There is nothing more beastly than people who shudder with distaste or squeamishness at contact with animals. This ironically-titled book by Keggie Carew, offering “A New History of the Animals and Us” is a cry from the heart of a nature lover.
The author runs a small nature reserve in Wiltshire. She has previously won the Costa biography prize for her memoir Dadland, so she is an eloquent writer. And she has researched a subject in which she is deeply concerned.
The book begins with a superb surreal moment when a barn owl descends and perches on the head of her husband. She just stands and watches. Minutes pass.
“Jonathan remains, the violet sky deepening, the dogs in the middle ground looking up at the man and the owl in this four-way silent conversation, until finally…finally, he tips his head slowly to one side, and the owl flies off. Thinking whatever an owl thinks when her post suddenly walks away.”
Maybe this is a book about showing respect for animals in all their different modes of sentience. It argues that animals have shaped our history, our land, our civilisation. Now that their existence is threatened by us as never before, we need to understand this basic relationship.
Another theme is the way that animals humanise us – they enable us to see the world through wider, more sensitive eyes. The author quotes a passage from The Seabird’s Cry by Adam Nicholson who was taken as a child to a giant seabird colony in the Hebrides. “The air and sea around us filled with 300,000 birds, a pumping, raucous, polymorphous multiversity in which everything was alive and nothing was refined.”
Keggie Carew comments: “The chaos, the stink, the vulgarity, the vitality, the unedited full-throttled spectacle was a rite of passage which Adam experienced as a drilling-down through Creation, as if the maw of life opened in front of his eight-year-old eyes…
“So that’s it. Something lights up inside us. And this touchpaper between humans and other animals has been lighting up, and indeed chronicled, for more than 40,000 years.”
Anyone who lives with a pet, say a dog or cat, will know this truth. A feeling similar to the parent of a newborn baby, a connection with the ongoing life force.
There are extraordinary stories: the young woman in a remote forest in Poland, sharing her home with a wild boar, a dog, an owl and a raven. She walks through a forest alongside a band of young deer. She sits cross-legged with the raven on her knee.
The raven they call Korasek rules the roost in their forest lodge. Scheming, smart, treacherous, magnificent, he is the biggest character of all. He tugs the woman’s plaits. He rides on the back of her husband’s motorbike. He tweaks the tails of the dog and the boar. He is “as cute as Satan.”
The book takes a critical look at the place of animals in Christian theology – and the way that humans “created in God’s image”, are set apart, as exceptional beings. It draws our attention to the ubiquitous pictures of St George slaying the dragon, even if it’s been slumbering peacefully in its cave.
The wider message is that our animal selves degrade us. The natural world is there to be farmed and exploited by man in pursuit of his higher spiritual destiny.
The book traces our slow-growing understanding of the natural world: Aristotle on the Greek island of Lesbos in 350 BC, inventing the new science of Biology; the Swedish botanist and classification nut, Carl Linnaeus; the ground-breaking German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, celebrated in Andrea Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature. Then Charles Darwin.
We learn about many extraordinary experiments in observation and communication with the apes, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas. These creatures are not far removed from the human family.
The last sections of the book focus on how we treat animals now. One big theme is the stability of natural ecosystems, a combination of carnivorous predators and vegetarian species that enable many different life forms to coexist in one habitat.
Too often humans arrive and hunt the top predator to extinction. It might be a tiger, a wolf, a shark or even a starfish. Frequently when this happens, the ecosystem collapses. Where there were dozens of species living side by side, held in balance, now only a handful survive.
Keggie Carew’s moral is “If you kill it, you have to eat it.”
I am tempted to think of a parallel with human revolutions, where the goal is always a more equal and liberated society, but the result has often been an eerie dystopia. Could there be a comparison to the ecosystem of human societies, where like it or not, we seem to need both predators and co-operators, competitors and carers, highly skilled and “unskilled” workers, and a real diversity of human types to make a functional community?
The second big theme is factory farming: how animals are ruthlessly exploited and given wretched lives in the pursuit of profits and cheap food. We eat a ham sandwich, bought for a snack lunch. Do we ever think of the pig that sliver of meat came from, or what conditions they lived in before the slaughterhouse?
We buy an attractively packaged, processed meal based on chicken, “because it’s a healthier form of meat.” What do we know about the brief life of that young bird, fattened up at record speed and never allowed to fly?
We try a salmon steak because “oily fish is good for you.” There’s a sense of virtue in it. It will be good for our brains and nervous system. Can we imagine the lives of those caged salmon (a species designed to cross and recross an ocean to fulfill their life cycle)?
Do we have any notion of the damage caused by the effluent from the giant salmon cages on the ecosystem below in the loch or sea floor?
These are difficult issues and the sad fact is that we can’t all afford to eat “ethical food.” But the book provides an uplifting read and it opens our eyes to the deeper question of where humans fit in the animal kingdom.