The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [40]
So hunting, to young Roosevelt, was a prerequisite for being a real faunal naturalist of the old Audubon school. But mistreating beasts of burden, who often suffered and died in streets, had nothing to do with hunting. All persons with a moral compass—as the ASPCA claimed—knew that. Also, the slaughterhouses of the world, Roosevelt complained, weren’t regulated in any way, shape, or form. Rancid meat and salmonella were commonplace. As a budding sportsman and an advocate of the humane movement, Roosevelt simply wanted hunting and the treatment of domestic animals regulated. Species extinction, torture of animals, overhunting, lack of seasonal bag limits, cock and bull fighting—such activities were anathema to his gentlemanly outlook on life. Killing game like cougars or bears with a knife was fine—but tormenting or teasing the animal was deemed unforgivable. Like his father and paternal grandfather, Theodore believed that animals had feelings and perhaps even communicated with one another in ways undecipherable by humans, and that they needed to be treated mercifully. By shooting finches in Egypt, for example, carefully studying their eye bands and plumage, taking careful notes of their demeanor, and lovingly stuffing them so as not to damage their plumage, Roosevelt believed he was honoring the species. Most other men would simply shoot birds. Roosevelt, by contrast, shot and collected them for scientific scrutiny. Only by learning everything about a species could you eventually save it from the maw of industrial man. If Roosevelt’s views pertaining to animals seem contradictory, consider this: they are essentially the hunting and animal rights codes American society abides by in the twenty-first century.
IV
When Roosevelt boarded a ship for Greece, leaving the Middle East, his asthma flared up again—perhaps returning to “civilization” made him ill. Wherever Theodore went in Europe he pouted and wheezed, believing that Greek ruins and Turkish mosques were a waste of time for an ornithologist like himself. Arriving in Vienna on April 19, 1873, he bemoaned the fact that his father needed to spend months in Austria on business. Young Theodore’s letters from Vienna attested to his depression: “I bought a black cock and used up all my arsenic on him.” “The last few weeks have been spent in the most dreary monotony.”49 “If I stayed here much longer I should spend all my money on books and birds pour passer le temps.” 50
While Theodore Sr. stayed in Vienna, he sent three of his children—Theodore, Corinne, and Elliott—to Dresden (known then as the Florence of the Elbe) to live with a German family. His cousins John and Maud Elliott were also there. The idea was for the American youngsters to become fully immersed in German culture. What interested the young Roosevelt most about Germany, however, were the romantic painters who had studied in Düsseldorf during the 1860s—Albert Bierstadt and George Caleb Bingham among them—and had them turned toward the American West for inspiration. And there was also his utter fascination with the white storks of Dresden, which nested in chimneys and could be found around the nearby pond. Instead of immersing himself in German history or language, he continued to play Audubon, studying the storks for variations in color and size. “My scientific pursuits cause the family a good deal of consternation,” he wrote to an aunt from Dresden. “My arsenic was confiscated and my mice thrown (with the tongs) out of the window.”51
But something else had occurred on this Old World trip. For the first time Roosevelt had carefully read On the Origin of Species himself instead of being spoon-fed Darwin’s theories