Texana
Wild Kingdom
Before his death, Cleveland Amory was the guiding spirit behind Black Beauty Ranch, an East Texas refuge for abused animals. He still is.
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Among the lifestyle changes of the various ranch staffers and volunteers, however, it’s probably Leigh Wilson’s that is the most clearly symbolic. Trained as a psychologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Wilson spent nearly twenty years living and working in Alaska before “burning out” on her two-legged subjects and, at the age of forty, deciding to attend veterinary school.
As Byrne and Wilson introduce me to some of the ranch’s residents, the animals’ stories begin to sound like the life histories of war veterans. Babe, who now shares the elephant enclosure with Conga and a Sri Lankan refugee from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus named Tara, was standing beside her mother in Africa when she was killed by hunters during a culling. Babe was then shipped to an American circus in an undersized crate, where she badly banged up two of her legs and her head, which is still misshapen. While performing with the circus, She further damaged her right hind leg—which is curled backward in what can only be described as a kind of clubfoot—when she was hit by a larger elephant while chained. After Babe arrived at the ranch, Byrne decided to have her leg evaluated at Texas A&M, a decision that entailed borrowing a trailer big enough to transport the 3,400-pound elephant, installing lights and an observation camera in it, and persuading the Texas Department of Public Safety to provide scales normally used for weighing semi-trailers. At A&M veterinarians decided that a fiberglass boot should be fabricated for Babe’s leg, but so far the university’s engineers have been unable to design one that Babe can tolerate. So Byrne has begun consulting with Larry Gallupo of the University of California at Davis School of Veterinary Medicine about alternative treatments.
Black Beauty’s most famous resident, however, is a 25-year-old chimp named Nim Chimpsky, whose early life is chronicled in two books bearing his name and who seems, during our visit, to take inordinate pleasure in untying Noah’s sneakers. Nim was born at the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies on November 21, 1973. When he was just three days old, he was sent to the New York lab of Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist who was doing research in behavioral psychology and who named him after—who else?—MIT linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. During the course of the next four years—until Terrace’s funding tapered off—Nim lived with private families and researchers in New York and learned to communicate in American Sign Language, using more than two hundred signs. After he was returned to the Institute for Primate Studies, Cleveland Amory prevailed upon the University of Oklahoma to let Nim live out his days at Black Beauty Ranch, where he has been for the past fifteen years, at present in the company of three other chimps: Midge, Kitty, and Lulu Belle.
But it’s not the chimps or the elephants or the bobcats that are the ranch’s real raison d’être. In 1979 the National Park Service decided to shoot the burros in the Grand Canyon because their numbers were getting out of hand and, the Park Service said, they weren’t indigenous to the canyon. That decision, which Amory called “a declaration of war on the burros,” so energized and mobilized the Fund for Animals that it hired the New York advertising firm Young and Rubicam to place a fundraising ad in Parade magazine showing a picture of a young burro under the headline “If You Turn This Page, This Burro Will Be Shot.” Months of negotiation, fundraising, and litigation led to the fund’s purchase of an 85-acre plot near Murchison and to an agreement with the Park Service to let it rescue the burros. Over a two-year period, using a helicopter and a sling—and with the help of world champion roper Dave Ericsson of Arizona—the new Black Beauty Ranch managed to airlift 577 burros out of the canyon and relocate them in East Texas.
More recently, the relationship between the ranch and the Park Service has taken a happier turn. When a part of the Mojave Desert was designated a national preserve in 1994, the Park Service decided that the burros there were damaging the area’s native plant life. This time, it contacted the Fund for Animals to see if they could work together to relocate the animals. An agreement was reached under which the ranch will accept some three hundred feral burros a year for adoption. On September 12 a shipment of fifty jacks arrived, followed by a shipment of forty more jacks and ten jennies on the twenty-third. If you’ve ever dreamed of adopting a couple of burros—like Noah in the Bible, you’re expected to take a pair—here’s your chance. For more information, you can e-mail the ranch at blkbty@mail.cleaf.com (or visit its Web site at www.blackbeautyranch.org).
“My ranch,” Amory wrote of his boyhood dream, “would most definitely not be a place for circus acts. No animal would stand on two legs or sit on a stool or jump through hoops or do tricks or acts or any other kind of stunt.” And, as we pull away from the ranch—past Shiloh, Atlantic City’s last diving horse, and One-eyed Jack, the buffalo found wandering around a Pennsylvania feedlot, and Peg, a three-legged cat who crawled up the driveway eighteen years ago with her leg caught in an animal trap, and Conga, who no longer has to sit on a bench twirling an umbrella—it is clear that here was a man who made good on his dream. “They’re able to give such love and respect to us,” Amory once said of the occupants of his East Texas ark. “Why can’t we do it for them? Why can’t we just be kind?”
Unlike Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I had wanted to write this piece to praise Cleveland Amory, not to bury him. But fate intervened, and during the last week of October, Amory’s ashes were placed in a large saltshaker tied around the neck of Friendly, one of the first burros rescued from the Grand Canyon back in 1979, and scattered about the ranch he so loved. “We’re going to keep going just as we have been,” Byrne says on the phone. “Just the way Cleveland would have wanted it.” He is working on a stone monument to Amory that will stand beside the monument to his beloved cat, Polar Bear, whom he rescued from starvation and cold on a long-ago Christmas Eve. The cat’s marker is inscribed with the words “Beneath these stones lie the mortal remains of The Cat Who Came for Christmas, Beloved ‘Polar Bear’ 1977—1992. ’Til we meet again.”
Now, true to Amory’s wish, he and his beloved Polar Bear, the Curmudgeon and the Cat, have met again. “I have nothing to fear, / And here my story ends. / My troubles are all over, / And I am at home.”
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