Changing attitudes to animals
- From: "Lance" <LanceGary@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 31 Mar 2006 05:55:39 -0800
The strange journey of an animal-lover
·Fri, 31 Mar 2006
By Robin Crouch
One of the bst developments of the 20th century was the transformation
in the way we view animals, writes ROBIN CROUCH.
THERE were many bad developments in the 20th century, but there were
also some good ones. And the best, I think, was the transformation in
the way we view animals.
I, for example, was born in the mid-sixties into a classic South
African wildlife-loving family. My father had an impressive library on
the subject. It never occurred to us that there was something wrong
with the fact that half of these books were about big-game hunting.
There was no contradiction back then between loving animals and
ruthlessly killing them.
One evening when I was seven, I decided to try one of my father's
animal books. It was the first "proper" book I'd ever read other
than Famous Fives.
I'll never forget it.
It was called African Fury and was by a hunter called, funnily enough,
George Michael. I started tentatively but, before I knew it, I was
hooked. Every herd of elephant felled, each pride of lion blown to
glory had me more enraptured and enthralled. It somehow made it even
more exciting that all the butchery took place in exotic-sounding
places like "German East Africa" and "Portuguese West Africa".
"How wonderful!" I thought. "When I grow up I want to be a
big-game hunter."
His chapters were very long for a seven-year-old - up to 30 pages -
but I'd already established a reading rule for myself from my Famous
Fives. It's one I still adhere to. I always have to finish the
chapter, no matter how long, before I switch off my bedside light.
Well, I was so spellbound by George Michael's tales of derring-do
that, having laboriously finished one chapter, I thought: "Just one
more!" And again and again I thought it.
One story I can remember as vividly as if I'd read it five minutes
ago. My new hero and his client had shot a buffalo each. The only
problem was that this set off the herd of thousands on a stampede -
in their direction. They hid behind two saplings. The herd thundered
past them and, when it was eventually safe to emerge, they found their
two trophies had been so trampled that they were just pools of blood in
the dust.
"How thrilling! I wish I'd been there!" I thought - and
embarked on yet another chapter.
My ecstasy came to an abrupt halt when my mother staggered out in the
early hours only to find that my light was still on. Needless to say,
school the next day was an endurance test of nauseous exhaustion.
I would have been very surprised to know that the day would come when I
- and my father - would view hunting as a crime not very far
removed from murder.
I think our view of wildlife back then is encapsulated in a story I
once read about King George V. That crusty yet kindly old monarch, who
ruled from 1910 to 1936, was an obsessive shot who thought nothing of
killing quite literally thousands of game birds in one morning. Yet his
eyes filled with tears when he came across a dead thrush during a
stroll through Windsor Great Park. He would have been insulted to the
core if someone had suggested he wasn't an animal lover.
As it was with land animals, so it was with whaling.
When I was in Class One, one of the things we learnt about was whales.
Our teacher even trouped us all out on to the playing field and, with
her metre-rule, measured out for us exactly how long a Blue Whale
actually is. We were impressed.
"What magnificent creatures!" we all thought.
And yet we didn't feel the slightest moral qualm that one of the boys
in the class had a grandfather who worked at the Durban whaling
station. He used to bring along all sorts of fascinating bits of whale
his grandfather had given to him - foetuses in bottles, fronds of
baleen, enormous teeth. He even had a rather lurid album of photos of
whales being hacked to pieces.
We couldn't have been more intrigued - which is no doubt why I can
vividly recall it all to this day. Our whale-loving teacher never
dreamt of correcting our thinking. To be harpooned was quite simply
what whales were there for.
How times have changed. We would have been thunderstruck to know that
one day we'd regard whaling as not only close to murder but, perhaps,
in some ways even worse than murder.
This is progress indeed.
The Witness
Published: 31 March 2006
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