When I was a boy I was besotted by animals. All we had by way of pets were my Dad’s goldfish and my white mouse. I devoured animal programs on television – Peter Scott’s Look, Johny Morris’s Animal Magic, On Safari with Armand and Michaela Dennis, Zoo Time with Desmond Morris, David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I also collected Brooke Bond Tea cards – from British Wildlife, through Tropical Birds to Wildlife in Danger. I bought a copy of the Observers Book of Birds and started birdwatching. When I was eleven, we moved to a house in the country. Suddenly, there were chickens, pigeons, a dog, a rabbit – and even a pony. I was in animal heaven.
I have since changed my mind entirely. Animals and nature are not at all how I thought they were. I have become disillusioned. I blame my disillusion on David Attenborough and the BBC.
I have been watching Attenborough and the BBC Wildlife Unit’s amazing offerings all my life. At first I was captivated, delighted, enthralled. I marvelled at the wonders of the natural world – birds of paradise, otters, Madagascan lemurs, whales. Even more so when things switched from black and white to colour. But now I find the reality of animal existence unconscionable. My moral conscience is outraged. In fact I am depressed by the futility of it all – the competition, the constant struggle, the fear, the suffering, the death. I have grown up and beyond sentimental, anthropomorphic projection. I have woken up and smelt the dreadful, animal reality.
There is the obvious horrid relation of predators on prey – of leopard seals on penguins as they are forced to launch themselves into the sea to find food; of clever orca on seals stranded on ice flows or drowning whale calves; of racer snakes pouring after young marine iguanas; or gulls swooping down to help themselves to newly hatched turtles dashing for the sea; of a crow snatching a duckling from the line as the mother leads them down to the water, or snatched by a pike from beneath. This is the reality we have been made to face – increasingly. The worse it gets, the more it makes for good television. Unfortunately, it’s also true, so there’s no arguing.
Then there’s Penguins in the Antarctic. ‘Mother’ nature has obliged Emperor penguins to live and reproduce in what must be the most inhospitable environment on earth. They huddle against the winter storms for months together, each carrying their precious single egg on their frozen feet – without food, living off their own
bodies.
What dismays me still more is the absurd, hormone-driven competition between male mammals. Ungulates especially – deer, cattle, wild horses, but also elephant seals, walruses and hippopotami. Few mammals seem immune to this particular competition. The younger stag challenges the stag in charge. The stag in charge is driven to run up and down and around his herd and to drive off the intruder. (The female herd simply observe, and carry on grazing). The older stag is eventually defeated, displaced, and goes off to end his days in wounded isolation and decline.
When a new male lion takes over the pride he kills all the cubs. Domestic cats do the same. Even bottlenose dolphins do it.
All this is, of course, just biological machinery, running its repeated course, with no higher purpose or end in view or intended.
We human beings have evolved beyond these things.
We oppress each other deliberately :
Social media, hate, abuse.
Competition, greed, control.
War, genocide, holocaust. (Gaza, Sudan, Myanma, Ukraine . . . )[1]
Egos.
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