Life of Pi – Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter 9 is a short one but it introduces a concept that is going to become absolutely central to the rest of the novel, even if it does not announce itself that way yet.
Pi explains the idea of flight distance, which is the minimum distance at which an animal wants to keep what it perceives as an enemy. Every animal has one and they vary enormously. A flamingo in the wild will tolerate you at 300 yards but cross that line and it becomes tense, and get closer still and it will flee and keep fleeing until that 300 yard buffer is restored, or until its heart and lungs give out. A fiddler crab scurries at ten yards. Howler monkeys stir at twenty. African buffaloes react at seventy five. Giraffes will let a car come within thirty yards but will bolt from a person on foot at 150. Different animals measure the distance differently too. Cats use their eyes. Deer use their ears. Bears use their nose.
The entire art and science of zookeeping, Pi says, is built around the project of reducing this flight distance. The tools are knowledge of the animal, the food and shelter provided, and the protection offered. When it works properly the result is an animal that is emotionally stable and stress free, one that stays put, stays healthy, lives long, eats without fuss, behaves naturally and most tellingly, reproduces. That last detail matters because animals under stress do not breed. Reproduction is the clearest sign that an animal has genuinely settled.
Pi then pays tribute to his father as a zookeeper. The Pondicherry Zoo was not San Diego or Toronto or Berlin or Singapore, he admits honestly. But his father was a natural. He had no formal training but made up for it with an intuitive gift and a keen eye. He could look at an animal and have a sense of what it was thinking. He was attentive and the animals responded to that attention in the most practical way possible. They multiplied, Pi adds, some of them to excess.
It is a short chapter but do not let that fool you. The concept of flight distance, of learning to read what an animal needs and slowly, carefully, patiently reducing the fear between yourself and a wild creature, is essentially a manual for what Pi is going to have to do later in the novel to survive. Everything Pi is telling us about zookeeping is also, quietly, telling us something about what is coming.
