Dugong, dugong, it’s the cow of the sea…
Dugong, dugong, also known as the manatee
It doesn’t have wings – that would be silly
Doesn’t live in a tree – that would also be silly
Compared to the dolphin, its very close cousin
It’s quite ugly – so very ugly!
Click here to listen to this song in its original context. And read on for a very different perspective.
***
I first learned of the existence of manatees in 1989. My new boyfriend Charles took me to Florida to meet his parents, and we enjoyed a one-day detour to the Everglades National Park. Florida has 15,000 square kilometers of fragile marshland, and 4,000 of them are protected by the U.S. National Park Service. Everglades National Park has few trails, but many watercourses. Its purpose truly is conservation rather than recreation. About 1200 endangered manatees live in Florida, and many take shelter in the estuaries of the Everglades.
Charles and I visited the Everglades at the very end of the era that allowed airboats in the watercourses. An airboat is a flat-bottom metal boat propelled by an airplane propeller. The first airboat, built in Nova Scotia in 1905, was called the “Ugly Duckling,” and modern designs have not improved.
Charles is extremely comfortable and skilled around all kinds of boats, so he romantically insisted we rent one and ride around the Glades. The water is so rich in tannin from the mangrove trees that it is black. From your boat, you cannot see into the water at all. So, as you can imagine, Charles ecstatically enjoyed the water, the wind, and impressing me with his boating skills…while I shivered in terror, absolutely positive we were going to harm a manatee. (We did not.)
Boating accidents are actually the greatest threat to manatees in Florida. Manatees are aquatic mammals who live in shallow water, both saltwater and freshwater. They are large and long-lived – a seventy-year old manatee might weigh 1200 pounds (550 kilos). Biologists describe their intelligence as comparable to dolphin intelligence. Manatees are calm underwater vegetarians, with a very specialized diet of shallow-water plants. They hear high-frequency sounds very well, but they can’t hear the low-frequency hums of a motorboat; hence, their vulnerability.
Last week I was with my mother, a retired animal activist. For no particular reason, I was reading her December issue of Sierra Magazine. And I came across an article about manatees, called “Thou shalt not smite thy manatee.” The article was about an incident in Kings Bay, Florida, and it reported:
“After two endangered manatees were killed last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed making the bay a manatee refuge, where boat speeds would be greatly reduced. That set off the Tea Party. ‘We cannot elevate nature above people,’ local leader Edna Mattos told the St. Petersburg Times. ‘That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights.’”
I’ve studied the U.S. Bill of Rights, and I am fairly certain it doesn’t say anything about either nature or speedboats.
But bringing up the Bible leads us to Parshat Terumah, which has a lot to say about nature.
Torah teaches that the Israelite community offers many gifts of the heart towards the building of the Mishkan (traveling wilderness sanctuary). One gift is called in Hebrew orot techashim, skins of the tachash, which were used to cover the mishkan. Translators have struggled with the word tachash for at least a thousand years. Options include ermine, dolphin, narwhal, zebra, badger, okapi, seal, antelope, giraffe, and – I am not making this up – rainbow joy.
The prevailing contemporary favorite seems to be dugong.
An astute reader might ask, “Where in the desert did the Israelites get the dugong skins?” The 12th century commentator Rashi offers a mystical answer: this multicoloured animal came into existence for the purpose of building the mishkan, and then disappeared. However, this question does not require a mystical answer. Dugong do live in the Red Sea, and the Israelites must have done a good bit of trading to supplement their shepherding economy.
Still, there is quite a bit to be said in the mystical department.
It is alarming to what extent some people will justify destruction in the name of religion or freedom. Just as killing manatees is justified through the Biblical rationale to “subdue” the earth, or the alleged freedom to ride boats through the Everglades regardless of what wildlife are killed, so some people shoot prairie dogs by the thousands for sport, or ride off-road vehicles that destroy Indian archeological sites, or in the 19th century shot bison by the million, almost to the point of extinction. They forget that in the Torah, along with the idea of subduing things, there is a section telling humans to “guard” the earth as well.
As for the Tea Party, they are the unfortunate descendants of the militia movement of the 1990s, which inflicted the 1993 bombing of the federal government building in Oklahoma City, which killed many people, including children in a daycare center. Even after being told of these deaths, one militia member defended the bombing on the grounds that the government had violated the divinely held rights of people by putting speed limits on their roads.