Sir Mulberry Hawke is the latest beneficiary of moral relativism
PAUL JOHNSON
Lst week I studied the operations of two squirrels in Hyde Park. Their extraordinary darts, punctuated by moments of intense stillness, their curious way of hopping rather than running, as though they were toy kangaroos, the sheer concentration with which they attend to whatever it is they are doing — all this is pleasurable to watch. Then I thought to myself: supposing these animals were rats? I would view their activities with revulsion, and might even wax indignant that they were taking place in the open, in broad daylight, and not with the underground furtiveness proper to rats. Why such feelings? Rats and squirrels are similar creatures in many ways. Squirrels are not more, or less, moral creatures than rats. Both are governed by instincts needed for their survival. Yet rats, in our anthropomorphic scale of values, are baddies, grey squirrels are goodies. Not to the same extent as red squirrels, of course, who are nowadays near the top of the hero league, but nonetheless well on the right side of the moral line.
This set me thinking about the changing irrationality of our estimation of animals. The thrush has suddenly moved high up our popular affection scale. People like thrushes because they sing heartily. I like them because their speckles make them delightful to paint; difficult, too, but that adds to the pleasure. However, the reason for their rise in the charts is that they are said to be disappearing, killed by intensive farming. Recent studies claim their numbers have fallen from four million to one million breeding pairs. I don't see any evidence of this myself. Thrushes frequent our London garden and they are plentiful down in Somerset. Moreover, when I was walking past the Round Pond recently, I saw an amazing sight. A crowd of thrushes were begging for bread. They looked sleek, well-fed, were aggressive enough to drive off ducks, pigeons and even swans, and were doing well in the handout scramble. I counted them: 24. I had never seen so many thrushes together. Moreover, they were in close order, which made them seem sinister. They were in danger of toppling over into the baddie league.
It is amazing how an animal out of context or scale can transform itself from appealing to menacing. A ladybird a foot long would terrify us. A thousand foxes running together and snarling in the way foxes sometimes do would have the masked terrorists of the anti-hunt army howling in fear.
A lone wolf, as the name implies, is a goodie, a sympathetic creature. I recently painted one and can testify that a wolf is beautiful in a way few dogs can be. But a wolfpack is a different matter. The Norwegian authorities are so alarmed by the slaughter of thousands of sheep (9,000 last year in a single district) by one of the ten giant packs which roam the wilds, that they plan to carry out a mass cull using helicopters and snowmobiles. A member of an endangered species does not know it is a goodie and that it should behave like one. It just does what comes naturally. I once found myself, in Africa, gazing at the backside of a rhino. I don't know what kind it was. It certainly didn't look white, but then neither do white rhinos. I thought I was safe and that it did not know I was there, and rhinos are almost blind anyway, which is another reason we are meant to feel sorry for them. But it did know I was there, and it suddenly leapt into the air and, all in one movement, stood facing me, prepared to charge. At that moment I wished it was not merely an endangered species but already extinct. A rhino close to is a baddie, and it becomes a goodie only if it is well out of charging distance. That's my philosophy, as Mrs Gamp said.
It is a question of numbers, too, as the thrush case indicates, and as my daily visits to the Round Pond constantly prove. I have written before about the horrid Canada geese, those proliferating shit-machines from Ottawa. The big purge carried out last year by the rangers has not eliminated them — far from it — but it has had moral consequences. The residue are shitting as hard as ever but they have acquired a persecuted look, and it would not entirely surprise me if they suddenly started to parade, goose-stepping of course, with posters protesting against the holocaust. Moreover, there is another lot of orange-beaked geese, which have suddenly multiplied and are now more numerous than any other fowl around the pond. I had hitherto thought of them as goodies but they are beginning to look aggressive and evil. As for the swans, it is hard to think of them ever becoming baddies: but their numbers are growing. Last autumn I counted 60 at the pond. Now there are 80, possibly more. They are big birds and not particularly friendly. I saw one last week reduce to tears and howls a little girl who had offered it a biscuit. If there were 1,000 swans at the Round Pond, we would be horrified. What is the magic figure of proliferation which turns a goodie into a baddie?
I recall, a few years ago, general jubilation that a pair of red kites had settled and bred in the Chiltems. They are splendid birds to watch. Now I hear there are quite a lot of them, and that they are moving into the Landon area. There is certainly plenty of animal life in London these days. Foxes stroll the streets; the squirrels are multiplying fast. London is known to be a soft touch by animal asylum-seekers fleeing from the horrors of industrial farming. But all is not necessarily rosy for furry and feathered creatures in our city of refuge. The raptors, the avian equivalent of the Mafia, the Yardies and the Tongs, are seeking refuge too. Or that's their line. I saw, over Kensington Gardens, a large creature drifting lazily on the thermal currents the other day, too high to recognise clearly. My next-door neighbour, who studies bird-form more closely than I do, says that a sparrow-hawk has been frequenting both our gardens. No wonder people complain about the shortage of sparrows. I saw a biggish bird in our pear tree on Friday. He certainly had the look of a powerful mobster out to pluck, and he had a touch of crimson about him: Sir Mulberry Hawke in person!
Our forebears treated hawkish birds as baddies, unless they could be caught, clipped and trained to do useful things for humans. Otherwise, it was argued, they simply slaughtered weaker birds, including goodies. In recent decades, the powerful agencies which interfere in the natural cycle of life — quite ruthless bodies, by all accounts — have labelled most, if not all, raptors as goodies and protect them with a ferocity no beak or claw can match. As a result, the Hitlers, Stalins and Maos of the bird world are no-go for those who want to preserve the tiny, weak birds. But it is the little ones that make a garden seem so lively. We see the same in the human world, where the Saddams, Gaddafis and Castros are protected by international law and so are able to carry on their wickedness. The truth is, none of us knows enough about the changing world of nature to seek to subject it to a fixed legal framework, especially one based upon an anthropomorphic system of moral relativism.
Previous page
