Flash Count Diary. Darcey Steinke
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grim. Female dominance depends on having babies, so once a female stops reproducing, she falls to the lowest rung of the social ladder. “They lose interest in the silverback,” Margulis says, “and the silverback loses interest in them.” Just like humans, gorillas suffer from arthritis and osteoporosis, but the thing that often kills them is starvation. Once their teeth rot and they can no longer chew, they starve.
Dian Fossey writes in her book Gorillas in the Mist about a few older females she studied in the forests of Rwanda. Near the end of shy Idanno’s life, her silverback, Beethoven, slows his group’s pace to keep up with her, and in the last days of her life, though his group has younger females, he carefully builds his night nest of leaves and branches and invites the elderly female to sleep beside him. Even more compelling is the partnership of silverback Rafiki and Coco. Coco is Rafiki’s only female. Coco, Fossey writes, has deep wrinkles on her face, a balding head and rump, a graying muzzle, and flabby, hairless upper arms. She is missing many teeth. One day, while Fossey watches, Rafiki notices that Coco has fallen behind. He stops his group and waits. When Coco approaches, they gaze deeply into each other’s eyes before throwing their arms around each other’s backs and walking together up the slope. The two also share a night nest and “resemble a gracefully aging old married couple.”
While Ambika is the oldest living elephant in captivity, and Lolita is the second-oldest orca, Colo, at age fifty-nine, is the oldest captive gorilla. Audra Meinelt, the assistant primate curator of the Columbus Zoo, believes that Colo is no longer cycling. She does not give “the look” to her silverback or to her male keepers. Neither Meinelt nor her coworkers have ever seen a gorilla menstruate. There is no labia swelling, like there is with other primates, and blood is absorbed and hidden by the animals’ thick, dark fur.
Colo, as the first gorilla born in captivity, had a long and celebrated life at the zoo before, at age forty-five, she started to distance herself from her family. In the mornings when the family left their private sleeping quarters, Colo held back, signaling to her keepers she wanted to be alone. Colo’s new enclosure is next to her family’s, and she still makes clear, by vocalizing and running back and forth, when she disapproves of something the silverback does. Meinelt feels that Colo may have gotten tired of her silverback’s “theatrics.”
These days Colo moves a little slower. The steps to her habitat have been changed to ramps, and along with her regular diet, she is given cranberry juice for urinary tract infections and whole grains to battle constipation. On her fifty-ninth birthday, while spectators sing to her, Colo runs a finger through her birthday cake’s frosting, brings it to her nose, and sniffs. Under her deep-set brown eyes, the skin is wrinkled, and the hair on her head is silvered. Her fans want her to open her presents, but it’s clear, as Colo pulls down the colorful paper chains and drapes them around her neck, that she isn’t going to rush for anyone.
Even though menopause has pushed me back onto my animal frame, I don’t kid myself that now I am one with them. In the presence of animals, I am thrilled by their physicality. But I also feel their deep inscrutability. “Nothing, as a matter of fact,” Georges Bataille writes, “is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended.” He felt the only way to speak of it overtly was through a poetry that slips toward the unknown. The writer Lydia Millet also warns against shallow interspecies enlightenment and claims that the fact we cannot fathom animals is a great and precious gift: “I cherish the reality that other animals are us, in that they have sentience and are not us, in that the nature of that sentience is an eternal mystery.”
In Break of Day, Colette’s 1928 novel, the main character, also named Colette, agrees that no matter how much time goes by, animals remain mysterious. “The passage of the centuries never bridges the chasm which yawns between them and man.” As she ages, though, and moves into menopause, her sympathy with animals increases. “When I enter a room where you’re alone with your animals,” her former husband tells her, “I feel I’m being indiscreet. One of these days you’ll retire to a jungle.” She is attuned to animal emotion: “The tragedies of birds in the air, the subterranean combats of rodents, the suddenly increased sound of a swan on the warpath, the hopeless look of horses and donkeys are so many messages addressed to me.” Colette claims, at the age of fifty-four, that she no longer wants to marry a man. “But I still dream that I am marrying a very big cat.”
On my fifty-fourth birthday I get up early and drive through the Bronx, past Westchester, to Lucky Orphans Horse Rescue in Dover Plains, New York. Winter is sliding into spring; the trees are in first bud. Once I turn onto Route 22, tulips bob in yards, and tiny white petals, like confetti, float down over the road.
I’ve come to meet yet another post-reproductive creature, less exotic than elephants or gorillas. A horse. A thoroughbred, no less, with the official name of Overdue Number. Her sanctuary name is Willow. To my eye, she’s the prettiest horse in her all-female herd—a half dozen mares in a field standing around a small barn with a tin roof. Many of her herdmates have far more horrific stories than Willow’s. Cadbury was rescued from a summer camp. Her owners never took off her bridle, so it grew into her snout. The foal Tulla has scars all over her body from a mountain lion attack.
Willow isn’t the oldest horse at the sanctuary, but her biological predicament is closest to my own. She is here because she is no longer a viable breeder. Born in 2002 in Virginia, Willow raced only once before being sold in 2007 as a broodmare. Broodmares are bred each year and, like Premarin mares, whose urine is used to make hormone supplements, are kept continuously pregnant. Willow’s offspring included Penalty Due, Celestial Number, Vision and Prayer, Noon Shadow 3, and Thunder Thief.
In February 2016, Willow miscarried, and her owners decided her body was no longer viable for reproduction. When horse owners decide their horses are no longer useful, either for riding, racing, or breeding, they send them to auction. But it’s a fantasy that older horses are cared for after their usefulness has passed. Most are not bought at auction and are sold to the slaughterhouse.
Death is the hardest part of feeling animal. “In every calm and reasonable person,” Philip Roth writes, “there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” As a human, I view myself as a significant being who will persist, at least symbolically, after I am gone, but to be animal is to die a forgettable death. Animals look particularly dead splayed along the highway, lumps of fur in puddles of inky blood. Menopause has aggravated my sense of entrapment and death, uncovering what, for so long, I have struggled to deny.
Deanna Mancuso, the founder of the sanctuary, says that Willow was depressed when she first arrived. Her ears, alert in healthy horses, had flipped over. She wasn’t eating and had no interest in people or other horses. An article in Reiner magazine, the publication of the National Reining Horse Association, lays out the criteria for reproduction at broodmare farms. A mare is culled if one of her foals is not easily trainable, if she has trouble in labor, if the money from the sale of her foals does not equal her upkeep, or if, like Willow, she becomes subfertile and requires too much medical care. The article sneers at “welfare programs” that crop up when owners become emotionally connected to their older mares.
Before I leave Lucky Orphans, Willow lowers her head and presses her warm check to my face. Her eyelashes brush my forehead, and I see, like a tiny rain cloud, the milky cataract floating in her eye. Mancuso tells me how, surrounded by mares her own age, Willow seems to be getting over her miscarriage and adjusting to life at the sanctuary. She’s become a surrogate mother to Tulla, the foal attacked by a mountain lion. She lets her dry nurse and shows her disapproval, by whinnying and stomping, when the foal misbehaves.
Lolita. Ambika. Colo. Willow. Their animal spirits reside in their animal bodies and my animal spirit resides in mine. I have tried to understand what their post-reproductive life is actually like. I have mostly failed. I read book after book about animals, studying their habits and wishing I could be wilder. But I also struggle to accept that I too am a biological creature no different from a whale or a horse. I long to comprehend animals just as much as my ancestors did, the first humans who crawled into the earth and painted animal-human creatures on cave walls. “There is every indication that the first men were closer than we are to the animal world,” writes Georges Bataille. “They distinguished the animals from themselves perhaps,