A n i m a l E f f i g y

Tracking Urban Prey

Several years ago, I listened to George Elliott Clarke speak about the
romance that Canadian writers have with woodlands and the North. “We all want to be couriers du bois,” he said, “Yet most of us live in cities.” He was right.

Most of my writing incorporates the natural world, yet I live in the city—the most populated city in the country; however, while I was born in Toronto, I was not raised here. My father, a true outdoorsman a man who looks more comfortable sitting in a disintegrating blind in a marsh than in a plush recliner–took me into the woods and onto the water at every opportunity. Much to his chagrin, at my first opportunity, I sprinted to the closest city, then to bigger cities on the opposite side of the country, and then even larger cities overseas, and never looked back.

I now live in downtown Toronto and spend 24 hours a day amid concrete, skyscrapers, and hot dog vendors. There are no silver perch in the sewers, no grizzlies outside the Royal Ontario Museum, and no mink scrabbling across busy subway platforms—only cabs, bike couriers, and coffee shops.

And yet I love this city.

While most days I pine for, well, pine and spruce trees, and kettle lakes and canoeing, I’m trying to reinvest in my city, my home. In an effort to get back to the city, I began to use my digital camera to document the unnatural world I now live in. While we have physically distanced ourselves from the flora and fauna that make up our Canadian psyche, our cities are populated with thousands of animal effigies.

We’ve razed the earth, yet we repopulate it with steel moose and spray paint tigers. It seems that we wish to bring nature—muted and defanged—back to us.

Take a walk around Toronto and you’ll find trendy hipsters wearing t shirts emblazoned with stags, a plush quilt of caribou on display at Spadina Station, dolphin balloons for sale on the sidewalks of Chinatown, and the famous flock of geese frozen mid-flight in the Eaton Centre. No area of this city is free from our human habit of replacing the real thing with copies. Even the hard brick and concrete exteriors of the financial buildings in this city display stone sculptures of polar bears and deer.

We’re surrounded.

In my own apartment, I could spend an afternoon documenting the ceramic birds, wooden deer, and plastic sheep that sit quietly on my tables and windowsills. The covers of my books alone are a treasure trove of animalia, a dense literary forest on my bookshelves. And in my cupboards, cookies shaped like a small army of golden bears and a baking tin in the shape of a turkey.

Everywhere, animal effigies are used to brand, market, adorn, and transport us out of the concrete din on days when we would rather be hiking through leafy forest, no one else for miles around.

But as Jane Jacobs said, “”The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.” It’s impossible to live in cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, or even Windsor, Halifax, and Edmonton, and not realize that all of almost all of your desires (most of mine food-related)—at least the ones that can be purchased—can be found in only a few blocks. Many of us have chosen to live in cities because of our jobs, social ties, or artistic pursuits, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t fantasize about jumping into a mid-summer lake. Maybe we’re simply trying to spice the streets with something familiar to our heritage, our grandparent’s heritage. Or maybe we just want it all.

It’s a digital world, and I don’t leave my apartment without my camera. As I make my way through this city, I snap photos of the animal effigies I spy on the streets, in stores, and even the ones people wear. I have a log of my sightings, and in only several months, I’ve taken hundreds of photos and catalogued dozens of species. So, without a driver’s license, or an easy way to get out of the city—there are no subway stops for Algonquin on the University Line—I’ve found a way to enjoy the animals and forests we do have, the ones of our creation.

I doubt that animals feel pride in the same way that humans do, but I often wonder what they would see and subsequently feel if they were to come to the city. Plastic and stone images of themselves. Like a zoo or forest set free upon the city when no one was looking.

As for my parents these days, I make up for my city living by swapping sightings with them over the telephone—they of the birds they see flying over their home, which is under a large migratory path, and me of the crane I saw on the streetcar, the bear on Bloor street.

Dani Couture
Toronto, Ontario
June 15, 2008

(All photos by Dani Couture.)

The Animal Effigy Tracking Handbook: Stalking Urban Prey

(The rules I follow when I take photographs for AE.)

The animal effigy must be a likeness of a known animal; my apologies to unicorns, gryphons, and the like.

The animal effigy can be found anywhere humans have been and continue to be in any number.

About:

Dani Couture’s first book, Good Meat, was published by Pedlar Press (2006); she has a second collection forthcoming from Pedlar, “Sweet,” and she is working on a novel. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers across Canada, including This Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Taddle Creek, Arc and The Fiddlehead. For more information visit: www.blackbearonwater.com

Contact:

dani (dot) couture (at) gmail (dot) com

Torontoist‘s Stacey May Fowles on Animal Effigy:

“Poetic talent Dani Couture (Good Meat) has embarked on a fun and thoughtful new project called Animal Effigy, where she (and the occasional guest photographer) ‘tracks urban prey.”‘ The concept is simple yet endlessly amusing—the site is Couture’s attempt to “document the unnatural world” via shots of the animal reproductions the city has to offer. Whether it’s the CN Tower’s Woodpecker, or Robarts’ Peacock, the site is an interesting commentary on our urban approach to the natural world.”