Tracks suggest he slipped through a small gap at the top of his tank, scampered across the floor, slid down a 164-foot-long drainpipe and reached the ocean.
Source: Inky the Octopus Escapes From a New Zealand Aquarium – The New York Times
There is something about Inky’s recent escape that captivated our attention: just Google “Inky the Octopus” and you’ll see. What is it about Inky? Well, for starters he’s not alone, as The Washington Post reported a set of related escapes spanning much of the animal kingdom: bison, badgers, flamingos, etc.
But what fascinates me (as much as how Inky did it!) is why we are so fascinated by Inky’s escape. The Post also reported a wide swath of social media responses on their site alone. Certainly we have a late-modern fascination with the wild, a numinous notion that seems to have overtaken wilderness as the quintessence of nature. Any story, then, of a nonhuman moving from captivity to freedom validates this notion in our hearts, possibly reminding us of our own cages.
Yet freedom, as we all learn, is not as possible as it sounds. Inky, as the Post reports, is “…almost certainly gone for good.” But the bison were eventually captured (and most likely became bison burgers); Rusty the red panda of the Smithsonian National Zoo was brought back to father more red pandas; and Chacha the chimp, another recent escapee, succumbed to sedation and fell into an awaiting outstretched blanket. Would we have been happier if those bison continued to roam suburban Maryland, the red panda DC, or Chacha Sendai, Japan? Surely they would have eventually met a worse fate.
Perhaps we should be less dismissive of the social institutions that bind us. Or realize that wildness—let’s call it authenticity—can be achieved right in the middle of this web of connections we find ourselves entangled in.
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