Siegfried and Roy pose with Pride, another white lion, in an undated photo.
Photograph: Getty Images
A white lion on loan from the Siegfried and Roy animal and magic act has died
after undergoing a medical procedure at the Toledo Zoo.
Zoo officials announced Friday that 14-year-old Legend died after being
immobilized for an hour to allow veterinarians to treat problems with one of its
paws. Legend went into cardiac and respiratory arrest after being removed from
anesthesia.
A zoo veterinarian says in a statement that while there are risks whenever
anesthesia is administered, the procedure was necessary for Legend’s quality of
life. A necropsy will be performed to determine a cause of death.
The zoo has one other white lion, Legend’s 14-year-old brother Courage. The
pair came to the zoo in 2003. A white lion named Wisdom died during surgery at
the zoo in 2013.
The relationship
between shepherds and their dogs is one of the longest-running stories in human
history. But in the US, that story paused for a while and almost looked like it
might come to an end. Since the second world war, by and large, Americans have
stopped eating sheep.
In 1945, there were 55
million head of sheep in the US. By 2013, there was around a tenth of that
number. The decline in the demand for wool led to some of the liquidation of the
sheep flock, but so did changing food tastes. Americans used to eat upwards of
4lbs of lamb in any given year, but now two out of three don’t eat any at
all.
The consumers who
still eat lamb are a now a small niche market, incorporating immigrants from
countries where lamb is a staple and foodies in search of pasture-raised
authenticity. Demand is slowly regaining strength, along with a growing
consciousness about the provenance of animals and the conditions they’re raised
under.
Michelle Canfield, sheep farmer, with Bronte (right) and
Moses . Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
For farmers like
Michelle Canfield, who since 2008 has run a small herd of sheep near Snohomish,
Washington, it brings both opportunities and constraints.
First, she runs
“shedding sheep”, which drop their hair, meaning she doesn’t have to pay to
shear them. Hers are Katahdin Hair Sheep, first developed in Maine and prized
for their prolific lambing and easy-care characteristics.
Second, the absence of
a USDA-approved slaughterhouse close by means that if you want to eat her sheep,
you have to take them away and get them butchered yourself. She doesn’t have a
problem selling them – Seattle is close by, she says, where “the Muslim market
is huge” (she says it is thanks to the number of migrants who have moved to work
in the tech industry).
As much as any other
foodies, this highly educated clientele “want their grass-fed, natural, local
meat, but they want to do their own slaughter, and make sure it’s Halal”.
This “exploding
demand” for strictly grass-fed animals means that she has to leave the flocks
out in the fields full time, including overnight. In turn, the animals are
vulnerable to predators, particularly in lambing season. The most dangerous,
persistent and clever predator of lambs is the coyote.
Canfield tried llamas
as guardian animals, and they worked for a while, but the coytoes worked out how
to get around them at the same time her border collies did. She started to take
losses.
Lockjaw traps are
illegal, and poison is fraught with risks, so she needed another solution.
This is where Moses
and Bronte came in. Both dogs are around eight years old, weigh in well over 100
pounds and are off-white in colour (so they can be distinguished from
predators). Each is descended from two different ancient lines of livestock
guardian dogs.
Moses (left) and
Bronte resting in the grass. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
Bronte, the Maremma,
was the first dog Canfield adopted . Maremmas are an ancient central Italian
breed, created to protect the flocks of Abruzzo, Tuscany and Lazio, a job they
still do in a country where wolves are present and protected.
Bronte had been raised
in the traditional manner of guardian sheepdogs, in a barn with sheep to whom
she was bonded. She loved Canfield’s flock, but she had to learn to cool her
exuberance. “She tried to play with them, she’d want to wrestle with them, even
the lambs.” She was challenging and wilful. “She went feral for a while and I
had to retame her with food.”
It worked, and now
Bronte attends to the flocks dutifully and gently. She looks and acts a little
like an oversized Golden Retriever, one who “perceives the sheep as her primary
peer group”.
To keep her company,
and to help at the times when they needed to split up the flocks, they got
Moses, a Kuvasz. They are a Hungarian breed whose precise origins are lost in
time, but who are said to have arrived with the Magyars in the Carpathian Valley
some 4,000 years ago.
Kuvasz almost
disappeared in the second world war, when many were killed by German or Russian
soldiers for protecting their families. There were revived, and now they are
another part of the array of working dogs available to livestock ranchers.
Moses was a failed
show dog; he was too reactive and grumpy for the ring. When Canfield acquired
him, she quickly realised what the problem was: “He’s terribly far-sighted. He
was growly at dog shows because everything up close was just a jumble of stuff.
He’s worked out well here.” The fact that he has learned to be a guardian
despite not being raised as one is a tribute to Canfield’s training.
While other breeds of
guardian dogs might be more assertive and aggressive, these two mostly get the
job done with their booming barks. A bark is enough to warn Canfield (“I’ve
learned to tell which kind of bark means trouble”) and is also enough to scare
off a coyote. They haven’t yet had to physically tangle with a predator.
Looking to the future,
Canfield worries about wolves. “We’ll see how quickly they make it out here”,
she says. Reintroduced in Idaho and the still-protected apex predator, wolves
are slowly making their way west of the ranges. They’re already in western
Oregon, and one day, perhaps, they will show up in her corner of Washington.
Perhaps the same
conflicts that have played out in eastern Oregon and Washington between
conservationists and ranchers will play out closer to the big cities of the
Pacific Northwest, or maybe by then new techniques and new dogs will provide a
solution.
For now, these two
dogs are happy sleeping, living and eating with their flocks. Soon, Canfield
will introduce a new puppy who will learn from them – which is how a tradition
as old as domestication itself will be renewed.
After one of the longest aquatic pursuits in history, a vessel wanted for
illegal fishing lies wrecked nearly 4km beneath the water off west Africa.
The vessel, Thunder, had been stalked by the Bob Barker, operated by the
conservationist group Sea Shepherd, since 17 December. The two ships played a
game of cat and mouse for 110 days, across 10,260 nautical miles through the
Southern, Indian and Atlantic oceans, before the pursuit came to an end in the
waters off São Tomé on Monday evening.
“The Thunder suddenly came to a complete stop, the crew came out with their
life jackets on and threw a ladder over the side,” said Peter Hammarstedt,
captain of the Bob Barker. “I radioed the captain to ask if they were in
distress and he said ‘yes, we’re sinking’.”
The Sam Simon, Bob Barker’s sister ship, took Thunder’s 40 crew on board as
the boat gradually slipped below the waves over a six-hour period. The crew of
the Thunder comprised about 30 Indonesians, with Spanish officers. The captain
was Chilean.
Hammarstedt said the Thunder’s captain was cheering and applauding as the
boat went down and was recalcitrant when offered shelter on the Sam Simon. Sea
Shepherd spent four months preventing Thunder illegally hauling large quantities
of toothfish, a protected Antarctic species, from the waters.
Three Bob Barker crew members boarded the Thunder and reported that the boat
was deliberately scuttled.
“It was suspicious that all the hatches and doors were left open, some tied
open,” Hammarstedt said. “That’s counterintuitive to keeping a vessel afloat.
They opened it up so it would sink, the engine room was completely filled with
water.”
The Chilean captain said the Thunder was struck by a cargo ship, causing the
sinking, but Hammarstedt said the vessel simply ran out of options.
“They have spent the last month going around aimlessly, simply burning fuel
and hoping that we would run out of fuel first,” he said. “It’s been a siege
situation – who would run out of fuel, food and patience first. They obviously
ran out of patience first.
“It’s a strange situation to be in. Bittersweet, really. I had thought this
would end with us escorting them to a port and handing them over to law
enforcement. The evidence is now in the bottom of the ocean, although we did
take some plans from the Thunder and I do have a toothfish in my freezer that
I’ll send to Interpol. I hope the captain is prosecuted and I’m glad the Thunder
won’t be poaching again.”
The lengthy chase began in the Banzare Bank, a remote part of the Southern
Ocean, about 15 days’ sailing from Perth or Cape Town.
The Thunder made a number of attempts to lose its pursuer, attempting to
dodge between pack ice or using huge waves to create a barrier between it and
the Bob Barker. Finally, the Thunder’s captain tried to simply outrun the Bob
Barker, skirting around the Cape of Good Hope before the final scenes played out
in the Gulf of Guinea.
There were flashpoints – about two months in, the Thunder deployed gillnets
to scoop up some toothfish, only for the Bob Barker to use grappling hooks to
cut buoys from the nets, rendering them useless. More than 1,400 fish, weighing
more than 45,000kg, were returned to the ocean.
Patagonian toothfish, known by some fishers as “white gold” due to their
value, are large predators found in some of the coldest waters on Earth, in the
Southern Ocean. Dwelling in depths of up to 2,500m, toothfish can weigh up to
150kg and produce a solid piece of white flesh, high in omega 3, when
filleted.
The capture of toothfish is tightly regulated but at least six vessels,
including the Thunder, are suspected of targeting the species in the largely
lawless international waters.
In 2013, Interpol issued a “wanted” notice for the Thunder, which has
operated under at least three different names and several different flags,
including Mongolia and, most recently, Nigeria.
Interpol estimates that the owners of the Thunder, probably an organised
criminal gang, have earned more than US$60m from illegal fishing since 2006. The
governments of New Zealand and Norway have condemned the activities of the
Thunder, accusing it of “violating international laws and conventions”.
Sea Shepherd will be pressing São Tomé and Nigerian officials, who are
leading the search and rescue operation, to work with Interpol to prosecute the
Thunder’s captain. But most illegal activity in international waters goes
unpunished and even unnoticed.
“We hope this makes government think a bit more about co-ordinated action
against illegal fishing,” Hammarstedt said. “These criminal syndicates take fish
from some of the poorest countries in the world and they need to be
stopped.”
Every time he hunts, Peter Williams sends a
silent message to his prey before he squeezes the trigger: “Please give me your
life. I’ll eat some of your meat, and I’ll make something beautiful out of your
hide.” On a cold afternoon in mid-January, Williams, who is 33, was kneeling on
the barnacle- and birdshit-encrusted rocks of an uninhabited island. On all
sides was Sitka Sound, a narrow stretch of water off the coast of southeast
Alaska. Williams wore an orange raincoat and earmuffs; his rifle rested in a dip
between rocks. About a hundred feet away, a dozen sea otters were bobbing in the
water. He wanted a stray, at the edge of the group. He was moving with the
sureness of ritual. For him this is ritual. When he scans the water for targets,
Williams’s eyes get unnaturally wide, like a mask, and his head starts to
swivel.
His prey seems to have evolved for heart-melting cuteness. Black beseeching
eyes, soft triangle nose, puckered little mouth: sea otters look like puppies’
or human babies encased in fur. Pairs “hold hands”, paw in paw, to stay
together. As Williams says: “They’re very human-like, not only their physical
appearance but also their behaviour. They’re very social, they’re very
family-oriented. They’re intelligent, they’re playful.” Sea otters float on
their backs, limbs in the air, up to a hundred massed in a “raft”. Snoozing,
they tuck themselves into stringy beds of kelp, to keep from drifting out to
sea.
Williams is after their fur, which is the densest and softest in the animal
kingdom – Russian traders once called it “soft gold”. There is no material like
it. The black, silky, lustrous stuff is so instantly comforting that it hardly
seems like fur at all. Few human heads have more than 150,000 hairs, but sea
otters stay warm with a double layer of never-moulting fur, up to a million
hairs per square inch. Williams designs and sells clothes and accessories, made
from the otters he hunts. By reviving a forgotten and forbidden market for their
fur, Williams sees himself as restoring a wounded culture. His father was
Yup’ik, from the largest tribal group of Alaska Natives – who suffer as a whole,
disproportionately, from poverty, substance abuse, suicide and rape. The
tradition of marine mammal hunting runs deep among the indigenous peoples of the
state, but beginning in the 18th century, white settlement brought the forced
conscription of Native hunters and the near-eradication of many species.
Out on the rocks, a muffled shot cracked the stillness. The raft split up, a
dozen black heads adrift in seemingly random motion, and Williams picked off a
second. A shot to the head is the quickest and cleanest way to kill, according
to Williams. “There’s a sound when it hits, a thump you can hear when the bullet
stops. It mushrooms out, expands, and fractures,” he said of the 55-grain,
soft-point .223 rounds he fires.
Williams made for the Jenna, his ramshackle aluminium skiff, docked just off
the island. He bailed out a few buckets’ worth of water and set the outboard
motor, racing after the harvest before it could sink or float away. Wild little
islands lay scattered across Sitka Sound, which opened wide on to the freezing
North Pacific in the distance. A volcano stood glazed with snow.
A few minutes later, the Jenna pulled up alongside two floating bulges of
sleek fur. Both females: a “sub-adult” (or teenager) and a hefty “old-timer”,
with distinguished white hairs, maybe 5ft 6in long. “There’s times when I go out
to pick up the animal and it’s still alive,” said Williams. “That’s what I bring
the aluminium bat for. Life is a powerful force.” He maintains that “clubbing is
a really efficient way of killing something, especially if you do it right, you
club it in the head.”
He grabbed the otters by the scruff and dropped them in the skiff. One had
blood on its whiskers, and its eyes were filling up with blood. Williams guided
the Jenna into a sheltered bay of foam-flecked green water and towering spruces,
known as Pirates Cove. On this cold cobble beach, Williams would do the
skinning. Blood dripped on his waders as he pulled the corpses onshore. Then he
lifted each otter’s maw in turn and gave the dead their last drink of water,
following an old Yup’ik custom he learned from an anthropologist’s study. “The
idea is that spending their life in the salt water, they get really thirsty,” he
told me later. “If they know that the hunter will give them their last drink of
water, they’ll give their life to the hunter.” The spirit of the animal,
reincarnated in another body, will visit the hunter again. Williams took a swig
of water himself.
Peter Williams on the hunt for sea otters.Photograph: James Poulson
“I don’t really like to do it,” said Williams – not of the skinning, but of
the plastic gloves he was pulling on to do it – “because of the disconnection.”
But he wasn’t taking any chances: some months earlier he had contracted “seal
finger”, an infection common among people who handle the bones or pelts of
seals. First his left thumb blew up like a balloon; he went on antibiotics for
months; then came the tingling, the burning feet, insomnia, pain in every joint
– a possible autoimmune reaction. Work had become almost impossible, whether
hunting, designing, or sewing. Still, he had little choice but to continue. Deep
in debt, Williams had managed to network, charm, and spend his way into a
foothold during New York fashion week in February. Living well below the poverty
line, he saw it as his last, best shot to get his business off the ground.
Fashion week was less than a month away, and he had a to-do list 37 items
long.
Working fast on the sub-adult, he cut inside the thighs and around the tail,
slit down the arms and around the wrists, then up to the chin. The fur opened up
like a onesie unzipped, revealing ribs racked with perfect purple meat and a
steaming tangle of intestines. Williams produced a larger blade, curved and
medium-sharp, for scraping away the tissue and membrane. Ten minutes later, the
hide peeled off with disturbing ease.
“I like to leave some meat for the birds,” said Williams as he worked on the
backstrap, the tastiest part, pushing chunks of meat into small Ziploc bags.
“Sometimes I make friends with seagulls. I’ve learned to not feed ’em until I’m
nearly done. They get pretty demanding.” He carved out a tooth – it’s how
biologists age them, he said, and hunters are supposed to submit a tooth for
every kill, a grisly way of keeping tabs on the population. In the past you had
to take the skull. He tossed the carcass and innards into the water.
“That blood,” said Williams, euphoric in a patch of bay going Day-Glo by his
feet, “such a beautiful electric red.” A seagull was hovering and crying in the
darkening sky.
“Kind of like heaven,” he said.
* * *
The first time I met Williams, two years ago, it was over plates of seal
curry. I was in Sitka on a summer-long fellowship, and he brought the seal,
which he’d hunted and cooked himself, to share with the fellows. He said what he
always says right off the bat: “Alaska Natives are exempt from the Marine
Mammals Protection Act. We’re allowed to hunt marine mammals for food, clothing,
and to make arts and crafts for sale.”
Williams was a giant, gangly guy with shoulder-length hair and hippie
sideburns. He had a way with women, but cracked off-colour jokes. “Right on,”
was a favourite phrase, but the mellowness melted fast, giving way to a
charismatic intensity. He was “a radical lone-wolf nonconformist”, as he said,
but a friendly one. “I’m this country bumpkin,” he once told me in New York. “I
don’t really know what I’m doing.”
Williams is a hunter-designer-entrepreneur with an unusual ethic. “My
business is not separate from my activism,” he said, “it’s not separate from my
spirituality, it’s not separate from my culture.” His clothing label, Shaman
Furs, is a one-man operation: Williams hunts, skins, fleshes, stretches, sews,
designs, markets and sells. Tanning, the process of treating the hides to make
them wearable and durable, is one of the few things he outsources. He prints and
uses Wi-Fi at the library and takes credit-card orders on his iPhone. Influenced
by Italian design and indigenous art, he designs for simple elegance, confident
that unique materials can speak for themselves.
Williams is aware that his identity and livelihood are based on killing a
beloved and magnificent animal, but he argues frankly for subsistence – the
cultural and economic right of Alaska Natives, which is legally recognised, to
live off the land and the sea. He understands that fur carries a lingering
stigma, particularly for liberal North Americans and Europeans and partly as a
legacy of Peta’s famous 1994 campaign “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur”, which
featured supermodels. But Williams holds that conservation, imposed from the
outside, can look a lot like colonialism. A small-scale, Native-run hunt can be
sustainable and empowering, he tells anyone who will listen – and it is the
thing that saved him.
In and out of therapy since he was eight years old, Williams struggled for
years with drugs and alcohol, depression and antidepressants, a sense of
cultural trauma as an Alaska Native, amplified by a very personal sense of doom.
He was “locked up” in treatment centres, left home at 16, got kicked out of high
school. “I would go from job to job, trying different things,” Williams told me.
“I worked at the local television station, as a janitor, at the tribe,” trying
to make it as an artist. He hit rock bottom, suicidal, among anarchist punks in
Portland, Oregon: “I had to change, or I was going to completely destroy
myself.” He came back to Sitka and taught himself to hunt, but for almost a year
he wouldn’t or couldn’t kill a sea otter. He shot and missed, or couldn’t bring
himself to shoot at all. Six years later, he is deft and thorough as he hunts.
He can manage when the bad feelings come.
Homeward bound from Pirates Cove, Williams revved the engine and got us “on
step”, skipping over the crystal waters of Sitka Sound. The Jenna hit a constant
speed – “Plateauing!” he shouted – and zoomed past stunned-looking ducks.
Humpback whales were breathing up columns, smoke-white above the horizon. Sea
lions, lovely and fierce, swam towards the boat. Retreating glaciers had formed
the landscape: a submerged chain of icy mountains incised with innumerable bays,
channels, straits and many-fingered fjords.
Peter Williams sets off in his ramshackle aluminium
skiff.Photograph: James Poulson
And there were 17m acres, 5,000 islands more of this: the Tongass National
Forest, encompassing almost all of the southeast Alaskan panhandle. Nowhere else
in North America does the natural world feel so vast, wild, and abundant –
during a salmon run, the rivers here can turn dark silver. Barely populated and
mostly roadless, Alaska is three and a half times the size of Texas. Nowhere
else in North America does the natural world feel so vast, wild, and abundant –
during a salmon run, the rivers here can turn dark silver. The modern state
emerged in the 1970s as a strange sort of compromise when oil companies, Alaska
Natives and conservationists fought each other to a standstill, then divided up
the land. Car number plates proclaim it “The Last Frontier”, but the frontier
mythology now comes with a postmodern twist, thanks to the bizarre boom in
Alaskan reality TV. The Deadliest Catch, Yukon Men, Bering Sea Gold – more than
20 shows are currently in production.
A few hours after the hunt, we were in the trailer eating sea otter
backstrap, pan fried and lightly seasoned. “It’s some of the best wild game,”
said Williams, “it’s iron-y,” close to venison. The hides had been salted, the
Jenna dragged up on to Eagle Beach, just out back. We ate the wine-dark meat
with salad and mashed sweet potatoes.
Williams’s trailer is a home, office, design studio, storage unit, and sewing
room – with magnificent views facing out to the hunting grounds. The yard was
strewn with useful stuff: tyres, oyster shells, sand beds for a garden, the
skulls of sea otters. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew was
on the record player and spent shell casings filled a former jar of artichoke
hearts. There was fur all over – clippings and scraps, along with some of
Williams’s products: scarves, hats, pillows, blankets, earmuffs, six
fur-encircled mirrors in a row on the wall. Hanging across from them was a 5ft
stalk of baleen, primevally beautiful, and two Chagall-like scenes of hunting
and addiction, which Williams painted himself. Three freezers – Alaskan freezers
are not like other freezers – stood stocked with otter, seal, salmon, halibut,
black muktuk (the blubbery skin of a bowhead whale) and elk meat sent
by an uncle in Utah.
Despite the legal restrictions and ambiguities around marine mammal meat, not
to mention the lack of market, Williams speaks lyrically about the culinary and
dietary possibilities: “I’d love to open up a little taco truck with seal
barbecue, or make sea otter sausage. I would love to make omega-3 fatty acid
pills out of seal blubber. They do that in Canada.” He cooks seal jalapeño stew,
praises seal heart jerky, and calls seal liver “the best of all livers”, though
personally he’s cutting back – high cholesterol.
Peter Williams making clothes from sea otter
skin.Photograph: James Poulson
* * *
The next morning, we were in church. Yesterday’s bloodied hunter was spiffy
in a dark blue dress shirt and the “Peter Williams vest”, a waistcoat he
designed himself: half otter and half seal on plaid. Williams values Christian
community, but comes from a bloodline of Yup’ik shamans (“Good shamans, I’ve
been told. Apparently there were good shamans and bad shamans – good and bad in
the sense of intent and forces, not necessarily skill quality”). He describes
his hunting as a “spiritual act of harvest”, and before going out, he always
“smudges” with a shrub called Hudson’s Bay tea, passing the sweet-smelling smoke
over his body as he prays for safety and for quick kills. He keeps these kinds
of details quiet at church: “To talk about trees communicating to me, to talk
about salmon speaking to me, I have other forums that I do that in.”
Williams is used to straddling worlds, the traditional role of the shaman. He
grew up doubly displaced: an Alaska Native among white folks, a Yup’ik among
Tlingits (the indigenous people of Sitka). His mother’s family was Pennsylvania
German, missionaries and teachers who settled in Sitka. His father was from the
Yup’ik village of Akiak in western Alaska – a land of subarctic tundra,
thousands of thaw lakes, a thousand miles northwest of Sitka. His parents met
while his mother was teaching in the village. Linguistically, culturally and
physically distinct from most other Alaska Natives, the Yup’ik have adapted to
life near the Arctic, beyond the tree line. They are part of a broader Eskimo
family of cultures – extending from the eastern edge of Siberia across Alaska,
along Canada’s remote northern coast and all the way to Greenland.
When he was just six weeks old, Williams came to Sitka with his mother. His
father, who suffered from alcoholism, stayed behind in Akiak. “When my father
died, I think I was eight,” Williams told me. “He drowned in an alcohol-related
boating accident. Four of his other brothers died in alcohol-related deaths. Out
of eight years I don’t remember a phone call, I don’t remember a letter, but I
also wondered if he did contact and I just wasn’t aware of it.”
Until recently, Williams had only been to Akiak once; he still doesn’t speak
much Yup’ik, the first language of Akiak and arguably the most resilient
indigenous language in the US. “I thought you were a kass’aq [white
person],” his father’s mother once told him, not recognising him when he spoke
English to her on the phone. “Some people call it decimation, not assimilation,”
said Williams. “A lot of it [Yup’ik culture] I have to rediscover.”
After Williams started hunting, he learned the ways in which the history of
North America is bound up with furs and hides. From the 1600s to the end of the
19th century, millions of fur-bearing animals were killed across the continent,
as indigenous subsistence patterns gave way to industrial-scale slaughter. Fur
trappers and traders, often exploiting Native American labour, played “a major
role in the settlement and evolution of the colonies”, writes historian Eric Jay
Dolin. At a massive, crumbling mansion in upstate New York, Williams once met an
Astor descendant – the first American fortune was made with fur.
The European rage for beaver hats propelled settlement and trade from the
Atlantic to the Rockies, but the history of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest was
shaped by the mania for sea otter pelts in late imperial China. Feeding that
insatiable market, Russian colonisation followed the otter, whose traditional
habitat centred on the vast peninsula of Alaska with its 34,000 miles of tidal
shoreline.
In 1804, Sitka became the capital of Russian America, and 18,000 pelts were
going to Canton annually. Forced labour fed the slaughter. Under Russian
coercion, Native hunters went out in skin-covered kayaks, armed with bone- or
shell-tipped spears and later with guns. By 1911, barely a thousand sea otters
were left, and a single pelt commanded £200 on the London fur market. That was
the year that an international ban on fur seal hunting, signed by the US, UK,
Russia, and Japan, also protected sea otters, almost as an afterthought.
In 1972, US Congress passed the Marine Mammals Protection Act, adding a
further layer of conservation and regulation – but also carving out an exemption
for Alaska Natives with a “blood quantum” of a quarter or more, who “dwell” near
the coast and hunt for subsistence. “Now we have a theoretical monopoly over
this valuable resource, which brought us so much pain and oppression,” Williams
told me, “I see the potential for healing and empowerment.”
Today there may be as many as 100,000 sea otters worldwide, most of them in
Alaska. Furriers and fashionistas have forgotten they even exist, while
conservationists pride themselves on a textbook success. The southern sea otter
of California is considered endangered and the otter population in south-west
Alaska is officially “threatened”, but the stock around Sitka is by all accounts
healthy – far too healthy, say many locals.
An Alaska state senator recently went so far as to propose a bounty on sea
otters, citing the threat to commercial shellfish beds. By eating up all the
shellfish, the otters harm not only commercial shellfish divers, but themselves
as well – creatures that consume more than 25% of their body weight in food,
every day, tend to run through resources quickly. “Go get ’em” is what many
locals tell Williams.
“Sea otters are becoming almost kind of a despised species,”
hunter-conservationist Richard Nelson told me in Sitka. “They’re devastating
their own habitat. From that standpoint, Peter Williams isn’t just out there
trying to make a living, he’s out there carrying on an important ecological
service.” But Nelson adds that an expanding market for the fur could necessitate
“management regulations” – like a season, or a bag limit – ideally run by Alaska
Natives in consultation with biologists, “so we don’t have a replay of the
extermination”. Sea otter earrings by Peter Williams.Photograph: Tim Knox
“All of us live by taking other life,” he added, “you can’t opt out of it and
stay alive.” As Williams put it: “Disconnection from the environment led to
exploitation and taking too much. The other extreme is you can’t touch it, but
that continues the disconnection instead of continuing the relationship,
continuing the harvest, and adapting.”
Last year, up to a hundred regular hunters across Alaska, people like
Williams, harvested a record 2,100 sea otters – double what it was a few years
earlier, according to a government-run tagging and monitoring program. (Williams
took 38, “a minimal year for me”.) While few make a year-round living, sea otter
and seal are becoming an important source of supplementary income for many more.
With economic opportunities scarce in the villages, Native leaders are quietly
promoting the hunt and the craft with skin-sewing classes, a state-funded
“sustainable arts project”. The hunt happens quietly – many hunters are aware
that sea otters have their adoring fans, especially “down south” in the lower
48. Williams, too, knew what he was up against.
* * *
A few days after the hunt, visibly unwell, Williams got around to fleshing,
the final stage before sending the sea otter’s hide off for tanning. He clipped
a hide to a board and blasted it with the jet of a power washer, removing what
was left of muscle and fat, taking care not to tear a hole in the fur. Globs of
flesh ran off, staining rocks a calamine pink. Once 80lb or more, the animal was
now down to less than a tenth of that. Williams laid the hide on a rock. After a
few weeks at the tannery – drying, hydrating, pickling, rinsing, oiling,
tumbling, and brushing – it would be a fur: something Williams could work with,
something people will wear.
Back in the trailer, he had started stretching hides that were already
tanned. There were enough for fashion week, he decided. Now it was time to
create pieces, non-stop. Williams sat on the floor, tracing with tailor’s chalk
on a swatch of fabric – the flaps for a trapper hat to be lined with fur, for a
model to wear in New York. Once he cuts the fabric with a craft knife, a
seamstress may help with the fabric sewing, but any fur sewing Williams does
himself, by hand.
For all the rugged individualism, the frontier is highly regulated, utterly
rationalised. A mouthful of committees, commissions, and councils “divvy up
resources” and ensure that the voices of “resource users” get heard, as one
local fisherman told me. The sea otter hunt isn’t “managed” like others – no
season, no bag limit – but legal ambiguity and periodic enforcement sweeps have
left Williams with understandable paranoia. “I’ve got to make the thing from
start to finish,” he told me. Unless sold to another Alaska Native, pelts must
be “significantly altered” by the hunter, in a traditional manner consistent
with a cottage industry. Williams’s friend and mentor, Wade “Marty” Martin, once
sold 10 sea otter hides to a non-Native, unwittingly he says, and a federal
judge hit him with two years’ probation and a $1,000 fine. A Native craftsman in
Sitka was once hauled in for putting a “non-traditional” zipper on a sea otter
parka and two “non-traditional” metal snaps on a hat – he only won the right to
do it after a seven-year court battle.
There is a tension, too, between the economic pressures of modern American
life and traditional Alaskan culture. Many cash-poor Alaskans subsist on what
they can hunt and fish, but there is also a traditional cultural ideal around
self-sufficiency, autonomy, connection with nature, and a gift economy that
extends to family, friends and neighbours. Capitalism is “a slave system, a
prison system”, Williams once told me. “I’m not an anarchist,” he said another
time. “I’m just a Yup’ik.” But he had just bought his plane ticket to New York,
a capital of capitalism. He was staking the last of his savings on fur and on
fashion.
On my last day in Sitka, we walked around a museum where Williams goes for
inspiration and sometimes gives demonstrations. There were shaman masks and
bentwood boxes a century old, looking pristine and timeless; there were snow
goggles eerily reminiscent of Google Glass, and a giant sealskin suit fit for an
astronaut.
“I go to craft fairs,” said Williams, “and I hear about elders not even
covering their table fees, let alone their time and money to get there.” Young
people cannot devote themselves to traditions that will not make them a living,
he added, and he hoped to change that by going to New York. He pointed to
dazzling totem poles at the centre of the room. The art of totem pole carving
traditionally went about as far north as Sitka, and the creation of such ornate
and specialised indigenous art is often attributed to the abundance of the
Northwest Coast fisheries. Meanwhile, life was harder, and the art more spare,
among Williams’s people further north. “They had time to develop,” said Williams
of the totem pole carvers, “they had resources to develop.”
* * *
When Williams brought his furs to New York in the middle of February, it was
the coldest day in 20 years – much colder than Sitka – and the rivers were
turning to ice. He had finished sewing the vests on the plane and assembled 100
pairs of seal earrings for gift bags while crashing on a friend’s couch in
Bushwick, binge-watching House of Cards. Overnight lows hit -5C, -25C with the
windchill. The weather brought to mind an era when fur was a status symbol, when
seven city blocks of New York’s Garment District were wall-to-wall fur.
Six years before, Williams had shown up at a glitzy fur expo in New York,
wandering the halls in baggy cargo pants, hair down to his shoulders (“I saw
people wearing jewellery worth more than I’ve made in my entire life”). On
periodic trips to the city since then, he would wear his furs, crash on couches,
talk his way into parties, make friends on the subway. With no contacts in the
world of east-coast fur, he cold-called his way into a relationship with a
century-old fur firm, where he picked up tips about sizing, grading,
pattern-cutting, and the kind of garments to make. “I felt like I was in an
episode of Project Runaway,” he said.
Now, uptown at fashion week’s Lincoln Center headquarters, fur scarves and
stoles were trending, and fur trim – much of it fake – seemed to be everywhere.
The Nepalese-American designer Prabal Gurung was debuting a fur coat inspired by
Native American motifs. A 19-month-old North West was rocking a crystal fox fur
coat, at an estimated cost of $3,500. Fur is “making one hell of a comeback”,
gushed the website Fashionista. “We’d be hard pressed to name a major show so
far this season that hasn’t showed an excess of fur.”
Downtown, Williams was setting up at the TechStyle Lounge, a one-day
“anti-trade show” organised by a fashion PR firm. Buying the “Insider Package”
had got him into a loft space with views over the snow-covered city, plus
signage, invitations, VIP gift bags, “logo inclusion”, and other symbols of
professionalism. There was no runway, but he had been connected to the three
young models – attractive and approachable, but not preternatural – who were now
sporting his vests, cuffs, and headbands. They greeted the invited bloggers,
“influencers”, one-percenters and assorted hangers-on who were taking a break
from the runways to discover something a little different. Williams was paying
for the chance to get noticed.
The TechStyle Lounge was not a venue for selling, but Williams had brought
eight different products, ranging from a $60 seal headband ($300 for otter) to
three different vests, priced around $1,500 each. “I’m hoping that I’ll find
some retailers,” he said, “people that want to buy some stuff at wholesale,” or
even a boutique that would carry a few items. His price point might be high for
Etsy, the online marketplace, or for the craft-fair scene, but it was normal by
high-end fashion standards. It was all about finding his customer, maybe a
certain kind of well-heeled hipster, who was looking for stories and sources and
something unique.
Williams stood by the entrance with his models and products, next to a big
photo of himself with an unapologetic caption: “I Hunt the Otters I Sew With.”
About a dozen other “brands” had informal stations around the room, each one
straining to seem successful and established. There was organic lip balm
(“handcrafted in a private kitchen in Harlem, six ingredients or less”), and
“hot yoga towels that attach to your mat, like a fitted sheet”. The morning
“influencer fitness event” had featured ayurvedic lollipops; now people were
hydrating with raw organic maple water and “couture tea”. Peter Williams models his clothes in New
York.Photograph: Tim Knox
Completing the new-age new-economy carnival were the minor celebrities, said
to be circulating: Billie Carroll of the reality TV show Made in Chelsea: NYC;
18-year-old IndyCar driver Luca Forgeois; author, instructor, and fitness coach
Nadia Murdock. It was all about the connections and exposure, but nobody famous
was hashtagging Shaman Furs on Instagram, or tweeting out mentions. As the
afternoon wore on, Williams seemed increasingly anguished: “It’s really funny to
have this premium product where just about everybody who sees it loves it, but
not being able to sell it yet,” he said. “I have it, people like it, it’s
unique, it’s special. How do we start selling it?”
“I don’t think anyone has walked by without touching something,” said
Anthony, one of the models. A lifestyle coach from Atlanta posed for a few
pictures, trailed by a publicist in gold shoes and army pants. “That’s sexual,”
said the publicist as he ran his fingers over the fur. “That’s like in front of
the fireplace.” A blogger awarded Shaman Furs her “close-to-nature authenticity
prize”, but disclosed an unease: “What would the folks from Peta have to say?”
The global fur trade may be booming – $40bn a year, according to the
International Fur Federation, 85% of it farmed, rather than hunted in the wild –
but the anti-fur campaigns still resonate.
When I called Williams the next morning, he tried to sound hopeful: “People
seemed to be pretty interested and supportive of what I do, but I wasn’t aware
of any connections made. I wasn’t aware of talking to any boutiques or any
retailers.” He was on his way to the airport, and I wondered if I would see him
in the city again. “I’m trying to stay positive,” he said. “I’m trying to pull
back and relax and open up, and that’s usually when the magic happens.” But if
something didn’t give, Williams said, he might have to work as a luggage handler
for an airline, or train to be a drug counsellor. Hunting and designing would
become an occasional thing.
When we talked again a few days later, Williams was back in Alaska, sounding
a little better. He and his girlfriend Carol had missed their connecting flight,
but the airline put them up in a swanky hotel room, and they watched a dog show
– “boyfriend points,” said Williams, laughing. He was looking forward to
gardening, he said, and anxious about the application he had just submitted to
Fashion Week Brooklyn, which happens in April. The first day back, he was out in
his hunting grounds. Ross Perlin is the author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn
Little in the Brave New Economy. He writes on labour, language, and
culture.
Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
On Wednesday, Uber delivered puppies on-demand. For $30, office workers in
10 cities across the US could use the company’s app to order 15 minutes of
cuddle time with the adoptable dogs.
The company, which is usually geared toward taxi and limousine service world
domination, brought the pups to offices in partnership with the Animal Planet
television channel.
The deliveries were part of a promotion for the station’s upcoming Puppy Bowl
XI special. The show airs annually as an alternative to the NFL’s Super Bowl,
which kicks off in Glendale, Arizona, this Sunday. Puppy Bowl cameras follow the
tiny canines as they play in a field-themed pen packed with football toys.
Puppies were delivered between 11am and 3pm in Phoenix, Baltimore, Cleveland,
Dallas, Washington, Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Seattle.
The dogs delivered were from local animal shelters. Notably, some were
dressed for the occasion in tutus and jerseys. In the past, Uber has delivered
kittens, Halloween costumers, food and flu shots.
