A key moment for attaining an understanding of T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done occurs fairly early in the narrative when the somewhat overly orderly and stiff multi-degree holding scientist Alma Boyd Takesue delivers a lecture on the issue of protecting indigenous species and she gets riffs on the subject of the most notorious extinct animal of recent vintage. She declares that that dodo went extinct because it was too naïve to recognize the danger situated within its seemingly comfortable existence. The ill-fated bird, she declares, “had fear and suspicion bred out of it, and so waddled right up to the first seaman to land on the island of Mauritius, who plucked and roasted it, then introduced pigs and rats, which fed avidly on this ground nester.” The lecture goes on to make important points about how flight for birds is not the seemingly effortless exercise in pure freedom that it seems; it comes at a high cost in terms of calories expended. So too is building nests high up in the trees to escape easy capture by predators. If there are no predators, why bother?
This lecture situates the dodo—more subtly than it may seem out of context as presented here—as a metaphor for human beings. Not in the grand sense that our own lack of awareness about our daily sacrificing of the future to the short-term enjoyments of fossil fuels and blissfully willful ignorance among many of the reality of global warming is dooming the human race to an early exist from the pages of history, but more in the short term manner of making decision based on comfortable assumptions.
Ostensibly, When the Killing’s Done is concerned with a very specific case of evolutionary battle for supremacy of among species. That case is the battle over indigenous species and non-indigenous invasive species on the Channel Islands off the coast of California. Anacapa and Santa Cruz are setting of this battle which is based on actual historical fact. Taking part in the natural face-off between the species native to the islands and those brought there by accident—like rats and feral pigs—is human intervention. Humans brought poison to this animal knife fight in support of the natives to use against their enemies. The irony, of course, is unavoidable: killing off a species in order to save a species. That is the “subject” of the narrative, but the novel is not really a blow-by-blow account of the efforts to control and manipulate natural selection with the hand of God appearing in the form of an exterminator with poison wand.
The meat of the story is the face-off between the scientist who is lecturing and the radical animal-rights activist who believes when it comes to indigenous species and non-indigenous species that all lives matter. This is where the part about the dodo as metaphor comes into play. Because, of course, in a squaring off between species that have been part of an island for thousands or millions of years and the later-comers who only showed up as a result of human error in the first place, one cannot simply take the middle position that all species are entitled to not be killed by humans as a plan to correct the error that species made in the first place. Given enough time, invasive predators—whether they be rats, feral pigs or whatever—will annihilate the native population. And once one native species goes away, the dominos begin to fall.
Given this premise, it would seem a fairly easy dictate with little conflict at work: the scientist is right—or at least more right—than the radical activist. That would be so, perhaps, if this were a documentary, but it is a novel by T.C. Boyle who delights in absurd irony and it is the presence of irony which creates the conflict. The story, as hinted earlier, is not really focused on the means of preserving and destroying species on the islands; the story is rooted in the conflicting interpersonal relationships of people who are, for the most part, on the same side of the larger ideological divide of right versus left. The scientist and the radical are to the left of center and fully Californian in their expressions of liberalism. It is the peculiarities of the details where they diverge and within those divergences Boyle introduces irony to raise the stakes. Ultimately, the ironic stance situates both sides of the issue as maintaining a dodo-like naivete. Both the scientist and the activist see things through their own persistence of vision and that vision is no different from the dodo seeing that first seaman to land on the island of Mauritius to whom he waddled up without any expectation that he was leading his entire species straight toward extinction.
