Cuddling

I have now finished the animal lover’s book – reference 2 – first noticed at reference 1 and then again at reference 3. The work of a mixed-media artist who became an author and who looks now to be well on the way to becoming a personality, not to say a celebrity. A work which she describes in the preface as a love letter to the world of animals large and small. Which I might describe as a reaction to all the dreadful things we humans have done to animals in the course of our short time on earth. As much a loving obituary as a love letter.

About 330 pages of decently but cheaply produced book. Perhaps deliberately, glossy pictures – which would have been easy enough to source – have been avoided, in favour of a modest number of cheaply reproduced black and white photographs, mostly of fellow cuddlers. She clearly has a lot of time for people who get up close and personal with animals, who take them into their gardens, if not their homes.

The book is organised into ten chapters, mostly of four or five sections each, but it came across to me as a rather disorganised sprawl. There is no action plan, and about the only action that I am likely to take is to reduce my meat and fish intake. Elimination seems some way off yet and the author herself admits to eating meat once a month or so. Perhaps sensible given that our modest digestive tract is that of an omnivore, not a herbivore: we would have trouble living off grass, let alone bamboo in the way of a panda.

There are some things which the author appears to get angry about. Perhaps top of the list is the sometimes gross behaviour of those who hunt animals for sport – while quite often being rather unsporting about it, quite often getting a lift out of the actual business of killing and quite often sequestering huge tracts of land, land which might otherwise be left reasonably wild, for the breeding, raising and fattening of things to shoot.

Another item on her list are the big corporations in the food business. The people who sell us pigs raised in grim conditions in factories and who make toxic chemicals to spray all over the land.

And some things she is keen on. For example, the reintroduction of apex predators. Partly for them themselves, partly for their role in keeping the number of prey herbivores down to levels which the land can decently carry. Another example would be the creation of nature reserves, large and small – in which department she does her bit on her Wiltshire smallholding. She is tolerant of eco-tourism, which she sees as providing at least some of the money needed to pay for such places – from where I associate to the oil guzzling and polluting cruise ships disturbing the peace of the polar regions. Another would be giving animals space to play, with her view being that most large animals given the space will play, will enjoy themselves. That it is wrong to deny them that space.

She is good on all the complicated interactions between all the many forms of life. That chopping out one of them, for one reason or another, is all too likely to have unexpected and unwanted consequences.

She has gathered a huge amount of material and covered a huge amount of ground. I dare say there are plenty of mistakes and plenty of simplifications in the interests of telling a good story. But I did not actually catch her out. Maybe she hired some good quality research assistants!

She is also goes on a bit and can be a bit tiresome. But I got there in the end. Maybe BH will take to it.

My closing thought is close to where I started when I started in population statistics some fifty years ago now. There are just far too many of us and we are far too greedy and selfish. It seems all to likely that it is all going to end in tears. Maybe this is what is really driving the fondness of cinema audiences in the US for films about disasters and films about life after the apocalypse – to be fair, often if not usually of the nuclear rather than the zoological variety.

PS: the author does not give any space to change, to all the changes in the world over the human span of half a million years or so, never mind the fifty million years before that. To the continual turnover of animals, with new ones always arriving on the scene to displace the ones already there. Change which we have massively speeded up - but change which does not greatly disturb her argument. But it should have, in the interests of balance, been given a bit more air time.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/paused.html. 

Reference 2: Beastly: A new history of animals and us - Keggie Carew - 2023.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/a-sense-of-humour.html. 

Reference 4: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-pork-industry-photos-2013-5?r=US&IR=T. The source of the snap above.

Reference 5: https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/03/11/staph-bacteria-spreading-between-pigs-humans/. A pig story from North Carolina turned up en-route to reference 4.