By now, you’ve probably heard about Happy Feet, the ailing emperor penguin who was found near New Zealand a few months back. After rehab, Happy Feet was released this week, only to go missing somewhere in southern waters.
Some say he was gobbled by an orca. We think he might’ve been munched by a huge manatee, even though said mammals reside only in the northern hemisphere. Hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good headline.
Dead or alive, Happy Feet has captivated everyone. This is not unusual. Animal stories are always popular in any form of media, especially online. And if you think about it, that says something gently profound about our own humanity.
Yesterday was like any other day in the media. On the online News Ltd mastheads alone, at least two new random animal stories did the rounds.
There was the herd of cows serenaded by jazz musicians, and the Malaysian orangutan who kicked her smoking habit, presumably because the habit was even more disgusting and smelly than rubbing her enormous butt in other orangutans’ faces.
And that was just yesterday. There’s always a new animal vid doing the rounds. If it’s not a surfing spider or a parachuting dog, it’s mice on bikes or a cupboard full of cockroaches who’ve formed a mariachi band.
On a simple level, these videos are charming. We love animal antics as part of our daily news mix because frankly, who can read another word on the bloody carbon tax? Was the carbon tax introduced into parliament yesterday? Who cares? Too busy watching the Marlboro monkey.
But some animal stories are much more than diversions. Sometimes, they provide a vital frame through which we consume serious news, and there have been several stunningly good examples of this in recent years.
Think back to the 2009 Victorian bushfires. The enduring image, apart from Christina Nixon’s mushroom risotto, was Sam the Koala guzzling a plastic bottle of spring water from a benevolent fire fighter.
That’s not to make light of the 173 people who died, or the towns that disappeared overnight. It’s just that people needed a symbol, a victim who was outside the realm of blame, responsibility and politics. In the 2003 Canberra bushfires, Lucky the Koala performed a similar role.
In Japan this year, the scenes after the earthquake and tsunami were so spectacularly devastating, it was as impossible to watch as it was not to watch.
Then came the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a catastrophe which was a much harder story to comprehend, especially after the unbelievable giant sea waves we’d all just watched ad nauseam on YouTube. Compared to raw tsunami footage, the threat of radiation and potential gene mutation was a heck of a hard sell as a news story.
Then along came the Fukushima Bunny. Half cute, half gross-out, this soft little white rabbit rammed home the nuclear threat like no story of human misery could.
We’ve seen the same effect in too many oil spills to mention. No matter how many fisheries are destroyed, or human livelihoods lost, it ain’t a serious oil spill till you see the doomed pelican covered in sludge.
Animal stories help us make sense of the world, even when they don’t relate directly to a particular disaster or other major news event. That’s what made Happy Feet such a good story.
Here was a classic 21st century environmental tale. Sick penguin is found eating sticks and sand. Animal rescuers do their thing, attach a transmitter, release him back into the wild and we all briefly dwell in the sheer wonder of the animal world, as this brave little penguin tries to swim his way back to Antarctica.
And then his beeper stops beeping and we all wonder what has happened. We still don’t know.
For all the intrigue behind the Happy Feet story, there is a darker side. Quite simply, why is it that we attach almost human qualities of determination and will-to-live to a penguin’s travails at sea, when we dehumanise people who make much scarier journeys on leaky boats off Australia’s northern coastline?
Remember, many of these people are fleeing regimes so evil we’ve committed our own troops to fighting them.
Seems sometimes our sense of humanity is much more easily stirred by the plight of animals than by actual humans.
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@AndrewCatsaras Agreed. Kills more people than AIDS. Yet tolerated. Meanwhile: Good Insiders piece again Andrew.
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