats ought to be awarded “wild stature,” the same as the songbirds they kill. Animals also make great stories because they become metaphors for the great issues that roll through society. Mr. Sterba, who is inarguably the most prolific critter writer in the paper’s history, explains why his several features on frogs over the years amounted to core Journal coverage: “The first story I wrote for the WSJ was a middle-column piece about the national frog shortage. After Sputnik, the Eisenhower administration raised the alarm that we were behind the Russians in science. Eisenhower created the National Science Foundation, which started showering schools with money for science education. What did the schools buy? Frogs. Soon every kid in freshman biology was taking a frog apart. To supply them, the biological-supply houses were paying frog catchers more than restaurants would pay. Frog legs disappeared from menus.” This revelation would later lead to Sterba features on the conundrum of imported frog legs (congressmen got sick eating salmonella-tainted Asian frog legs at Richard Nixon’s second inaugural, setting off a federal investigation) and on get-rich-quick frog-farming schemes. Of course, Mr. Sterba is hardly the only reporter at the Journal to break animal news. In what other paper in America last year could you read about startling advancements in goldfish surgery? Mr. Wells is a senior Journal writer and the editor of “Herd on the Street: Animal Stories From The Wall Street Journal,” just published by Wall Street Journal Books. Reprinted from the WSJ, all rights reserved. |
