Wednesday
I had a sense of déjà vu while reading a recent Washington Post article about challenges currently being faced by the city zoo in Kyiv, Ukraine. That’s because I’ve read Haruki Murakami’s account of zoo animals under fire in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Apparently the Feldman Ecopark zoo is near a military installation and also directly in the path of the invading Russian army. Their facilities have already been damaged, and the zoo has reported some of the animals have been injured and some killed. The smaller animals are being placed in makeshift shelters, including a bird enclosure and an unfinished aquarium.
The larger animals, however, pose a special problem. Horace the African elephant is being given sedatives to deal with the shelling, but as the zoo director points out, the elephants and giraffes “have no space to hide or run. Once they’re out of the zoo, they have fewer options than any human. It’s going to be the streets with tanks.”
Murakami’s novel describes the final days of the Japanese occupation of Hsin-Ching, Manchuria. As he awaits his troops’ inevitable defeat at the hands of the advancing Soviet army—let’s just say “Russian army” to emphasize the Ukraine parallel—the Japanese lieutenant is told to kill all the animals in the zoo the Japanese have set up. He’s ordered to use poison but there’s not enough poison to kill a horse, much less the entire menagerie. We see him wrestling with what to do:
If possible, I’d rather not kill any animals, the lieutenant told himself, in all honesty. But the zoo was running out of things to feed them, and most of the animals (especially the big ones) were already suffering from chronic starvation. Things could only get worse—or at least they were not going to get any better. Shooting might even be easier for the animals themselves—a quick, clean death. And if starving animals were to escape to the city streets during intense fighting or air strikes, a disaster would be unavoidable.
Besides, if he doesn’t follow the order to kill the animals, he might face court martial. This despite doubts “whether there would even be any courts martial at this late stage of the war.” In the end, however, he decides that orders are orders: “So as long as the army continued to exist, its order had to be carried out.”
I won’t share the grisly passages of the animals being shot (wolves, lions, tigers, bears, leopards), just the soldiers’ reactions.
When the soldiers finally succeeded in extinguishing all signs of life in the bears, they were so exhausted they were ready to collapse on the spot….In the deep silence that followed the killing, several of the soldiers seemed to be trying to mask their sense of shame by spitting loudly on the ground. Spent shells were scattered about their feet like so many cigarette butts. The ears still rang with the crackling of their rifles.The young soldier who would be beaten to death by a Soviet soldier seventeen months later in a coal mine near Irkutsk took several deep breaths in succession, averting his gaze from the bears’ corpses. He was engaged in a fierce struggle to force back the nausea that had worked its way up to his throat.
As in the Kyiv zoo, the elephants pose a special problem. One thinks of George Orwell’s famous essay “Shooting an Elephant” in the following passage:
In the end, they did not kill the elephants. Once they actually confronted them, it became obvious that the beasts were simply too large, that the soldiers’ rifles looked like silly toys in their presence. The lieutenant thought it over for a while and decided to leave the elephants alone. Hearing this, the men breathed a sigh of relief. Strange as it may seem—or perhaps it does not seem so strange—they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.
The elephant problem is solved by the hungry Chinese workers, who kill the elephants for food. In fact, they’re disappointed that they haven’t been able to do the same with all the animals. Then, a few days later, the Soviets swarm in and either kill or capture all the Japanese.
Animals may seem incidental in a war that is killing untold numbers of civilians, but their plight further dramatizes how the innocent are always victimized by the insanity of war.