Mel

A wild donkey in the Arizona desert will dig a well six feet deep with its front hooves, and for half a century the United States government has been shooting it as a threat to the desert. August on a dry wash in the Sonoran. The creek has been gone since May. The sand is hot enough to cook on and every animal for miles is standing in what shade it can find, waiting for a rain that is not coming. A burro walks down the wash, stops at a bend for no reason anyone else can see, puts its head down and smells. Then it starts digging. Front feet, one after the other, like a dog after a bone, until it is in up to its shoulders and the bottom of the hole goes dark and wet. It drinks and walks off. Within the hour there is a queue. Mule deer. Javelina. A bobcat. A scrub jay standing on the rim. In 2021 a biologist called Erick Lundgren published the count in Science: 59 species of vertebrate drinking at donkey wells, 64% more species than at the dry stretches of the same streams, and in the driest months the donkeys were raising the amount of open water in the desert by 300% on average and by up to 1,450%. When the wells were abandoned, cottonwood and willow seedlings came up in them. The donkey had been planting the riverbank. Asked about his methodology, the donkey had another drink and left. When a beaver builds a pond, a film crew is sent. When a donkey digs a well, the Park Service sends a marksman. The burros came up from Mexico with the Spanish and the prospectors, carried the ore out of every mine in the West, and were turned loose when the mines closed. Then they were reclassified. In 1979 the National Park Service planned to shoot all 577 in the Grand Canyon. A writer called Cleveland Amory raised more than $500,000 and lifted 582 of them out by helicopter, slung underneath, the most expensive taxi ride a donkey has ever taken. Death Valley shot 400 between 1987 and 1994. Lundgren said that when he started, people did not think a donkey digging a hole was worthy of scientific attention. The animal was listed as a threat to the desert's water. It was the one bringing the water up. Fifty-nine species knew. The ones with the rifles had never sat by the hole.

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.