From The Vault Of Art Shay: How Deep Is Your Love (For Your Pet)?
By Chuck Sudo in News on Feb 6, 2013 8:30PM
My favorite animal picture shows this Brookfield Zoo monkey evading capture and relocation in warm winter quarters.\r\nIts title is anti-Darwinian: \"Monkey Descending from 12 Men.\" It hangs on the wall, or did, of at least one Nobelist, who thought as little of Darwin as did the monkey.
Simone de Beauvoir loved this picture because it illustrated an animal-human dilemma at the Brookfield Zoo. Until it was a year old the bonnet monkey could pass through bars of the cage easily. At one year the bonnet\'s head became too big and it has to choose- live outside and elude cats, dogs, etc. Or live inside and get free food and medical care. Here I show the choice of one democratic voter.\r\nSimone , who took the picture back to Paris and framed it for her wall, reported to Nelson that Sarte had mocked\r\nthe picture as illustrating her life living off Sartre at the time. She stopped taking money from Sartre, so don\'t underestimate the power of a picture in the international existential arena. Or in the halls of ZETA maybe.\r\n
This was one of several assignments I did for the \<em\>National Enquirer\<\/em\>. (They paid me for three out of the four I did for them.)
I had noticed a Tribune story on a family in Hegewisch (a neighborhood on the Southease side of Chicago) that had built a big cage for their pet lion. They got tired of the 63 cats they had owned formerly. I sold the story to \<em\>Life\<\/em\>.
A Sunday supplement asked me to sneak into the Chicago Stockyards and illustrate the then-scandal of animals being so closely packed on trucks from the farms that many of the pigs died en route. Here, awash in a sea of dead mama pigs, a doughty little Spotted Poland, survives a day after his birth on milk from a dead sow\'s teat. He died the next day, but this picture and the story accompanying it, helped amend the cruel shipping practice of the time. Aside from my work for Chicagoist, this picture may go down as my greatest journalistic achievement. Give or take my 1968 Convention coverage.
Nelson Algren (find him in the picture) led me to the animal shelter that gave him the idea for Sparrow in \<em\>The Man with the Golden Arm\<\/em\>. Sparrow gets stray dogs free here, from Viola Larsen, and sells them to\r\nanimal lovers for 50 cents each. Nelson insisted on buying this picture from me and gifting it to his sometimes girlfriend, Simone de Beauvoir. Did she like the irony of most of the bystanders paying more attention to the little dog than to the big derelict. Nope. She liked the fact that the bum had stigmata, like Jesus off the cross, on both wrists. She asked Nelson where he thought the bum scored the stigmata. He sloughed her off with a joke on bondage he was sure she didn\'t understand but, in the light of the New York Times story I write about this week, could be veritable.
This little pooch was following her master as well as she could heading east on Superior Street, right down from the Stephen Daiter Gallery, which eventually sold her picture upstairs.
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Germany's recent outlawing of bestiality has Art digging through animal photos.)
I'll bet most of you fellow New York Times readers were combing the sports section last week for clues to Notre Dame's dilemma—was Manti Te'o 's girlfriend real and could she learn to spell his name before she sold her story to the tabloids? (Not me.)
At the same time, back in the news section, the Times' Berlin reporter, Chris Cotrell, had a more lubricious problem: How to get his much sexier story past his prissy editors, out of South Bend, and into the hands of moralist readers such as I and, by extension, several million Gothamist network readers who wisely bait their breath every time I come up to the plate.
Cottrell's job was to disseminate the news that Germany's upper house of Parliament, the Bundesrat, voted last Friday, for the very first time in German history, to criminalize "using an animal for personal sexual activities." So be warned all you buyers of Volkswagens and BMWs who combine your foreign car purchases with deductible sidetrips—leave your sexy pets at home, or bring a human along who's legal.
Cottrell, a much better reporter than the guys who promulgated the Te'o story, pointed out that ZETA, the advocacy group (Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Enlightenment), has a co-director, David Zimmermann, who opined: “It's a sexual aspect that is entirely foreign to most people. They just see a man and think, 'What terrible thing is he doing to that dog?' Or vice versa?”
The story dutifully noted that "Mr. Zimmermann had a Great Dane (sex unspecified) with which he occasionally had sex, but it died four months ago," he said. "Now he lives with his similarly zoophilic boyfriend and their Dalmatian."
"For me," he says, "she's just a good friend." The story also mentions a low-budget documentary which features a porn star with feelings for cats and a butcher who fell in love with a pig."
As we punsters like to aver, truth is often stranger than affliction. Here followeth some of the truths I've learned covering (not in the biblical sense, of course) animals.
