Not my own photograph at the head of this post (all photos on this blog are mine unless stated otherwise).
I watched this last night:
Violent Chimpanzees That Attack Villages and Steal Children | Our World
Some of it is hard to see. I’ve long felt that the trouble with Chimpanzees is that they are too like humans. This documentary shows them hunting monkeys, taking and eating the young and very young. Human infants have been taken, killed and eaten, in one case snatched from the arms of a mother. The savagery with which they attack and kill lone members of neighbouring groups is horrific. I’ve seen similar brutality and bloodlust in another documentary, in that case involving the deposing of an ageing leader by younger males.
The talking heads are experienced in the field. They suggest that Chimpanzees may even experience a sense of wonder. I had it in my head that they share 98% of their DNA with us, but recent research posits a figure of 98.8%. Still room for plenty of variation (Chimpanzees are as vulnerable as we are to some viruses, but not malaria) but it seems awfully close.
There are footage of and interviews with a volunteer zookeeper. A Chimpanzee saw an opportunity, a gap at the foot of the bars of the cage, grabbed her arm, pulled it in, bit off her thumb and went into a frenzy, doing serious damage. To her enormous credit, the keeper, now keen on observing them in the wild, concludes, not because she was badly injured but because she respects them and their right to freedom, that we simply should not be keeping Chimpanzees in captivity at all. She also says that when she insisted on going to visit the chimp once she had recovered, he or she could not look her in the eye, seemed thoroughly ashamed.
Chimpanzees snatching human babies is “just chimps being chimps” we are told, as we encroach increasingly on their territory. And awful and apparently insoluble though that is, there’s another question raised: what can we learn about our own behaviour, our enjoyment of violence and hatred of outsiders?
I continue to obsess about the Sparrowhawk hunting songbirds in the garden. I have seen her just now and three times in the space of fifteen minutes yesterday. My heart is in my mouth every time, although my head is telling me something different (raptors have to eat too, it is all part of the natural cycle).
Most of her lightning fast attacks are not successful. I am sure she is a female and almost certainly an adult. For a small raptor she is a large bird. Unusually, Sparrowhawk females are 25% larger than the males, which may be beneficial all round since the females can take larger prey leaving smaller birds for the males.
Accipiter nisus – they can reach speeds of up to 50 mph in short bursts, fast and agile enough to take their prey entirely by surprise. The small birds here are being noticeably more circumspect, spending shorter times at the feeders and bird bath. The Wood Pigeons too. The Jackdaws are not fazed at all.
Out of irrational curiosity only I had a look online to see if anything could be done to discourage the Sparrowhawk. Most of the answers were along the line I would take myself: don’t interfere with nature, be grateful your garden is so healthy as to sustain such a bird, but some I found (deliberately) hilarious, brilliantly subverting the idiocy of the question. Wildlife writing can be a bit po-faced, including mine, so I am pleased to include them here. Apologies if anyone is offended.
- Get an actual Andean condor, the song birds will be too small for it, but it will scare away the sparrowhawks.
- Start by just putting up some signs asking in a passive aggressive manner not to eat song birds but just the other ones.
- Begin teaching self defence classes with the songbirds. Should that fail, form a miltia and defend your territory with your sparrow army.
- Schedule a meeting with the Sparrowhawk. Tell him to stop being all SparrowHawky as it is ruining your enjoyment of birds further down the food chain. Ask him whether he has considered other options, such as plums and apples.
- Dress up like a sparrow. A big, hench-as-f*** sparrow. Do a bit of light prancing around the garden.
- Sit by your window closely watching the bird feeder, whilst holding a wizard’s staff and wearing a wizardy dressing gown. If you see the hawk approaching, quickly position yourself between it and the songbirds, jam the staff into the floor and shout ‘YOU SHALL NOT PASS!’. The sparrowhawk will slam into an invisible force field you have just created and that will be the end of that.
- Go outside at 5 am smashing pots and pans together and yelling the word ‘****’.
Keen for further laughs yesterday evening I rewatched Richard Dawkins reading some of his hate mail. Whilst searching for the files on my PC I came across his essay on Hugh Lofting and the Dr Dolittle books which I had forgotten. I wrote about my own love of those wonderful books in Animal Trust. Dawkins also read them as a child, over and over as I did, and he and I seem to feel very much the same about them. He points out that Lofting told his tales based on a single alteration of reality (as opposed to say J.K. Rowling’s where the supernatural is a panacea) – an ability to converse with animals, that Dolittle was a great scientist and naturalist with a boundless sense of curiosity. Like Darwin, Lofting was fiercely opposed to slavery, a subject which made both men unusually angry. One poignant tale involves Dr Dolittle’s rescuing a captive from a slave trader with the help of outraged other members of the animal kingdom. Lofting has been accused of racism, with some justification, which I covered in Animal Trust and an earlier post:
Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle books were important. I have a lovely set of first English editions in delightful, colourful dust-wrappers. It was only on re-reading them decades later that I realised what a profound impact they had had. It wasn’t the good doctor’s ability to talk to animals so much as the author’s humanity and recurring arguments for treating animals with compassion and, to an extent, as equals. When a new edition was published by Red Fox in 1991, there needed to be some re-writing to remove or alter characters and incidents which were not considered racist then, but certainly are now. In an afterword, the author’s son Christopher writes about the dilemma. Is it ok to tamper with or censor the classics? Or should children be denied the opportunity of reading the books at all because of a few unintendedly offensive references? Christopher Lofting continues: “After much soul-searching the consensus was that changes should be made. The deciding factor was the strong belief that the author himself would have immediately approved of making these alterations. Hugh Lofting would have been appalled at the suggestion that any part of his work would give offence and would have been the first to make the changes himself … The message that Hugh Lofting conveyed throughout his work was one of respect for life and the rights of all who share the common destiny of our world. That theme permeates the entire Doctor Dolittle series.”
Dawkins concurs. More important for him (and me) was the awakening in him of an awareness of what we now call speciesism, from Lofting’s writings. Dolittle and Darwin were not dissimilar he suggests. Dolittle exhibits “a love of nature, the gentle solicitude towards all creation”.
Here again for the third time, also reproduced in Animal Trust and an earlier post, is one of my favourite passages from The Story of Doctor Dolittle, perhaps my favourite piece of writing in all literature for children. I am repeating myself but had not previously made the Dawkins and Darwin connections.
A boy, whose uncle has been lost at sea, pulls a red handkerchief from his pocket. The eagles have already looked everywhere. But Jip the dog smells snuff:
“SNUFF, by Jingo! – Black Rappee snuff. Don’t you smell it? His uncle took snuff – Ask him, Doctor.” The Doctor questioned the boy again; and he said, “Yes. My uncle took a lot of snuff.” “Fine!” said Jip. “The man’s as good as found. ’Twill be as easy as stealing milk from a kitten. Tell the boy I’ll find his uncle for him in less than a week. Let us go upstairs and see which way the wind is blowing.” “But it is dark now,” said the Doctor. “You can’t find him in the dark!” “I don’t need any light to look for a man who smells of Black Rappee snuff,” said Jip as he climbed the stairs. “If the man had a hard smell, like string, now – or hot water, it would be different. But snuff! – Tut, tut!” “Does hot water have a smell?” asked the Doctor. “Certainly it has,” said Jip. “Hot water smells quite different from cold water. It is warm water – or ice – that has the really difficult smell. Why, I once followed a man for ten miles on a dark night by the smell of the hot water he had used to shave with – for the poor fellow had no soap…. Now then, let us see which way the wind is blowing. Wind is very important in long-distance smelling. It mustn’t be too fierce a wind – and of course it must blow the right way. A nice, steady, damp breeze is the best of all… Ha! – This wind is from the North.”
Then Jip went up to the front of the ship and smelt the wind; and he started muttering to himself, “Tar; Spanish onions; kerosene oil; wet raincoats; crushed laurel-leaves; rubber burning; lace-curtains being washed – No, my mistake, lace-curtains hanging out to dry; and foxes – hundreds of ’em – cubs; and – ” “Can you really smell all those different things in this one wind?” asked the Doctor. “Why, of course!” said Jip. “And those are only a few of the easy smells – the strong ones. Any mongrel could smell those with a cold in the head. Wait now, and I’ll tell you some of the harder scents that are coming on this wind – a few of the dainty ones.” Then the dog shut his eyes tight, poked his nose straight up in the air and sniffed hard with his mouth half-open. For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream. “Bricks,” he whispered, very low – “old yellow bricks, crumbling with age in a garden- wall; the sweet breath of young cows standing in a mountain-stream; the lead roof of a dove- cote – or perhaps a granary – with the mid-day sun on it; black kid gloves lying in a bureau- drawer of walnut-wood; a dusty road with a horses’ drinking-trough beneath the sycamores; little mushrooms bursting through the rotting leaves; and – and – and – ”
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