Take a beloved contemporary play by Tom Stoppard, cast starring actors from the Lord of the Rings films, and finish it off with some of Canadian theatre’s best Shakespearean actors, and you’ve got an assured box office hit. But star power isn’t the only reason Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead shines — instead, it’s the clever use of contrast between the large and small that lights up the stage, and these contrasts extend through every aspect of the production. Director Jeremy Webb’s vision is clear throughout the play, and utilizes the complex demands of the script to craft a dance between elements of decadence and distress.
The play’s premise is simple, yet opens a world of possibility: it’s Hamlet, told from the perspective of the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tom Stoppard’s famed 1966 script weaves in and out of Shakespeare’s familiar text while filling the audience in on what “R and G” are up to when they aren’t on stage. For the most part. that’s trying to figure out what the heck is going on with that tricky Prince of Denmark, a task made a little harder when they can’t even seem to remember how they ended up here in the first place.
Even if you’re not familiar with Hamlet, the title provides you with the key information: These guys are going to die. The play is about the journey.
The show opens with Rosencrantz (Dominic Monaghan) and Guildenstern (Billy Boyd) in complementary blue and green suits that seem just a little ragged, alone on a stage decorated to be… well, a stage, albeit an abandoned one. The two sit on a set of sparse metal risers, while tattered curtains hang haphazardly behind them, in shadowy light that leads us into the metafictional world of this play, where reality and performance blend together.
Immediately, contrasts are at play: Boyd’s Guildenstern is thoughtful, chatty, usually talking himself in circles, while Monaghan’s Rosencrantz punctuates his ramblings with occasional insights and physical comedy. Boyd and Monaghan play off each other like old friends — their characters have clearly known each other for as long as they remember (even though they seem to have forgotten when that was). Their dialogue is snappy and almost dizzying, both to the audience and themselves, but the confusion of the characters is the comedy, in true absurdist fashion. The inherent appeal of this production is in this dynamic. Webb captures the comedic pace of Boyd and Monaghan that is familiar to fans of the celebrity duo, but utilizes that pace to pull the less theatre-minded easily into the absurdism of the script.
The mid-stage curtain then rises to reveal a troupe of actors who call themselves the Tragedians, led by Michael Blake as The Player. Blake perfectly complements the leading duo — he slides easily into the scene, matching Guildenstern’s snappy dialogue with his own witty rhetoric, and Rosencrantz’s large physical movement with bold, extravagant movement. The players begin to further blur the borders between reality and representation as some of them transform into characters from Hamlet, and the more familiar plot begins to unfold. Pasha Ebrahimi as Hamlet is an intense inferno, ferocious and assured and grounded, the starkest contrast to the shadowy uncertainty of our titular characters as they try to puzzle out what exactly is going on around them.
The scenes with the rest of the cast feel incredibly decadent, with the company of 11 actors in layers and layers of fabric and masks gesticulating dramatically in the light. At first, this felt strange to me; why are there so many people on stage? Such a large cast feels almost jarring against the simpler scenes where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are alone, but Webb’s choice for a large cast is not simply to have bodies in the space. As the play continues, the high energy of the full company scenes allow for the quieter, introspective moments of the piece to feel all the more poignant, as the two contemplate their existence, reality, life, and death.
Webb continues to build contrasts between the simple and the extreme through the rest of the production’s aesthetic. Kaelen MacDonald’s costumes, built from shining fabrics, are shape-shifters — under certain lighting they seem glorious and indulgent, while in others they seem to show wear, dirt, and grime. The sound design by Deanna H. Choi swings wildly between comedically hollow echoes of certain lines, to a more subtle reverb to demonstrate scale as the Hamlet characters declaim their iconic lines. Andrew Cull’s set moves constantly, creating everything from an actual theatre to a moving ship, all from what seems like fragments of a theatre that has fallen into shambles.
The play showcases many such contrasting beats and design elements, to great emotional effect. It is heart-racing when the story moves into the familiar world of Hamlet, and then heart-wrenching as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come closer and closer to their inevitable fates, and whatever may come after. The result is the ride of a lifetime, so strap in and hold onto your hats.
Neptune Theatre’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead runs until February 25 in Halifax, before moving to Mirvish Productions from March 5 to 31. You can learn more about the production here(Halifax) and here (Toronto).
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here and here.
Björk announced on her social media channels that she has narrated a documentary about fungi.
The artist with the most Grammy nominations, despite never winning, wrote, “A long-dormant dream of mine to narrate a nature documentary has come to fruition. And I am blessed it is not just any but featuring the magnificent Merlin Sheldrake and about fungi. I hope you will enjoy this.”
The documentary, directed by Gisela Kaufmann and Joseph Nizeti, and titled, Fungi: The Web Of Life, is set to be released early next year. The film explores the mysterious world of fungi and how it connects all life on Earth.
Critics of new anti-scab legislation in Canada are worried about the ability to “get things done.” But halting production is the very purpose of strikes — to create disruptions that force bosses to negotiate.
As the Canadian government’s anti-scab legislation works its way through Parliament, the usual suspects continue to complain about protecting the rights of workers. Most recently, Canadian Chamber of Commerce vice president and deputy leader of government relations Robin Guy took to the pages of the Financial Post to take issue with Bill C-58 and to warn that should it pass, the Canadian economy and business as we know it would crumble under the force of labor’s new weight.
Guy argues that banning scabs — or “replacement workers” as he and the legislation call them — in federally regulated workplaces would exacerbate job action, leading to more strikes that will undermine an already-sluggish Canadian economy. Worrying about infrastructure in particular — trains, ports, planes — he writes, “Although politicians claim to be addressing Canada’s productivity challenges, they are advancing anti-replacement worker legislation that will reduce productivity, further erode our global reputation and keep Canada from simply getting things done.”
There’s an awful lot hidden in the words “simply getting things done.” Guy’s lament for the state of the Canadian economy contains an argument that reflects what so many capitalists and their minions take as an article of faith: workers are grist for the mill. Whatever slows or stops the smooth feeding of labor and raw materials through to profit-generating outputs is to be viewed, at best, as suspect and threatening.
No doubt, Guy’s argument will resonate with many who view labor action as disruptive (which it’s meant to be), costly (which it need not be, if employers bargain in good faith), and unnecessary (which couldn’t be further from the truth). We live in an economic system supported by the “common sense” of marketeers who never stop in their efforts to undermine labor rights.
Many who buy into the bogus, anti-worker narrative take for granted what unions have delivered: better working hours, better working conditions, and better pay. These sorts would burn the ships that delivered them safely to port, not imagining they might ever need them to return home again. That’s a serious problem and this is an opportune moment to revisit why strikes — and collective bargaining — are so important, and how those rights are undermined by scab workers.
The Anti-Scab Law Making Its Way Through Parliament
The Liberal government’s anti-scab law bans replacement workers in federally regulated industries during strikes and lockouts. Those industries include airports, airlines, railways, ports, telecoms, and certain subsectors of the agriculture industry. As written, it carves out exceptions for pressing health and safety concerns related to physical, property, and environmental damage. It’s also got quite a long lead time, eighteen months out from proclamation, which some Canadian unions are concerned about. But the law, which also applies to some crown corporations, is otherwise quite welcome. In fact, it’s so welcome that even the Conservative Party voted for it on second-reading.
Attempts to introduce such a law federally have failed in the past. While Quebec and British Columbia ban scabs in their jurisdictions — and have for decades — a federal law has been elusive despite decades of efforts to establish one. The current bill is a product of the Liberal–New Democratic Party supply-and-confidence agreement, which is to say that it’s the product of a minority parliament in which the governing party is induced to cooperate with its political rivals.
Guy is worried about the effect of the anti-scab law, but the fact is that such laws encourage employers to solve labor disputes at the bargaining table and prevent them from undermining collective bargaining rights by bringing in replacement workers. This approach leads to fewer and shorter strikes, provided that bosses and owners bargain in good faith and the balance of power remains fairly distributed between parties.
Historically, workers have long seen their powers eroded by ever more powerful capital, particularly since the 1980s. For labor rights to be meaningful — that is, for them to exist in practice rather than just in theory — those rights must be impactful and difficult, if not impossible, to undermine by circumventing their reason for existing.
Anti-scab legislation also reduces the prospects for violence on and off the picket line.
Why We Strike
Strikes have been around for a long, long time. Indeed, the Guinness Book of World Records tracks the first organized work stoppage to Egypt in 1152 BCE, when artisans at the royal necropolis downed tools. Union action and rights as we know them today emerged much later, in the late nineteenth century. They developed following the Industrial Revolution, which led to the rise of wage labor and a pronounced class division between workers and capitalists.
Canada has a robust history of strikes. In 1872, printers in Toronto agitated for, among other things, a nine-hour workday and made great strides in the struggle for better working conditions. The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, which was violently repressed by the state, emerged from widespread disaffection at social and economic inequalities and remains to this day an iconic moment for labor.
The 1949 Asbestos strike in Quebec, which helped launch the career of future prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, pressed back against provincial repression — and seventy-five years later that spirit lives on in the province. The Days of Action from 1995 to 1998 in Ontario also marked a pivotal moment of resistance in Canadian labor history. Mobilized against the “Common Sense Revolution” policies of the Mike Harris government, the actions featured eleven regional and citywide rolling strikes. More recently, a 2022 strike by CUPE workers forced Ontario premier Doug Ford to repeal anti-worker legislation that threatened collective bargaining rights, while last year saw roughly 160,000 federal public service workers demand better wages in one of the largest strikes in the country’s history.
It wasn’t, however, until 2015 that the Supreme Court of Canada recognized — or, more accurately, confirmed — the constitutional protection of the right to collective bargaining and the related right to strike. In a 5-2 ruling, the court sided with workers over the government of Saskatchewan, which was taking liberties with whom it designated an essential worker and in ordering striking workers back to work.
In her reply to two dissenting justices, including now chief justice of the Supreme Court, Richard Wagner — who argued the ruling would tilt the balance of power in favor of labor — Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella wrote:
In essentially attributing equivalence between the power of employees and employers, this reasoning, with respect, turns labour relations on its head, and ignores the fundamental power imbalance which the entire history of modern labour legislation has been scrupulously devoted to rectifying.
What Abella articulated in 2015, which some people forget today, is the critical nature of the right to collective bargaining and the attendant right to strike as a part of essential worker rights. They’re pivotal in addressing the inherent power imbalance between labor and capital. Moreover, her judgment underscores a crucial point: these rights lose their force if they are undermined by capital’s capacity to do an end run around them. Employing scab labor is just such a circumvention, which is why prohibiting the practice is so important.
Disruption Is the Point
Naturally, strikes will be disruptive. They will disrupt business. They will disrupt employment. They will disrupt economic output. They will disrupt access to goods and services. That’s the point. Strikes are meant to be disruptive because they are meant to induce both parties to find a solution at the bargaining table. Workers don’t love sacrificing their time and livelihoods for sport — strike pay isn’t exactly lucrative. They resort to striking and picketing as a strategic response to their relative lack of power in negotiations, aiming to level the playing field and secure a fair bargain when negotiations seem or are unlikely to yield results at the boardroom table.
Strikes are about leveraging solidarity to secure workplace gains for the many. For the wealthy and comfortable, strikes are most often a trifling disruption. However, they can also pose a long-term threat for elites insofar as they are a means by which workers can assert power and reclaim what is lost to them as wage or salaried laborers in workplaces that resist democratic control.
For workers, strikes are necessary tools that will secure better working conditions and pay in the long run, even though they may cause pain to them and others in the short term. The efforts of unions extend benefits not only to their members, but also to the broader workforce at large, who often enjoy higher wages and better working conditions as a result. The short-term sacrifices, painful as they may be, are more than a reasonable price to pay for long-term gains.
Scabs, on the other hand, are parasites. They are tools of capital who leave workers worse off in the short and long term. They are sand in the gears of worker power, hindering the progress that strikes aim to achieve by filling in labor gaps during work stoppages. Scab labor undermines workers’ solidarity and bargaining power. Every level of government with legislative authority over this issue should ban it across all industries.
I have this tendency of brushing off a topic if it didn’t catch my interest. One of those topics was AI. I mean, come on, you can go to any tech news website and see headlines about new AI breakthroughs multiple times a day.
2 days ago, I was having lunch with a friend, and he said, “Did you hear about Groq? I saw their demo video, their AI can chat like us, and it’s all happening in real-time.”
I hadn’t seen the video, but my first thought was, “So what? Siri can chat like us in real-time too, although not very well.” My second thought was maybe the demo was staged. Like maybe there’s a supercomputer somewhere doing all the work. As if being skeptical made me a smarter person.
My friend didn’t push it, and we moved on. But then, I kept seeing Groq everywhere. So I decided to check it out, in case it’s a bigger deal than I thought.
Turns out, it’s a bigger deal than I thought. The oversimplification is this: if you use a bunch of simple chips with static RAM (like the kind you find in CPU caches) to run software compiled with a custom compiler, you can generate text very quickly, like 10 times faster than using a GPU.
Due to the implications for Nvidia and the GPU industry, I decided to share it with my business-savvy friend. But… he was just as skeptical as I was. And that kind of ticked me off. I even told him, “If you’re gonna keep asking these kinds of questions, then maybe we shouldn’t talk about this at all.”
Luckily, it didn’t turn into an argument, and we ended up having a pretty good discussion. But looking back, I realize I had no right to be angry because I was no different from my friend.
So… sorry, man, to both my lunch friend and my business-savvy friend.
We’re doing things differently today; let’s call this issue a special edition. I’m posting the main story of the Roundup today on its own and then the rest (Good News, Supportlandia content, and Bad Job Bingo) separately later this week.
Why? Well, there was some breaking news last week that I feel warrants special attention.
Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic,[1]made a series of progressively more terrible and baffling choices in response to accusations of transphobia in Tumblr’s moderation policies, which include some of the most egregious lapses in judgment that I have witnessed in my decade of working in Tech and 20-plus years of being a denizen of Al Gore’s internet.
He then went on to argue with Tumblr users both publicly[3] and (allegedly) privately in DMs, even going as far as finding the user whose banning sparked the original controversy on Twitter and replying to one of her tweets.[4]
That terrible decision led to a predictable and ill-advised back-and-forth with the original banned Tumblr user, including Mullenweg’s absolutely jaw-dropping choice to tweet a list of the user’s other Tumblr accounts,[5] which any reasonable Tech professional would recognize as private information.[6]
All of this culminated in a remarkable response from some of Tumblr’s trans staff in which they admirably navigated being put in the incredibly difficult position of clarifying the events leading up to the original user’s suspension while distancing themselves from the communications surrounding it, all while toeing the line of publicly holding their boss accountable without denouncing him.[7]
Now, I will say upfront that I’m not qualified to comment on the broader accusation that Tumblr’s moderation policy is transphobic or transmisogynistic, nor am I comfortable trying to comment on the original ban decision. Having worked in moderation and managed the Trust & Safety team at Khan Academy, I know first-hand how complicated and nuanced these decisions can be, and it’s impossible to make any kind of judgment without access to details to which I don’t (and shouldn’t) have access.
I will say that it’s not at all uncommon for marginalized groups in communities to identify negative trends in moderation before we as staff do because they’re more attuned[8] to the specific injustices that affect their experiences in a community.
I will also say that moderation policies are designed by people, and people are imperfect. Community standards have to evolve over time in conversation with the community. This is how healthy communities work: members raise concerns about moderation, Trust & Safety teams do their best to find a balance between addressing concerns and protecting the broader safety and well-being of the community, and then they do it all over again the next time the community raises an issue.
It’s a never-ending, imperfect process that will never satisfy everyone. Running community platforms like Tumblr is not for the faint or uncaring of heart, and it’s not something just one person can practically do. We put together teams of experienced people – ideally resembling the community they’re moderating – because we need everyone’s collective expertise to adequately serve the community’s interests.
Which is why I’m dumbfounded by the trouble Mullenweg has gotten himself into and the harm resulting from it, because it was entirely avoidable at pretty much every turn.[9]
So, we’re going to talk about this. Not just because Automattic has a fairly high profile in CX spaces[10] and I think to ignore it would amount to giving Mullenweg a pass, setting a bad precedent regarding how we expect leaders in our space to conduct themselves, but also because his behavior violates norms and standards of community practice his own company has helped set.
Let’s start with the first bad decision that set all of this in motion, which was Mullenweg answering this ask on his Tumblr:
You going to do anything or make any statement about the rampant transmisogyny on this hellsite, especially in cases like predstrogen recently? Or yall gonna stay silent and keep letting/making us get pushed off of it.
Mullenweg founded Automattic in 2005, nearly twenty years ago. I note this to underline that he’s not new to the internet or to being the face of a company to happy and disgruntled users alike.
Mullenweg has cultivated a brand of being approachable to users, and his answering asks on Tumblr is somewhat routine.[11] At this point, I’d expect him to have the judgment to recognize when a question is suitable for The CEO of Automattic™ to answer (because that’s what he is whenever he’s speaking on Tumblr) and when a question needs to be referred internally for further discovery and action (if any).
This ask is very clearly the latter. This is a user who, for better or worse, is venting their frustrations at the person they think is ultimately responsible for it, but here’s the thing: this is part of being CEO of a social media platform.
Users will say things about you or your company that you think are mean, inaccurate, and/or unfair, and that’s just how it goes. The only way to refute those things with any kind of efficacy is through the collective actions of your platform. Trying to refute every accusation personally is not only pointless, but also wildly inappropriate conduct from a CEO (for reasons we’ll get into shortly).
Aside from choosing to answer the ask at all, there’s this even worse unforced error:
We generally do not comment on individual cases, but because there seems to be mass misinformation around this, I will make an exception and comment on predstrogen.
If you’re the CEO of a company, you can’t publicly violate your own policies. You simply can’t, for a few reasons:
If you, the CEO, are breaking your company’s policies to comment on an individual moderation decision that users are protesting as notably unfair, you’re reinforcing the idea that something about the case is notable enough to warrant the exception. You’re pouring jet fuel on a fire, and everybody’s going to get burned.
By speaking publicly about an individual moderation decision in violation of your own policies, you are undermining your Trust & Safety team. You’re indicating that you don’t trust them enough to handle what should have been a routine moderation decision without your intervention. This doesn’t just damage your relationship with your Trust & Safety team, but also their relationship with the community.
Moreover, the way Mullenweg chose to comment on this moderation decision – by giving specific examples of “death threats” from a user – is also inappropriate and ill-advised. I’m quoting Denise Paolucci, who is co-Founder of Dreamwidth Studios, because she has unique insight into this as someone who also runs a community blogging platform:
Then Mullenweg’s decisions go from worse to almost unfathomably terrible: He started to reply in the comments of his post, publicly disclosing private account information in one of them:
He chose to argue with users of his platform in another (now-deleted) ask:[12]
And, in perhaps the most egregious lapse in judgment (not to mention some of the worst behavior I’ve ever seen from a Tech CEO), Mullwenweg found the originally-banned user’s account on Twitter, began arguing with her there, and, in the process, again publicly disclosed private account information:[13]
I’m going to address his decision to publicly disclose private information about a user multiple times on different platforms separately in a moment, because, uh, holy shit.
But first, I need to make something as clear as possible: the content or accuracy of the originally-banned user’s comments (or that of any of the users Mullenweg interacted with) absolutely does not matter.
Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic. His company owns Tumblr. It is totally inappropriate – not to mention displays a stunning misunderstanding of power dynamics – for him to interact with users this way, regardless of the circumstances.
Mullenweg has the power to ban users. As he so clearly demonstrated, he can see all the accounts associated with their IP address and he has the power to ban those as well. He has the power to see all of their friends’ accounts and ban those, too.
He has the power to turn off Tumblr for every person on the planet, basically, so why the hell is he replying to users on his posts, answering asks about moderation decisions, and following his users to other social media platforms?
As for going on Twitter: any person who’s been the CEO of a social media platform for five years and a blogging platform for nearly 20 years should understand the weight and attention their speech draws online. It is unacceptable – and frankly dangerous – to find a user on a completely separate platform, where you have no control over moderation or safety practices, and start arguing with them there. Doing this essentially paints a target on that user’s back.
Then add the fact that he knew the user is a trans woman, with all of the additional dangers of online and physical harassment that comes with that identity, and then did it anyway? It’s negligent at best.
AND ALSO: any Tech CEO should understand on a molecular level what constitutes private account information and what doesn’t and how they are allowed to handle that information, both as a matter of company policy and in terms of legal and regulatory compliance. Mullenweg publicly disclosed private account information not once but twice on two different platforms.[14]
I’m not a lawyer, I have no idea what the legal ramifications of any of this could be, so I’m not going to comment on that. But combine a CEO[15] commenting on an individual moderation case in violation of company policy, arguing with users on both Tumblr and a high-profile platform like Twitter, and publicly disclosing private account information multiple times in multiple places, and you have the kind of spicy recipe that should, in my opinion, result in some kind of accountability.
I would not be surprised if we learn in a few weeks that Toni Schneider has quietly transitioned from interim CEO to permanent CEO so that Mullenweg can spend more time with his family or, perhaps more likely, that Mullenweg’s sabbatical has been indefinitely extended.
Finally, before I end this, I want to say this: I know I’ve been hard on Matt Mullenweg, and for good reason. He’s bought the trouble that he’s in.
But because this is the internet and it’s often easier to drum up mobs than empathy, I think it’s important to emphasize that everyone in this situation is an imperfect human being deserving of consideration, including Mullenweg himself.
I don’t know why Mullenweg made the choices he’s made or what’s happening in his life that he didn’t have anyone around to tell him no, but he is clearly going through something. It’s not an excuse by any means, but I do hope someone is checking on him.
And, in case this ends up in front of Mullenweg, I’m going to offer some advice: all of this, including your final post on the matter explaining your beliefs and principles, are the justifications of a man who is more concerned that he (and an organization he's attached his identity to) is being perceived as transphobic than he is about how his actions are actually impacting people who are trans.
You can’t use Tumblr and other platforms – intentionally or not – to enable the harassment of a trans woman and then write a screed about how much you support trans people. No one is going to believe a statement like that because it’s demonstrably untrue.
Instead, you could refocus on making amends. You could take down that post and replace it with a sincere apology (that you’ve run by your Comms and Trust & Safety teams at Automattic, because there’s a reason you have them). Then you could voluntarily step back, take your sabbatical, and use it to think about ways to hold yourself accountable and spare Automattic from dealing with the fallout of your behavior.
You could also use your sabbatical to figure out why you did all of this in the first place and, through that, find some peace. I hope you do.
I mention this because it’s likely no coincidence these internal documents were leaked so close to Matt Mullenweg’s behavior last week - it indicates to me ongoing internal strife exacerbated by Mullenweg’s misconduct.
Automattic famously purchased Tumblr for just $3 million in 2019 from Yahoo, who themselves bought it for $1 billion in 2013. ↩︎
For any non-CX person who might be reading this, it’s pretty standard policy for Trust & Safety teams not to discuss individual moderation cases publicly. Policies like these protect the privacy and safety of everyone involved and help T&S teams avoid unproductive arguments about moderation decisions, which generally involve a lot of nuance that’s impossible to accurately convey without getting into details. ↩︎
I’m not linking to the tweet because it would be irresponsible to direct more attention to a user who is already at extreme risk of harassment, but you’ll find a censored screenshot of Mullenweg’s reply later in this piece. ↩︎
This tweet has now – unsurprisingly – also been deleted, but unfortunately, as KnowYourMeme has proven, the internet is forever.↩︎
It’s almost like Tumblr hired them to do this professionally and should let them do their jobs. ↩︎
Note that I didn’t say sensitive – marginalized communities are not being “overly sensitive” to perceived slights – they’re experiencing real micro- and macroaggressions that add up to cause real pain, real exhaustion, and, as is horrifically common, real psychological and physical harm. ↩︎
As I’m sure my gratuitous use of adverbs has signaled at this point, but goddamn, y’all. ↩︎
Automattic is a frequent sponsor of Support Driven conferences and its Support and Trust & Safety teams are highly respected for their skill in supporting large, technical communities and platforms like Tumblr, Wordpress, WooCommerce, and more. ↩︎
Which, by the way, I also think is absolutely fucking bonkers, but that’s a conversation for another time. ↩︎
He also allegedly direct-messaged (DMed) users on Tumblr, but I’m not including those screenshots here because, unlike public posts, reblogs, and replies, it’s impossible for me to independently verify DMs. ↩︎
Again, I’m censoring any info about the user because this is not about her, this is about Matt Mullenweg’s behavior. ↩︎
A CEO who, again, isn’t even supposed to be working right now! He’s on sabbatical! ↩︎
☕
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Backstory: This gentleman escaped from Central Park Zoo in March after his enclosure there was vandalized, and there was a lot of concern over whether or not he could/would survive out of captivity. Unconcerned by this, Flaco settled himself in a particular area of Central Park and spent all the spring, summer, and most of the fall eating large numbers of rats, and genially allowing himself to be photographed by an ever-growing cadre of bird paparazzi.
Then a few weeks ago, possibly irked by repeated mobbing by assorted hawks and corvids, Flaco took off from his normal haunts and went on a brief tour of apartment-building courtyards on the Lower East Side. Now he’s on the Upper West Side, within sight of Central Park (so food’s no problem, should he feel like heading back that way to hunt), and shouting for everybody to hear that he owns the place. The image above shows him on the water tower of an apartment building at 86th and CPW.
If you look back through the Manhattan Bird Alert and Above 96th Twitter feeds, you’ll see many splendid pictures of him. He’s a handsome lad, and it’s good to see him thriving.
What’s in his future? Hard to tell. (Though some people on Twitter are suggesting he should run for mayor.) He may head upstate at some point. But he may decide he’s quite happy to be a Manhattanite. As a fellow one, I wish him very well. :)
I love that an animal escaped from the zoo and everyone just went “no let’s see where he’s going with this”
as someone who has actually tried to get an unflighted adult Eurasian eagle owl back into his box while actually having a good grip on him, I can tell you with reasonable certainty there is no damn way they were ever going to catch him again.
This whole situation is one of the things that really makes me want to be a fly on the wall inside AZA accreditation meetings. Central Park Zoo is AZA, and it’s unbelievable that somehow they’ve faced no real problems with compliance for just… not managing to catch a loose escaped collection animal. Especially one that’s large, non-native, and highly charismatic.
A big part of AZA standards is that if animals leave a zoo’s control, the zoo is responsible for ensuring that the new location is providing appropriate care for the animal. If they don’t, they can get in a lot of trouble for irresponsibly disposing of them. “Oops, we lost him in NYC” does not exactly count. Regardless of the practicality of catching him at this point, I can’t overstate how much it would be such a huge deal if this happened at a non-AZA zoo - like I would 110% percent expect AZA’a CEO to make derogatory statements to the media about how irresponsible and unprofessional it is for a theoretical roadside zoo to just lose an animal like that and then choose to abandon him to fend for himself, etc etc. But because Central Park is AZA, I guess there’s just different rules? And AZA seems to be just fine with Flaco being loose and risking all sorts of possible harmful welfare and health impacts. Now, AZA makes all accreditation stuff proprietary, so maybe Central Park has gotten their hand slapped out of public view but… the whole thing just seemingly being NBD is mind blowing.
If Flaco were to escape now - in late 2023 - and not be recaptured, I’m pretty sure would actually be USDA violation for the zoo. Yet his escape in February 2023 wasn’t, by virtue of a timing loophole and the fact that new regulations have some lag time built in before compliance is mandatory. USDA finally expanded their remit to birds in addition to mammals, and the new rules were promulgated in Feb 2023! But facilities with existing licenses had until August to get into compliance. Which means, basically, that both the regulatory mechanism and the accrediting ones meant to ensure that the zoo actually is fully responsible for Flaco didn’t work. AZA because they just dgaf, and USDA because it happened just before they actually had the necessary jurisdiction.
The WCS announced late in the evening on February 23, 2024, that Flaco passed away after a collision with a building.
“The downed owl was reported to the Wild Bird Fund (WBF) by people in the building. Staff from the WBF quickly responded, retrieved the non-responsive owl and declared him dead shortly afterward. The WBF notified zoo staff who picked up the bird and transported him to the Bronx Zoo for necropsy.”
I don’t have a lot of words: I’m angry and yet also unsurprised. Reducing the risk of window collisions is crucial for protecting all urban birds; but Flaco’s story is about much more than that. His life was originally endangered by the person who cut open his exhibit and set him loose. The birding community in NYC made it worse: by romanticizing the idea of “freedom” and buying into the fallacy that “natural” and “wild” are inherently somehow better for animals - regardless of what they have ever known, or might prefer - their actions contributed to depriving him of many more years of a good, safe, captive life.
Instead. Flaco, a member of a species that regularly lives to 20 years in the wild and three times that in human care is dead at 13 because of anthropomorphism, selfishness, and a local community’s refusal to listen to scientific experts. He lived one fifth of his potential lifespan and he died on the pavement after colliding with a structure he had no capacity to understand, much less the ability to avoid.
The WCS has stated they will conduct a necropsy (animal autopsy) and will share additional information that results from it. That data will tell us which narrative is true: if he really was thriving as a “wild” bird in a foreign and adversarial habitat as so many fans claimed - or if, as so many scientists and animal care experts have expressed concerns about, he was ingesting rodenticide from eating city rats and struggling to stay healthy.
@honkifurhoary summarized the situation well in their tweets (emphasis mine):
“Flaco’s premature death was an inevitability as soon as his enclosure was vandalized. The people who sabotaged recapture efforts, instead of investing resources to help his recapture & improve his habitat, further guaranteed it. This wasn’t freedom. This was human failure. So much suffering is caused by humans anthropomorphizing wildlife. This is no exception.”