This week’s issue of CREATURE FEATURE is brought to you by Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. I rewatched it last Thursday as part of the imitable Nathalie Atkinson’s series on film design.
The first time I saw it was shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the American president. At that point, I was more focused on the idea of nuclear war with North Korea. This time, I’m pretty much only focused on climate change and the extinction crisis.
The only time animals crop up in Strangelove is during discussion of the doomsday machine, a device which, if triggered, will destroy “all human and animal life on Earth.”
In the film’s doomsday scenario, a smart government would have sequestered some domestic animals in deep mineshafts, along with foodstocks and a few select survivors who will ride out the toxic century sparked by the device’s explosion by breeding and doing little else (10 women to every one man, blah blah blah). But nobody talks about what would happen to the other animals.
I can’t fault the movie for this, but it did get me thinking. People (even military people) did think about the Bomb as a source of ecological threat in the Cold War, as anthropologist Joseph Masco argues. The US military also thought of animals (in the below excerpt from Masco’s essay, pigs) as a venue for testing the impacts of nuclear strikes:
The DOD film presents a slow-motion image of the blast wave hitting a pen filled with the animals and then documents the efforts of scientists to collect the injured and dead bodies after the test. In describing the experiment, the DOD narration identifies the pig as "an instrument" for radiation research, and in one close-up, the film shows a chart outlining the body of a pig used by radiation scientists to mark the injury and radiation effects on each of the animals. The rationality of this preprinted form, which suggests an industrial logic of production and control, is at odds with the chaos documented in the postexplosion scenes of technicians in white anticontamination suits and ventilators trying to round up the visibly wounded and dying animals.
BEAT. IMAGES CONTINUE TO PLAY AS THE MUSIC SWELLS.
We’ll meet again… don’t know where, don’t know when… but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.
Each of these metal canisters contains a live pig. They were exposed to a nuclear blast as part of Operation Plumbbob’s “Military Effects Studies.” The declassified footage from this is some of the internet’s earliest primo gross-out content, and I don’t suggest viewing it for entertainment alone.
If you want to learn more, here is the DOE accession page explaining what you’re watching and here is the Youtube link to the footage on Youtube, from the source used by the Atomic Heritage Foundation. It’s legit footage but I can’t be sure of the editing, because I’ve never seen the source film.
Extra credit
Newsy stuff I read this week
Feral hogs attacked and killed a woman on her way to work in Texas (Vice, David Gilbert)
Urban expansion blamed for spike in injured animals at wildlife rehab centre (Calgary Herald, Alanna Smith)
Giraffes among 10 animals killed in ‘tragic’ Ohio safari wildlife park fire (Port Clinton News Herald, Craig Shoup)
Trump signs law making cruelty to animals a federal crime (NPR, Richard Gonzales)
Longer/thinkier stuff
We need to talk about environmental projects that fail (The Revelator, David Shiffman)
How a Japanese anime boosted donations to animal conservation (Forbes, Eva Amsen)
These are the best animal photos of 2019 (National Geographic)
The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.
—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
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All images in CREATURE FEATURE are used under Creative Commons licensing. Efforts have been made to ensure that photographs of living animals or natural scenes have been taken ethically, in responsible pet ownership conditions, at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums or under safe, non-damaging conditions in the wild. If you see an issue with any image we share, please notify me.