I first became interested in animals around the end of the 1980’s, not terribly long after I had obtained my Ph.D. in German and intellectual history. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even the study of literature. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts.

Today, I shudder how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. But soon I had managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992). Around 1995, I founded Nature in

Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.), an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship. It was initially a rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. We put together a few conferences, which generated a lot of excitement among attendees but little notice in academia or in what they sometimes call “the real world.”

From fables and anecdotes, I moved to mythology, and published The Serpent and the Swan (1997), a  study of animal bride tales from around the world. This was followed by many further publications including an examination of the darker side of animal studies, Animals in theThird Reich (2000), and a sort of compendium, The Mythical Zoo (2002). My most recent book is a cultural history of corvids entitled Crow (2003).

When I embarked on the study of animals in myth and literature, even graduate students in the field did not have to mention a few dozen books just to show that they had read them. In barely more than a couple of decades, the literature on human-animal relations

has grown enormously in both quantity and sophistication. NILAS, I am proud to say,

has become a well established organization, which has sponsored two highly successful conferences together with ISAZ.

But as the study of animals, what I like to call “totemic literature,” becomes more of a standard feature of academic programs, I fear that something may be lost. It is now just a little too easy to discourse about the “social construction” and the “transgression” of “boundaries” between animals and human beings. Even as I admire the subtlety of such analysis, I sometimes find myself thinking, “So what?”

Having been there close to the beginning, part of my role is now to preserve some the sensuous immediacy that filled the study of animals in literature when that was still a novelty. That poetry is not simply a luxury in our intellectual pursuits. With such developments as cloning, genetic engineering, and the massive destruction of natural habitats, we face crises so unprecedented that traditional philosophies, from utilitarianism to deep ecology, can offer us precious little guidance. The possibilities are so overwhelming, that we hardly even know what questions to ask. But neither, I am sure, did the fugitive who once encountered a mermaid in the middle of the woods.

Published in ISAZ (International Society for Anthrozoology) Newsletter, Nov. 2003, pp. 8-9.

Nostalgia and superstition are guilty pleasures, and one time we ourselves to indulge in them, albeit with titters of embarrassment, is on Groundhog Day. This comes on February 2, when the groundhogs allegedly come out of their burrows. If they see their shadows, they will be frightened and return, in which case winter will last for another six weeks. Newscasters gather around the burrows of famous groundhogs, most notably Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania, and film his ascent. The result is predetermined, or at least manipulated, by heaters that are placed under the ground.

     Nobody really pretends to take the augury seriously, but it does have very exalted roots in history and myth, going back to rural societies, in which agriculturalists watched for subtle signs such as the migration of birds or the emergence of animals from hibernation to decide on the best times for planting and harvesting. In England, Germany, and Ireland, the animal is a badger rather than a groundhog. At one time, it may have been a bear, a more imposing animal that probably endowed the day with greater dignity. In Lithuania and parts Italy, it has been a snake.

      The idea of using animals to predict the weather, or even climate change, is not by any means irrational. The Chinese still used goldfish to predict earthquakes. In Italy in 2009, toads in very large numbers were observed leaving their burrows in Acquilla several days before an earthquake, and scientists who have studied this maintain it was probably due to the release of gases caused by seismic activity. Animals such as bears and groundhogs may be very sensitive to subtle changes in the thawing of the soil and other possible signs of spring. But, for traditional farmers, these indications to the changes in the weather were read in the context of many other clues. A bit like the animals themselves, they cultivated an intuitive sensitivity to climate, which almost everyone today has lost.  Furthermore, they did not use the emergence of animals from hibernation to predict the weather in vast geographic areas but only in the local community.

     Groundhog Day is set on the same day as the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox celebration of Candlemass, when lights are lit to celebrate the presentation of Jesus, “light of the world,” in the temple.  The slightly nervous laughter that usually accompanies Groundhog Day may reflect a Protestant mockery of Catholic rituals.  But Candlemass itself goes back to the traditional Celtic celebration of Imbolc, the beginning of spring, which was also set in the first days of February.  

     With irony, and even a little sneering, Groundhog Day celebrates a rural way of life, which we can now barely remember, yet somehow miss.  Holidays are times set aside to reflect on the meaning of our past, and Groundhog Day, while seemingly trivial, turns out to have a history as old and complex as perhaps as any celebration that we have.

Boria Sax