A review of the second part of Black Ops and Beaver Bombing; adventures with Britain’s wild mammals, by Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall, Oneworld, 2023
The fifth chapter is all about bats and Horseshoe bats in particular. They are the authors’ special passion and that shines through. There are further atrocious puns although they do manage to restrain themselves from saying that they are batty about the subject. I bet they thought about it though. I am not going to give anything away about this chapter. Buy the book and have your mind blown, if only by the first few pages of this section, which tells us things about bats I would never have begun to imagine. There is also a good deal of undisguised fury at government indifference, a common thread throughout.
Talking of buying books, as an author of two, I find myself now with a rather different view of lending them to others (one very rarely gets them back anyway). It seems almost like a kind of theft. A friend who kindly bought a copy of Animal Trust infuriated me by telling me that he had lent it to another neighbour who would otherwise certainly have bought his own. It was no more than a thoughtless and well-intentioned act, but it deprived not only me of money but also the charity for which the book was written. As a bookseller it is similarly annoying when people assume that because we love the objects we are handling, we don’t really need to concern ourselves with making a living.
Hedgehogs are next up and the myth that predatory badgers are a serious problem is debunked as I have written elsewhere in the blog. I completely agree too that hedge flailing must be a major cause of their decline along with all the other usual suspects, in particular housing developments* and pesticide and herbicide use, as much in gardens as in farming. Hedgehogs don’t really like eating slugs very much, although they do do it, so it is good that those particular poisons, slug pellets, have been banned, but only completely organic gardening will leave a safe and nutritious environment for them.
*I had to go out the other day since even sitting in the summerhouse was made intolerable by the constant rumble of heavy machinery and vehicles, the reversing klaxons and a very great deal of shouting. We have had to put up with this for over three years, all to build one large, extremely ugly house immediately behind ours. Everyone I know who has seen it wonders what it is. Part of an industrial estate? I think it looks like a crematorium. A perfectly in-keeping bungalow which occupied a relatively small part of the fields was demolished completely. If I had not gone out, I think I might have gone round and said or done something regrettable, I am way beyond my wits’ end with the stress, anxiety, noise, air pollution and disruption. We peasants are in principle not permitted to communicate with the owners or the contractors directly, we must deal with the architects, who unsurprisingly absolve themselves of any responsibility for anything. The buck-passing is developed into an art form. It has gone on for so long that it has seriously affected the well-being and even sanity of the surrounding neighbours. I was described by one of the owners, the father of the family, in an e-mail as “a big moaning girl’s blouse” – not only is that an old-fashioned sexist phrase I have not heard for years, he couldn’t even get the word order right. Well, I hadn’t heard it since Boris Johnson used it about Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 outraging many. He would, wouldn’t he? I have a suggestion for a new strapline for the architects: “Identically hideous houses in totally inappropriate places R Us”.
The chapter “Who Cares What Colour the Squirrels Are” hints at an element of xenophobia in the controversy surrounding red and grey squirrels, to which I alluded in Animal Wild. Sadly, it now seems that greys do after all pass on squirrelpox to reds which does not affect the former but is deadly to the latter. It is an extremely knotty problem which requires in-depth reading. I wonder how much time Jeremy Clarkson spent on it before writing, as quoted in Animal Wild, “I wouldn’t hurt an otter but would happily stamp repeatedly on the head of a badger … I would happily shoot a grey squirrel – and have – but could not even break a whisker on its red cousin.”
The final full chapter on seals and grey seals in particular reveals that in spite of claims to the contrary by the fishing industry, the consumption of fish by seals is trivial bordering on the totally inconsequential in terms of numbers. “Sand eels, a generic term for a number of small fish species, are harvested on an unimaginable scale by industrial trawlers, and, when they’re not being ground into pellets for farmed salmon, they can be used for fertiliser, burned to generate electricity, or added to cattle feed – which sums up quite neatly everything that’s wrong with the world.”
The very last chapter discusses the reintroduction of wolves and lynx. I am hugely in favour of both. See below for an extract from Animal Trust on the shortcomings of the National Farmers Union and a certain dairy farmer in particular whom I was kind enough not to name on the basis that it was unfair to single her our for a profound stupidity and lack of vision which she presumably cannot help. Minette Batters though, until recently president of the NFU, having put herself in that position of authority and public trust, seems fair game. She also betrays the fear and hatred of wildlife that seems to run through the industrialised farming industry and in no small part through farming before wholesale mechanisation. The lynx, she said, would create “a danger to the public on walks around the countryside.” How, exactly? Our authors point out that “There’s not a single record of a wild lynx attacking humans – nowhere, ever, under any circumstance.”
The book is dedicated to the NHS staff who treated Tim Kendall for bowel cancer whilst it was being written. He and Fiona Mathews are clearly a wonderful, caring, decent couple. I hope very much that they are now both in rude good health.
From Animal Trust:
The NFU does have a habit of shooting itself in the foot. There’s a currently ongoing furore about an advertisement by Tesco for vegan sausages. A young girl, whose father says in voiceover that he still enjoys eating meat himself, says to him that she doesn’t want to eat animals any more, a scenario which I believe is increasingly common. He cooks the vegan sausages for her and she comments that they taste even better than the meat-filled version. If I were an active campaigner for vegetarianism or veganism, I would hope that the advertisement wouldn’t be ignored by the NFU, I would hope that they would react in an apparently blind panic, wildly out of touch with the prevailing public mood and as though they had something to hide, and accuse Tesco of demonising meat eating. I’d hope that an individual farmer would fail to find anything misleading in the advertisement when asked on national television, but that she would bang on as usual about having the highest animal welfare standards in Europe (not true), bluster over the fact that over seventy per cent of farm animals in the United Kingdom are raised in factory farms (according to Compassion in World Farming), describe the thirty-second advertisement as “a direct attack on my industry”, say that eating animals which have died (not “been killed”) is part of our heritage and culture as though that’s ever a justification for anything, and perhaps even throw in something along the lines that health and nutrition are most important with “ethics hopefully further down the line.”
That would all be just great. Even better, to give the issue even more publicity and create an even wider debate, I might also wish for a celebrity such as, I don’t know, Janet Street-Porter to weigh in on the matter. She might describe vegans as militants, even better liken them to Stalinists. I would also like them to emphasise that eating meat is a personal choice, allowing the easy rebuttal that so is not eating meat.
All of this is exactly and almost comically what happened. Presumably it is the use of the word ‘animals’ that roused their fury. They do not want the public to be reminded of how meat is produced and where it comes from. But they do see fit to react like this after decades of bombardment with advertisements for and misleading packaging and labelling of meat and dairy products, farmed cows tending to be represented as contented, even smiling creatures, dancing happily around sunny fields.
The farmer quoted above is a Welsh dairy farmer with an MBE who has a role on the national dairy board. She exhibits a similarly myopic view when interviewed by George Monbiot for his television documentary Apocalypse Cow: How Meat Killed the Planet. Unable to see beyond the way things were done by her forebears, she protests that rewilding and vegetarianism would mean that the UK would have to import more food. This just moments after we see footage of imported animal feed being delivered to her farm by lorry (she needs a ton a month), which includes palm kernels from Indonesia – presumably the devastation brought about by the palm oil industry is too far away for her to imagine or care about. When George Monbiot, pressed on the suggestion that the dairy and beef industry feeds him three times a day, counters that he consumes none of her products, she replies “Shame on you.” Where she thinks she has gained the right to make that extraordinary moral judgement is anyone’s guess.
In a pro-cull argument, an NFU spokesman states that it will result in “healthy badgers, healthy cattle and a healthy countryside.” Another statement suggests that the evidence is “beyond doubt” (at the very least it is conflicting). It’s arrant nonsense, and it is disingenuous at best. It is not a healthy countryside that has been created. There are an estimated eight hundred ‘mega-farms’ in the United Kingdom, helping to put largely more humane small farms out of business. Pesticide use is not now so much about quantity as precision. The effect is even more efficient eradication of weeds and insects on which other wildlife depends. Bio-diversity is a blessing not a problem to be eradicated.
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