Alan Rabinowitz - Man and Beast

 

 

I was five years old, standing in the old great cat house at the Bronx Zoo, staring into the face of an old female jaguar. I remember looking at the bare walls and the bare ceiling, wondering what the animal had done to get itself there. I leaned in a little towards the cage and started whispering something to the jaguar. But my father came over quickly and asked, “What are you doing?” I turned to him to try to explain, but my mouth froze, as I knew it would, because everything about my young childhood at that time was characterized by the inability to speak. 

 

From the earliest time that I tried to speak, I was handicapped with a severe, severe stutter. Not the normal kind of repetitious ba-ba-ba kinds of stutter that many stutterers have or many children go through, but the complete blockage of airflow and where if I try to push words out, my head would spasm and my body would spasm. Nobody knew what to do with me. 

 

At the time, there were very few books written about stuttering. There was no computer, no internet. The reaction of the New York City Public School system was to put me in a class for disturbed children. I remember my parents trying to fight it, telling them, “He's not disturbed.” But the teacher said, “We're sorry. Whenever he tries to speak, it disrupts everything and everybody.” So, I spent my youth wondering why adults couldn't see into me, why they couldn't see I was normal and all the words were inside of me, but they just wouldn't come out. 

 

Fortunately, at a very young age, I learned what most stutterers learn at some point, you can do two things without stuttering, at least two things. One of them is sing, and I couldn't sing. The other is you can talk to animals and not stutter. So, every day, I would come home from the special class, which all the other kids called the retarded class, and I'd go straight to my room, and I'd go to a closet in my room, and I had a little dark corner of that closet, and I'd go into the closet and I'd close the door and I'd bring my pets, New York style pets, hamster, gerbil, green turtle, a chameleon, occasionally a garter snake, and I would talk to them. 

 

I would talk fluently to them. I would tell them my hopes and my dreams. I would tell them how people were stupid, because they thought I was stupid. And the animals listened. They felt it. And I realized very early that they felt it, because they were like me. The animals, they had feelings too. They were trying to transmit things also, but they had no human voice, so people ignored them, or they misunderstood them, or they hurt them or sometimes they killed them. 

 

I swore to the animals when I was young, that if I could ever find my voice, I would try to be their voice. But I didn't know if that would happen, because I realized that I lived in two worlds. One world was the world where I was normal with animals, I could speak. The other world was the world of human beings where I couldn't. 

 

My parents didn't know what to do. They tried everything. They tried hypnotherapy, they tried drug therapy, they sent me to many kinds of psychologists, but nothing really worked. I got through school, through grade school, junior high school, high school and eventually college by learning tricks stutterers learn, learning when to not speak, learning to avoid situations, learning just to not be around people. When I did have to speak, then I would prove to people that I was not only like them, but I was better than they were. 

 

In the academics, I excelled. I got straight As in everything. In sports, I joined the wrestling team and the boxing team in high school and college, and I took all my teams or helped take them to the state championships. Everybody always said I was an up-and-coming athlete. And I wasn't. I didn't even like it. I was just a very, very frustrated young man who had to find an outlet for his anger. 

 

But by the time I was a senior in college, I had never been out on a date with a girl. I had never kissed a girl except for my mother and I had never spoken a completely fluent sentence out loud to another human being. About midway through my senior year in college, my parents learned of an experimental new program, Upstate New York in Geneseo, where it was very intense. They had to send me away, and I was essentially locked away for two months. It was working with severe, severe stutters, but it was very expensive, but they would do anything for me. 

 

So, my father sold something very dear to him in order to send me there. That clinic changed my life. It taught me two very important things. One of them was that I was a stutterer and I was always going to be a stutterer. There was no magic pill, and I was not going to wake up one morning, as I had always dreamt, and be a fluent speaker. But the other thing it taught me, the more important thing, was that if I did what they were teaching me at this clinic, which was give me the tools, the mechanics to mechanically control my mouth, the airflow, if I worked hard, I could be a completely fluent stutterer. And I worked hard. It was unbelievable. 

 

For the first time in 20 years, I could speak. I could speak. In 20 years, I had never been able to voice everything inside of me. Now, I could. It took a lot of work, because While I was speaking, I had to be thinking about hard contacts, airflow, this and that, but it didn't matter. None of it mattered. I was a fluent speaker now. Life would be different. I would go back to school and they would accept me. 

 

I returned to finish the last half of my college year, and things were different. On the outside, I could speak, but nothing had changed on the inside. Too much had happened for that, I was still the stuttering, broken child inside. Throughout my academic years, I had focused on science. I loved science, because science to me was the study of truths apart from the world of human beings. When I got to college, I decided to channel that science into medicine, pre-medicine, thinking that maybe if I become a doctor, people will like me, people will accept me. But I never liked working with people. 

 

When I got back from the clinic, I realized I can't be doing this. I hate being in labs. And worse than that, I hated. I was tortured by feeling the frustration and the pain of the lab animals in the little cages spinning in those little wheels. So, I applied to graduate school at the University of Tennessee in wildlife biology and zoology, and I got accepted. And that first year, I was down in Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains, studying black bears. When I was in the forest with the animals, I was at home. This was what I was meant to be doing. Being in the forest alone with the animals was my real-world closet. This is what made me feel good. 

 

I came to realize what I'd always known in my heart but never been able to put it into words, and that's that the truths of the world, the reality is not defined by the spoken word, in fact, it's not even speakable. I knew that this was how I had to live my life somehow. Fortunately, right before I got my PhD, I met the pre-eminent wildlife biologist in my field, Dr. George Schaller. He and I spent the day together following bears in the Smoky Mountains. And at the end of the day, George said to me, “Alan, how would you like to go to Belize and be the first one to try to study jaguars in the jungle?” The very first thought in my mind I remembered so clearly was, “Where the hell is Belize?” [audience laughter] But the very first words out of my mouth, not 30 seconds after he had asked me that was, “Of course, I'll go. Of course.” 

 

Within two months, I bought an old Ford pickup truck, packed everything I owned in the back, which didn't even take up half of it and I drove from New York to Central America. Those last few miles-- [audience [laughter] That's a separate story. Those last few miles of driving into that jungle where I would set up base camp for the next two years was just unbelievable to me. Driving by the Mayan Indians, gawking at me, I was entering the jungle to catch jaguars, which nobody knew how to, and put radio collars on them and get data that nobody had ever gotten before. This was what my life was all about. This was where it had to take me. 

 

For the next year, I did just what I set out to do. I learned from hunters. I learned how to capture jaguars. I captured them. I followed them. Many things try to stop me from my goal. There was a plane crash where I almost died. There was one of my men got bitten by a fer-de-lance, a poisonous snake and unfortunately, he died. Many diseases. And those changed me. I had to really look upon things differently. But this was my life. This was where I knew I could stay forever and be happy and be comfortable. But I couldn't, because I also realized that as fast as I was catching jaguars and gathering information about them, they were being killed in front of me. My jaguars were being killed. The outside jaguars out of my study area were being killed, that they were all being wiped out. 

 

Yes, I could sit in that jungle, but then I wouldn't be true to myself. And more important, I wouldn't be true to the promise I made to the animals in the closet, that I would be their voice. And I had the voice now if I wanted to use it. So, I realized I had to leave it. I had to come back into the world of people and try to fight with the world of people to save the animals and these jaguars in particular. But ironically, I realized that if I was going to save these jaguars, not only did I have to enter the world of people again, but I had to go to the highest levels of government. I had to talk to the prime minister. 

 

Well, it took some doing. But within six months, I was standing in the capital city outside the office of the prime minister. He had given me an appointment with the cabinet. They had given me 15 minutes, had no idea what I was going to say to them. Frankly, I'm sure they gave me the appointment, because they just wanted to meet this crazy foreigner who was in the jungle catching jaguars. I had 15 minutes. I couldn't stutter. I couldn't stutter. I couldn't distract them from the point of trying to save jaguars. I had to use everything I had learned and be a completely fluent speaker and convince one of the poorest countries in Central America. No protected areas in the entire country at that time, a place where tourism wasn't even of economic benefit. Ecotourism wasn't even a term at the time that they had to save jaguars. 

 

An hour and a half later, I came out of there. I missed laughter, backslaps. The prime minister and the cabinet had voted to set up the world's first and only jaguar preserve. And I promised them I would make it work. I promised them I would show them it could be of economic benefit. A month later, I was in the jungle following my jaguars. You never see jaguars. If you see them, they'll be killed. So, the most prominent evidence of jaguars are their tracks. 

 

I knew all my jaguars in the study area from their tracks. But this one day when I was in there trying to see where they were all going and what they were all doing, I crossed a completely new track. It was the biggest male jaguar I had ever seen in my life, the biggest track. I knew I had to follow him, hoping I could catch a glimpse, but at least finding out what he was doing in here, whether he had come in from the outside, was he passing through? I followed him for hours, glued on those tracks, until I realized it was getting dark and I didn't want to be caught in the jungle at night without a flashlight. So, I turned around to go back to camp. 

 

As soon as I turned around, there he was, not 15ft in back of me. That jaguar, which I had been following, had circled around and was following me as I was following him. [audience laughter] He could have killed me at any time. He could have gotten me at any time. I didn't even hear him. I knew I should feel frightened, but I didn't. Instinctively, I just squatted down and the jaguar sat. I looked into this jaguar's eyes, and I was so clearly reminded of the little boy looking into the sad old female at the Bronx Zoo. But this animal wasn't sad. In this animal's eyes, there was strength, and power and sureness of purpose. I also realized as I was looking into his eyes, that what I was seeing was a reflection of the way I was feeling too. That little broken boy and that old broken jaguar were now this. [chuckles] 

 

Suddenly, I felt scared. I knew I should be scared, and I stood up and took a step back. The jaguar stood up too, turned and started to walk off into the forest. After about 10ft, it stopped and turned to look back at me. I looked at the jaguar and I leaned a little towards it, the way I had at the Bronx Zoo so many years before and I whispered to it, “It's okay now. It's all going to be okay.” And the jaguar turned and was gone. Thank you.