Animal crackers

PERSONAL COLUMN KENNETH ALLSOP

There are twenty million pets kept in Britain. Most of them—it has seemed to me at gloomy moments—live with- me. Just after income tax had been raised again, and I had before me a bill for a triple set of school fees which had apparently detached itself from the Defence Estimates, I morbidly totted up the number of mouths I had to feed.

Seventy champing jaws at least. They be- longed to a wife and three children, two dachshunds and a bloodhound, a Siamese cat and an old tom, three peafowl, twenty-seven doves, four Chinese geese, certainly more than a score white mice (outlawed, but which still swarmed in intemperate fertility in a slum of boxes in my daughter's bedroom), two Belgian hares and a family of corpulent goldfish, plus a jostling turnover of hamsters, tortoises, grass snakes, budgerigars, stick insects, turtles (brought from California in a Boeing 707's washbasin where they were glared at frus- tratedly by sticky-fingered passengers) and a procession of ferocious kittens captured by my sons from the litters of feral mogs in dark corners of the barns. As these supernumerary creatures died or escaped or were lost, they were replaced by other transient lodgers in my stranded Noah's Ark.

All save the first four on that list were para- sitical. They had no symbiotic relationship with me, other than providing an occasional aesthetic twinge. Hastening across the yard with an envelope for Fleet Street, one might con- sciously register the peacock strutting on the sunlit flags, swivelling his preposterous tail like a radar dish decorated by Underground poster- painters. The doves; too (descended from three pairs bright as a shake of Tide but now a mulatto block, blotchily stigmatised, as I sur- veyed them" with the jaundiced eye of a Mississippi white supremacist, from trolloping fraternisation with truant racing pigeons), still imparted the odd stab of pleasure. This was when, gingered up by springtime hormone- secretions, they heaved sluggish bodies, bulging

ssith my profligately scattered corn, from their perches and skimmed and wheeled above the Bedfordshire potato fields.

But mostly I went about my affairs, cross- ing to my writing-room in the converted cow- byre or mooching in non-productive sulks about the weedy lawns, without much aware- ness of the menagerie so fecund around me.

They accumulated, either furtively installed or mysteriously materialising. Often weeks passed before I noticed that the census had again

lengthened, when my children's indignant counter-attack would be that the newcomer had been here ages, it was one of us, and how could I be so horrible, threatening to turn it out? If I got the drift of a plot to take in another local pup or refugee rabbit, my shilly-shallying protests were steamrollered by passionate appeals to Schweitzer ethics.

Not that I am anti-animals or averse to shar- ing my hearth and larder with the needy, whatever their colour or pedigree, only that a fine point is reached when it is disputable which is the needier, they or Actually I quite like , dogs and cats in the environment in a generalised way. I don't find that doggy smell of steamy hide and damp paws about a room Particularly disagreeable,• certainly no more

noxious than the chemical unguents with which human beings daub themselves. The house I then had incubated singularly strapping spiders, which shouldered out of their Hobbitland be- neath the gaping floorboards and strode past on powerful furry limbs. Providing they , weren't competing for the bath at the same time, I was content to let them go their way unmolested—happy, really, that their chops were busy with -natural prey and not my gro- ceries. (Although probably my spontaneous warmth towards those self-reliant insect- gobblers would have chilled had they re- sembled the renowned Tegenaria parielina slain in Milan Cathedral in 1751 which had fattened bigger than a Pekingese from lapping up the lamp oil.)

Also I got much domestic pleasure from musing down into the magical murkiness of the pond, where fish glinted among the water snails and the dream Amazon of green stems. In fact, I have never looked at a living thing —moth or moose—that hasn't fascinated me and renewed the flash of wonder. Nevertheless, I am not a pet-keeper by inclination. So our national enthusiasm has a sort of anthropologi- cal interest for me. That twenty million figure works out at about one pet every two house- holds. Not all are dogs and cats: There is a Streatham housewife with wolves at the bottom of her garden, a London company director who down at his Kent home (perhaps lonely away from the business jungle) relaxes with a tiger and a few gorillas, and a Scots farmer who keeps a pack (or is the right collective noun a swindle?) of cheetahs.

The annual take of our pet industry is £80 million, £25 million of that spent on such ordnance as trinkets for budgies, lace-trimmed panties for poodles, breath deodorant, slumber robes, birth pills and car safety belts. Pet foods, including mint-flavoured Choc-O-Drops and Kanni Kandi (`Your dog's sweet treat') net the remaining £55 million—sixteen times the amount allocated to cancer research.

I am not being disapproving. Pet-keeping clearly answers a deep need in mankind not wholly explained by the psychologist's definition of the pet as a substitute human being from whom his master commands fawning love and loyalty. Desmond Morris shows illuminat-

ingly in The Naked Ape how" our favourite

animals are those with anthropomorphic features—funny-friendly mirror-reflections of ourselves, cuddly, Disneyesque, toyland marion- ettes. Yet surely, also, the animals we cosset in our semi-lets and high-rise flats are a living link with a flesh-and-blood evolutionary past from which we are ever more distantly separated by urbanisation, over-population and the chemical-soaked tracts of the factory farm upon which a live hoof never treads.

My reaching out through the barbed wire for this contact with a receding world (perhaps also for that sense of the numinous present in all relationships with other species of life) has been in a different direction: in the companionship of wild birds. I have kept a few—as pets, I suppose it could justifiably be jeered. I've had two jackdaws, two carrion crows, a magpie and, my ardent love, owls and hawks. I've had two tawny owls, two kestrels and a sparrowhawk, and I've done a bit of falconry with a borrowed goshawk. But I have regarded my possession of them as only escrow. I have never been able to persuade myself to pinion or imprison them.

Perhaps what I hoped to gain—from the hawks in particular—was a taste of their in- candescence of spirit, their untrammelled free- dom. In J. A. Baker's superb pantheist poem. disguised as a documentary, The Peregrine, he describes his hunting down of these migrant falcons on the Essex marshes—not to capture them, merely to be in their presence, in their aura of savage franchise. With him it was an obsession to be, like the child Arthur under Merlin's wand, metamorphosed out of his own earthbound, lumpy shape and to enter the peregrine's skin and intense violent existence. I didn't much care for the anti-humanism of Baker's book, but the chord was rung in my- self : oh for the wings not of a dove but of a killer hawk.

This worries me. Birds are the most non- human of creatures, and hawks especially are really just ultra-specialised vehicles, as lethally functional as a Minuteman IBM, aerodynami- cally designed to carry the warhead—talons and beak—to target, that k, its next meal. Poetically the hawk is a perfection of beauty: the hewed spear shape. the precision and eloquence of flight, the gorgeous plumage, the audacity of its character—kinetic art in essence. And yet if one looks beyond the associations and the glamour, one is staring direct through 150 million years at a Jurassic Period fossil. There aren't many left around. Although the croco- dile and snake have hung on, too, the big swimming plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs soon became obsolete. But if today there were some archaeopteryx flitting about the planes in St James's Park instead of the reeking fern-tree forests, they wouldn't look out of place- feather-tufted reptiles and, but for the teeth, with the same skull extension into horny mandibles that birds still use as bills.

Comparatively, the dog and cat are sophisti- cated modern refinements, in step with man and reasonably like us in looks. Perhaps that is

why most of us harbour them in our home- steads, because we feel they are our historical chums. Perhaps that is why I feel out of tune with this petty age. Although I feel all-dove, inside, it has been said (by one or two Tv` critics) that I am of hawkish appearance: an alarming thought. If so, where does that put me, a bird-man, a hawk-lover? Back in the primeval slime, I suppose, fishing for brachio. pods to feed my pet pterodactyl on.