Beastly

A review of Keggie Carew’s Beastly; a new history of animals and us, Canongate, 2023.

There is something very haunting about the dust-wrapper image. The end-papers are an optimistic very bright green. The author is well-known for her other books, Dadland and Quicksand Tales. This book is moving, funny, sometimes disarming, and profound. With 40,000 years to cover, beginning in prehistoric times, Keggie necessarily proceeds at a canter, but it never feels rushed. In some ways it is like one of my own books: part celebration and part manifesto, with anecdotes galore. I found myself nodding and agreeing with almost everything she has to say, with a couple of exceptions.

I have needed to hop, skip and jump through the book in this review or it would become much too long and more unwieldy than it already is. I recommend you read the book instead, but here is my best effort at summarising some of it.

Humanity’s big error lies in “our interactions with the planet’s other inhabitants” – and we don’t seem to be listening. But many do have “an ever present feeling of loss and anxiety.” We read about icefish nests (see May bug, PETA, Wild Justice, Protect the Wild, Icefish and more – Animal Wild), which should warn us that there is so much we don’t know and that “we should pause before we mine another ecosystem.”

We started farming 12,000 years ago and needed to find animals we could domesticate, creatures who were easy to subdue and whose young we could take: sheep and goats at first, then cows, pigs, horses and chickens. Some, like wolves, we have demonised without justification.

The author is typically to the point on the farming of lions for trophy hunting, some 8,000 of them: “What a business. Which is, when you think about it, down to the sorry state of human penises: traditional Chinese medicine buyers of lion bone and rhino horn have frightened or exhausted ones; trophy hunters, as we know, need bigger ones.”

She also tells of a group of captured baboons in what was then Abyssinia, whose screaming brought 3,000 more down from the hills. They destroyed the cages and “beat off their human captors by the sheer force of their number.” “Hooray,” she says.

Keggie liked London Zoo as a child as much as I did, i.e. not at all, and found more interest in a free animal, a magpie, to her mother’s chagrin. Zoos are all about business. Tigers and lions have 18,000 times less space in a zoo than in the wild. “London Zoo’s £3.6 million tiger enclosure is .6 of an acre…” Polar bears have a million times less space. “In the UK 75% of elephants are overweight, and only 16% can walk normally.” There is nothing to be learnt from captive wild animals because of course they do not behave naturally.

As soon as a photograph of a dining room with multiple locks, lamps, a girl and a wild boar appears in the narrative, I knew immediately that this must be Simona Kossak, see If you go down to the woods today… – Animal Wild. Her friend Korasek is a raven not a crow as described in the translation I found. The story affected Keggie deeply and she returns to it a number of times.

She loves the principle of ahimsa, non-violence and respect for all life, and quotes Gandhi speaking as though from the eyes of a cow: “you are not appointed over us to kill us and eat our flesh or otherwise ill-treat us, but to be our friend and guardian”, but then subverts it (she is very good at that, is often iconoclastic): “Which rather sidesteps the snag of male calves produced to keep the sacred cow in milk.”

I had forgotten the false Utopia in Animal Farm, Sugarcandy Mountain.

I spoke to George Melly’s wife Diana not long after she had begun a philosophy course. She was horrified by Descartes who thought that animals were no more than complex automata without language, intelligence, feeling or reason. Voltaire though countered that: just a dog’s joy at the return of his master was sufficient empirical proof of the opposite.

We read of a humpback whale released from entanglement in a fishing net by men on a small boat. For an hour afterwards she breached, flipped and splashed – in joy no doubt but perhaps also in gratitude.

It had not quite occurred to me that Linnaeus’ classification system not only gives us understanding of animals’ evolutionary pasts but also first showed the interconnectedness of everything. Darwin’s tree of life was there all along. We also read of Gilbert White, England’s first ecologist, who preferred, unusually, to observe living animals rather than shooting and dissecting them or not even bothering with the first of those. I wrote about my visit to his house and grounds in Animal Wild. The notion of connectedness was furthered by Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) as a result of what he saw during his expeditions. He was way ahead of his time: “a common chain links all organic nature”. And it was he who especially fired Charles Darwin’s imagination. His grandfather Erasmus proposed something not a million miles from the theory of evolution in 1794 in his book Zoonomia – the concept was not really new, but it was taboo. Muslim scientists of old have been much sidelined in western culture, but the polymath Al-Jahiz (776-868) wrote of the development of species: “Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to their offspring.”

Even Darwin though could not explain how hereditary traits were passed on. For that knowledge we have to thank Gregor Mendel, the first geneticist whose revelation came from experiments in growing peas. Darwin did not bring an end to spirituality of course and Keggie quotes Llewellyn Powys, one of the literary Powys clan, who wrote of witnessing a hare approaching his favourite dewpond one calm evening: “I was suddenly awakened from my rapture. I had heard a sound, a sound sensitive and fresh as soft rain upon a leaf. It was the hare drinking.”

Then the term Umwelt was coined to describe an animal’s unique sensory surrounding world and we learn of Konrad Lorenz who became entangled with the Nazi regime, through misunderstanding as much as anything, but who allowed wild animals to come and go to and from his house as they pleased. It was his friend Karl von Frisch who first observed the honeybee waggle dance. We are heading for new understandings at this point. The horrors of behaviourism and the experiments its believers carried out and the repression of so-called anthropomorphism were not to predominate forever (although pointless, mind-bogglingly cruel experiments do still of course go on). We move on to Jane Goodall who first reported the use of tools by chimpanzees and Dian Fossey who was driven perhaps to the point of madness by the predations of poachers on her beloved gorillas. But still our tests of animal intelligence are all too often anthropocentric. They are like us but profoundly not like us. We are constantly surprised when they are more intelligent than we thought. Incredibly, Black Kites in Australia will take smouldering sticks from bushfires and start their own fire elsewhere to flush out their prey.

The fishing industry is laid bare and we are told that 47 billion are caught each year for recreation. She is surprisingly forgiving of fishing for sport with hooks, far more than I would be. Why would fish not feel pain? What ever made us think that? “What they [can’t] do is squeal.”

The section on Gulliver’s Travels amongst the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms gives real food for thought. I read it long ago and probably didn’t really appreciate it.

The great linguist and thinker Noam Chomsky thought that language was uniquely human. But experiments to teach animals to speak human language are starting from the wrong place. So many experiments actually say more about us than the victims, and it’s nothing good. Instead of training chimps to sign we now study their world and how they communicate with each other.

Keggie like me tries not to use the pronoun “it” to refer to animals and wonders why so many animal names are derogatory when applied to humans (words to denote females mostly, bitch, cow, pig and so on) as I did in Animal Trust.

There are good sections on the phenomenon of island gigantism and an understanding that it was beavers in the United States who were the real stewards of the land. The Hudson Bay Company was the North American equivalent of the East India Company and the consequences of almost wiping them out were dire. But they are coming back, even in the UK, in spite of opposition.

There is very little Keggie leaves uncovered. Mustangs are not actually native to the U.S. but they were hunted for pet food and, unbelievably, they still are. She is uncompromising on the cruelty of isolating equines. It reminded of one of the worst things I witnessed at the animal rescue where I used to volunteer. There were two ponies sharing a field and one used to bully the other at mealtimes. They were then separated not just in different fields but out of sight of one another. It drove the mare to distraction, all day, every day. I was only in once a week but I quickly could take no more, spoke up and things were changed. God knows what the thinking was.

The author tells us all about the feather trade but, and this is the other instance where we differ, is surprisingly lenient on pigeon-racing, seeing the fanciers as “gentle folk” who genuinely love their birds, which actually I don’t altogether doubt, but I don’t think she has quite thought this one through.

There’s more on trigger-happy naturalists and collectors, especially the relentless Alfred Russell Wallace and the terrible story of his taking of a baby orang-utan, and a reminder that there used to be a thriving market for Aboriginal body parts in Tasmania. In the strange world of egg-collecting those of Guillemots are especially prized for their ‘calligraphy’ and beautiful shape – they are pear-shaped to stop them rolling off cliffs. Eggshells are generally thinner now because of acid rain (fewer snails means less calcium in bird diets) and DDT in the food chain. Then there’s guano. As usual we overdid it: “Almost 13 million tons of nutrients from one ecosystem had been transported across the globe.”

Who knew that Miriam Rothchild campaigned for the decriminalisation of male homosexuality and as a scientist and naturalist gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee in 1957 showing that it was “a natural occurrence throughout the animal kingdom”?

There’s a good deal about the Disney version of the story of Bambi which, outrageously (sic), outraged the American hunting community. Hunters tend to want the larger animals and charismatic predators, not considering the knock-on effects on whole communities and ecosystems.

It took the Burns Report to establish that foxhunting “seriously compromises the welfare of the fox”, now many have moved to towns and cities where they are less likely to be eradicated. On the killing of wildlife on a huge scale for the benefit of those who like to shoot grouse, Keggie says, having studied and cited the statistics, simply, “It’s really not okay.” She has a good deal more to say on it and pheasant shooting of course. Her anger sparks off the page.

Two converts. Aldo Leopold who shot a mother wolf but saw “a pale fierce green fire dying in her eyes” and came to a place of better understanding and respect, and Arjan Singh, once a big game hunter but then a rescuer of leopards and other big cats. When, in 1976, monsoon floods threatened the forest which was home to a mother leopard and her two cubs, she brought them one by one to his house, took them to a bedroom and stayed there with them. When the waters subsided, she left with one of them only to find that the river was too turbulent for her to cross. She jumped into Arjan’s canoe for him to paddle her across. She disappeared and eventually Arjan went back across the river, at which point she reappeared and called him back over so that she could fetch the other cub. The planning! I read Arjan’s wonderful book years ago: Prince of Cats, Jonathan Cape, 1982.

Reporting on a meeting of a river association, Keggie recalls various bad omens, but was not too surprised by the attitude to Cormorants and Herons (they eat our fish you know) because the attendees were all wearing the uniform: “Bracken tweed shooting coats, green waistcoats, gingham, Barbours, brushed Vyella checked shirts …” So easy to picture them. As I once described them, pink of trouser, yellow of sock (or vice versa) and red of face.

We mess with what Darwin called the entangled bank of interconnected life at our peril – “they are so immensely complex we do not understand them.” There’s more on top-down ecosystems and keystone species. Top-down or bottom-up we need to think about and in terms of entire ecosystems.

I worry for the vanishing baseline, the profusion of wildlife I knew but my children never will. But of course each generation’s baseline is a shift. I cannot even imagine a flock of Passenger Pigeons 300 miles long and a mile wide darkening the sky for four days, or a flock of 10,000 Goldfinches. Sparrows are the one for me and this author too – my parents’ garden was full of them, the little hedge would burst with life, now they are in serious trouble. That House Sparrows would ever be red-listed would have seemed rather crazy. It was Chairman Mao who famously had them wiped out – they ate grain but also locust nymphs. The campaign caused the worst famine in history, the deaths of between 25 and 40 million people. When vultures were wiped out in their millions by the cattle drug Voltaren, the cost came in the form of carcases left to rot, feral dog populations exploding, more deaths from rabies and from 1993 to 2006 an estimated $34 billion.

I have written often about neonicotinoids, the pesticide invented by pharma giant Bayer and the threat it poses to bees in particular. I had not realised that the seeds themselves are coated so that every part of the growing plant is poisonous. There’s something very disturbing about that concept, let alone the consequences. We should be paying very serious attention to Barry Commoner’s Four Laws of Ecology:

Everything is Connected to Everything Else. 

Everything Must Go Somewhere.

Nature Knows Best. 

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, or, Nothing Comes from Nothing.

The four laws of ecology and the four anti-ecological laws of capitalism | Climate & Capitalism

In spite of the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Silent Spring – Animal Wild) DDT is still used in Africa, South America and Asia and an insanely toxic insecticide called Ectosan was allowed to be trialled on Scottish salmon farms. What are we thinking?

There’s great writing on the subject of whales. And on farmed animals. What do we do to them? We chop bits off. We put sows in horrendous farrowing crates but if they hadn’t been bred to be top-heavy and their legs weren’t weak from lack of exercise, piglets would not be crushed in the first place. Factory farms are torture chambers, the animals live lives worse than death. And it’s no good just blaming the consumers. Sure, we are complicit and we look away, but when were we asked if this is what we wanted, cheaper food but at this terrible price? Keggie points out that it’s not about feeding the world (we waste a third of our food), and whilst in the UK we may meet certain standards of welfare, the bar is set incredibly low. If we complain we become the ‘lunatic fringe’. Cows stomachs are designed to process grass, not grains, it is worth remembering. If we left nature alone … wolves don’t just predate deer, crucially they keep them on the move. Enriched cages for chickens are a sop – they are little better than battery cages, giving each bird space smaller than a sheet of A4 paper – they cannot even flap their wings. Now they have come up with the mealy-mouthed concept of “Freedom Pens” for pigs. It means they can just about turn around. The National Pig Association says that raising standards would be uncompetitive. As Keggie Carew says, “The methods, designs and deaths we administer and allow in factory farms are legitimised EVIL.” The caps are hers.

A Greenland shark caught in by-catch was estimated to be 400 years old or more, whilst a clam dredged up in 2006 was 507. But to find that out the clam was killed, unnecessarily. The clam was filtering the ocean before Machu Pichu was built. One 60 to 70 year-old Albatross is known to have had 51 direct descendants across six generations. She could have flown more than five million miles in her life. Albatrosses swallow over 4,500 kilos of plastic a year – when it breaks down the chemical released, dimethyl sulphide, smells like squid.

Sea cucumbers are delicacies in China or are used for imaginary medical purposes, they are a subject of warring, criminal gangs but they are the ocean’s cleaners and as ever untold harm has been done on a far larger scale than we might first have predicted.

Keggie, like me, was “a child of the atom bomb deep anxiety” – we only wondered when, not if. Now we have eco-anxiety and it’s very real and very debilitating. A sense of grief, guilt and helplessness. Think HS2. The Baiji in China, a freshwater dolphin, is almost gone through pollution and habitat loss. “First we took their sight. Then we took their hearing. Then we took their river.” They may be actually extinct already.

Only two Northern White Rhinos are left, both of them female. Their horns are of as much actual benefit to consumers as their own fingernails. “The great herds of millions of elephants on the … African plains are down to just 400,000, many under armed guard; what an indictment: 20,000 lions, 4,000 tigers, 2,000 giant pandas, 500 Ethiopian wolves, not a dozen vaquitas [the world’s rarest marine mammal endemic to the northern end of the Gulf of California in Mexico] … The term ‘endangered species’ has lost its potency from overuse. We sink our shoulders, hang our heads. As we begin to understand the richness we lose species faster than ever before. What a thing, to wipe out a species. And what an indictment for it not to be a crime. [This now] … is the long loud desperate cry of the human heart.”

I am with Keggie on tracking too – I simply don’t believe that a collared wolf will behave completely normally and nor does she. “The Scottish naturalist Jim Crumley despairs of the many gizmos and aerials attached to our wild creatures: collars, bracelets, anklets, implants, glue-on tags, harness-mounted units.” But the capture and tagging process must be stressful and can be fatal. How much data is enough? That is a brilliant question. We know what’s happening, let’s concentrate more on doing something about it.

Wolves are hunted all the time in all sorts of horrible ways, yet in Wyoming where hatred of them is particularly hard-wired, in 2016, wolves took just over 200 sheep. Weather and disease took 37,550. And domestic dogs kill twice as many sheep as wolves. A Polish protector of and protestor about Simona Kossak’s precious forest is amazed when he hears that in Scotland there are no wolves at all.

We have plenty of recent experience of zoonotic disease, but have we actually learnt anything? Of course factory farms and wet markets are the perfect breeding grounds. Which is why antibiotic use on the farms is so dangerously out of control. What did we think would happen when we fed cows to cows (BSE)? During COVID, nature made a comeback. “How long will we remember those long months of birdsong, the peaceful skies, the kindnesses of strangers?” It is very sad that that is even a question to ask.

Short-termist profit junkies may call us tree-huggers, extremists, eco-terrorists, make the word “rewilding” somehow toxic, but happily ignore that rewilding, which doesn’t even actually take productive agricultural land, covers 1% of the UK whilst pheasant and partridge shoots take 12%, grouse 8% and golf courses 2%. Animals and nature will do the repair work for us. I asked many times for a small piece of land at the rescue I mentioned earlier to be set aside (and perhaps a pond as well but that was ambitious), perhaps a quarter of an acre out of ten, or even a tiny patch. All the other rescues I visited seemed to be doing it, it was educative for visitors and effortless. But the idea fell on stony ground. The fields had to be mown.

We are not misanthropic by default, we just respect all life, not just those animals to which we give honourable family status. An acquaintance would have deer shot if they arrived on his land. How was a deer different from the dog at his side? “Ah, well, he’s a member of the family.” It must be like being God. Meanwhile “We can’t even protect an enormous rhino.” And it’s ok to be emotional about it: “Tipping points tip … Reason and science have not convinced the world … to stop damaging the biosphere.” But some people at least are changing how they think about and interact with nature, whether through slow burn or epiphany. I think and hope that numbers are growing.

The badger cull gets very short shrift as one would expect, but there is enough about that in this blog already, except to note the very good point that it is just extremely odd that badgers were singled out, especially with zero basis in the science.

But … “Berlin is full of Nightingales because they let the wild in. ” A point made at the British Trust for Ornithology conference (Bird conference – Animal Wild). And Danish clothing magnate Anders Povslen is now the biggest landowner in Scotland and he’s “reversing the deer-sick landscape encouraged by shooting estates”. And there’s Knepp.

It is “corporate choices which drive the destruction of ecosystems”. It may be ultimately in the hands of consumers but when were we given choices? We may not want to buy palm oil but it’s in 50% of supermarket products. We are not even given the proper information from food labelling to enable us to make those choices. When we are it is all too often highly misleading.

The book ends with hope at the heart of it and returns once more to the story of Simona Kossak.

Here we are in the entangled bank. “Three billion years in the making, of ‘endless forms most beautiful’ “. That’s on the penultimate page of the text and the phrase is from the closing statement of On the Origin of Species …

“… endless form most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”