Alan Rabinowitz's Keynote Speech
at SFA Conference in Philadelphia.

I'm very happy to be here today, although it was difficult for me to decide to come. I've spent days thinking about what I would say to you, what I could offer. I know that all of you have your own experiences and stories. So all that I can really offer to all of you here today is a completely honest piece of my own life, for whatever it is worth.

For the last 25 years of my life, I have lived and explored some of the most remote places on earth, I have lived for days in caves chasing bats, I have captured and tracked bears, jaguars, leopards, tigers, and rhinos. I have discovered new animal species such as the second smallest, most genetically primitive deer in the world in northern Burma, and then its closely related primitive counterpart in the cloud forests of the Annamite Mountains between Laos and Vietnam. I have documented lost cultures such as the Taron, the world's only Mongoloid pygmies in the eastern Himalayas. I have been called the Indiana Jones of wildlife by the New York Times and given lectures and talks all over the world, to thousands of people. Yet not a year has passed, not a country traveled in, when I have not at some point felt again the little stuttering, insecure boy inside who'd come home from school and hide in a special corner of his closet. That boy is never far from the surface.

Stuttering has been a gift. I can say that now. But it has been a gift realized only after years of pain and suffering that I also believe no young person should have to go through. I've been stuttering for as long as I can remember, and as a youth my blocks were so severe that my body would twist and spasm in trying to get a word out. So at some point in my early years, I just stopped talking. The world outside my closet was viewed as the enemy. When I was in grade school in the New York City public school system, I was removed from my classroom each day and placed in a special class for disturbed children. The other children called this the retarded class. Sometimes I would make myself physically sick so that I wouldn't have to go to these classes. At other times, I wanted to go to these classes, feeling more at home there than anywhere else. The greatest of all terrors was to be told that I had to speak in front of the class. I could usually plan some diversion to get out of such activities but one day I was taken by surprise. Without thinking, I dropped a pencil on the floor, bent under the desk, then stabbed the pencil through my hand so that I had to be taken to the hospital. Now I wouldn't have to read in front of the class. The pain in my hand was nothing compared to the anticipated pain of pity and ridicule.

Yet the event that haunts me most in my life happened when I was about 15 years old. I was at the store picking up groceries that my mother had bought left there earlier in the day. But when my turn in line came I could not say my last name. One person waiting in line told another that I was probably retarded, and should not have been let out of the house alone. So I exaggerated my blocks and took on the role of a retarded child in order to give the people some reason for my behavior. It was easier to be what people thought me to be, then to be who I knew I was. This was a turning point in my young life, for I swore that I would never deny myself again, and that I would strive not to be just like other people but to be far better than everyone else. This became a driving force in my life that continues to this day.

When events such as these happened, I'd come home and go down to the gym my father built in the basement where I'd lift weights till my body burned with exhaustion or I'd punch the punching bag until my hands bled. I'd punch the faces of the people I met that day whom I felt had looked at me with pity or scorn. Those basement sessions turned into a lifelong passion for exercise that still helps me greatly in my work and life today. After every day of school, whether it was a good day or not, I'd come home and retreat to my sanctuary, a special corner of the closet in my room. Here I would talk to my pets - hamsters, turtles, garter snakes - about the days events. I needed the darkness and the solitude. This eventually turned into a life long bond with animals that set me on my career path.

In my career, in my life, one of the most common questions I am asked is how I came to love animals so much. People expect many kinds of answers but never what I give them. Animals were the only things I could talk to fluently as a child. Animals listened and let me pour my heart out. At some point in my youth I clearly remember realizing that animals were like me, even the most powerful ones I'd read about or seen on television - they had no voice, they were often misunderstood, and they wanted nothing more than to live their life as best they could apart from the world of people.

As I grew into my teens, I got used to my stuttering and, like many stutterers, became very proficient at all the tricks to avoid situations I didn't want to deal with. My parents never knew quite what to do with me. At first they thought I was too smart, or too excitable, but that everything would be okay. We never talked about stuttering, for they felt that to discuss it would give me more pain. Yet the silence was a much greater pain. All I wanted them to do was to sit and cry with me sometimes. To show me that they understood how hard it was.

When they finally faced the fact that everything was not okay with me we tried drugs, hypnotherapy, and a host of speech specialists who basically told me that I had to accept who I was, stuttering and all, and move on. The therapists were good people, trying to do good things. They made me realize that some people cared. The problem was that they just didn't know what to do. They seemed more frustrated than I was sometimes. They wanted me to accept my stuttering without any alternative.

But that is the one thing I would never do. I never accepted my stuttering and I refused to accept myself as a stutterer. I saw no reason why I shouldn't and couldn't be a fluent speaker despite no one seeming to encourage me towards that end. There seemed to be little literature on the subject at the time and there were no computers, no internet, no way to find out whether there were others out there like me. So I lived in two worlds - the world of people where I stuttered, and my closeted world with animals where I did not. Finally one day my mother heard another woman talking in a bank and we learned of Hal Starbuck's stuttering clinic in Genesceo, NY. I was 18 years old, in college, never had a date with a girl, never went to a school dance, and never knew what it was like to speak a complete sentence fluently. Then my life turned around.

Starbuck's clinic made me face the fact that I was a stutterer, and made me stop being concerned about why I stutter and blaming it on other people. That in itself was a rude awakening. But the difference between him and others was that he then offered me to the tools to be a completely fluent stutterer. Tools to control the flow of air and the contact of the tongue against the upper palate. Tools that were by no means easy to master but were within reach of anyone who wanted them badly enough. I was no longer helpless and floundering. I could be in control if I wanted to be. With constant practice, the tools I was taught became second nature.

It was only then that stuttering started to become a gift, although I still didn't realize it at the time. Through my life of stuttering I had developed a level of compassion, caring, understanding, truth and strength that I doubt I would have had otherwise. And now I could let it surface to guide my behavior and interaction with others. This would continue throughout my life but I only began to see and understand it years afterwards. The important thing at the time was that I was now in control. I had the tools to speak fluently. I could let my two separate worlds start to merge and I could let other parts of me surface.

But learning to speak fluently, while feeling wonderful, didn't heal the scar tissue that had accrued from all those years of suffering. I still wanted little to do with humans at this point and I still had a long way to go to figure out who I was as a person and where my place was in the world. And frankly, once I could speak fluently I realized that those with so-called normal speech seemed to have little to say that was of any interest to me. I left everything I knew behind as soon as I could, I ran as fast and as far as I could - combining a need I felt to pay back the debt I owed to animals with the desire to test myself, physically and mentally, to be lost in the wild, the dark closets of the world, among people whose language I couldn't speak and whose lives were so hard that they had no time to dwell on their own or others misfortunes. I had to purge the feelings of shame, fear, and inadequacy that so controlled my life for so long.

I spend years living in the field with animals doing research, establishing new protected areas, and writing scientific papers and popular books of my experiences. My standing and reputation in my field grew, but that meant little to me. People tried to make me something that I was not - a hero, an altruist. And yet I saw nothing of that in myself. I was a little stuttering boy, now a man, who simply ran to the furthest reaches of the earth to be with animals and try to feel whole. I just wanted to feel whole.

Over the years I did reach that goal and in fact it became harder and harder for me to run away and isolate myself, as the wild world and the wildlife I had come to love so much was being lost around me, despite my own and others efforts. Tigers killed for their penis, rhinos for their horn, gorillas for their paws, elephants for their skin. There seemed no way for these magnificent creatures to convey their pain and suffering to the human species that was wiping them out. I felt more than ever that I had to be their voice, and I would live my life trying to give them a home where no one bothered them - give them their own little space in the closet. That was the driving force behind my decision to engage the world of humans again.

Coming here today is another chapter in my life. This is special. While clearly a very emotional event for me, this is something I've wanted to do for a long time. I don't want other young people to go through what I went through, there is no need for it. The speech community has clearly gone through radical changes since I was a boy and stutterers have many places to now turn for help. But on the other hand the general public's response to and understanding of stutterers and stuttering is not what it should be. And I have also been surprised to learn that many speech clinicians and therapists still say the same things to young people that they said to me as a child. Some still feel uncomfortable with stutterers and others get frustrated when they don't get the kind of response they want or expect from a stutterer. But I am here to tell you today that every stutterer can be a fluent speaker. And that there is a set of tools for every stutterer and for the parents of stutterers to deal with stuttering, if they so choose.

I will always believe that stuttering is a special little gift granted to certain people in this world, a little key that opens up parts of the human psyche that would not have been opened otherwise. I also think that people who know stutterers or work with stutterers can come away a better person themselves for it, if they open their mind and heart to what they are experiencing. But nice words and thoughts do not negate the handicap that stuttering can create in young and old alike. But that handicap can be fixed. Maybe not quickly. Maybe not easily. But the key is not giving up - for both the clinician and the stutterer. No one should have to suffer through life because they were granted the gift of stuttering.