BY JOHN NASH

Recently, under the somewhat misleading banner of BBC News “Inside Science” (I kid you not, Dear Reader), we were treated to another pokey finger of hypocrisy courtesy of some Bash Britain Corporation (BBC) Radio 4 presenter or other. It was a piece about that much decorated monkey wench, Dame Jane Goodall, warning us that “The sixth great extinction is happening.”

Will someone please tell her that most normal UK people over the mental age of two couldn’t give a monkey’s about the “sixth great extinction”, for two reasons:

The first is because the extinction of our own pensioners will occur long before any great global extinction, followed by the extinction of all working people (working – any economic activity other than sitting on your arse all day).  We will soon have no physical economic activity at all – we are heading for manufacturing-less manufacturing, fishless fishing and farmless farming under Comrade Starmer’s Brave New World, where you will have to rub two Boy Scouts together just to keep warm – all that’s left after destroying most of our viable sources of fuel in favour of fairy-dust, sold to us by the chauffeur driven net-zero eco-lemmings of Westminster.

Did you watch as 470 of the clowns flew home from COP29, adding more than 300 tons to our carbon footprint? 
 
The other reason is because, when it comes to Particulate Matter Concentration (the real nasty stuff in the air) the UK is 112th on IQ Air’s list, so Dame Monkey-nut and the Beeb have 111 rather more pressing fingers to wag before they get to us.

Ms Goodall explained all: “I’ve come here from Paris. And after here I go to Berlin, then Geneva. I’m on this tour talking about the danger to the environment and some of the remedies,” she informed Auntie, reportedly spending 300 days a year flying around the globe, telling people they shouldn’t fly, or fart or farm, or whatever is the climate sin du jour.

Goodall is “an advocate for protecting animals, spreading peace, and living in harmony with the environment” (National Geographic). If she wanted to start protecting animals, she could start by protecting colobus monkeys, duikers, nesting birds and forest hogs from her precious bloody marauding chimps looking for meat (chimps kill up to a third of Gombe’s colobus monkeys annually). That, I suggest, might actually spread a bit of peace and harmony. And talking of harmony with nature, she has probably forgotten that she kept her own son Grub in a steel cage to protect him from being killed by “her beloved chimpanzees” when in the bush.

Of course, lovable old prune Dame G is entitled to her opinion, and she is, of course, the world’s most famous monkey watcher, much feted and highly decorated because (after she reportedly avoided Professor Leaky’s other ideas of monkey business) she “discovered” that chimps are tool users, kill other animals and have social relationships. Then again, she “discovered” these things for us, but the locals in the Tanzanian jungle would have told her if she asked them because they live with chimps and no doubt already knew.

Nobody ever asks the locals.

And it’s not difficult to get excellent local help.  When I was trading and prospecting in southern Africa, I might drive into an old diamond mining area, looking for semi-precious stones. The place would be deserted and quiet – just hundreds of acres of alluvial pebbles and scrub. The first thing is to stand on top of the truck holding up a huge bag of sweets. In a few minutes, the truck will be surrounded by dozens of kids who have appeared from nowhere.  Then, you show them a rock – say a carnelian – and tell them you’ll be back in a week, paying 10p a Kg for them. A week later, when you drive through, there are dozens of them along the roadside, all with sacks full of carnelians to be weighed and paid for in cash – a ton of carnelians an hour. She should have asked the local bush kids about chimps – they know everything about the local wildlife, too.  

There was a time back in the early 1970’s when Dame G was married to Derek Bryceson, the boss of Tanzania’s National Parks. The couple co-wrote in Africana that banning poaching was “untenable” and suggested that communities should be allowed to sell some of their wildlife to hunters in order to give the animals real value plus an income and meat for the locals. How things change when the PETA bandwagon rolls into town and recruits. Today, Dame G is a PETA supporter and activist who thinks the idea that trophy hunting can help conservation is “rubbish”.  

Her take on the brouhaha about Cecil, the “world’s most famous lion”, who is famous only for being famous – in a Mongabay interview, Dame G found it “ethically disturbing” that Oxford University’s WildCRU (who collared the lion and were studying it)  “… didn’t make enough fuss when Cecil was killed” outside Hwange National Park “…but the group continued to sit on the fence and not to defend even their own lions being killed.”  That’s what happens when a monkey-watcher over-reaches her watching brief. Old Cecil wasn’t Oxford’s WildCRU’s “own lion” – they were actually collaring and studying the parks’ 500 lions in order to study what happened to them. Outside the fenceless park, lions are dangerous pests and are all killed.

She also told Mongabay, “First of all nobody’s ever proved that the money from trophy hunting actually does go back to conserve the species” then got her old knickers in a twist about an elderly black rhino shot in Namibia for $350,000. “And everyone said, well he doesn’t play any important role in the genetic survival of his species. He’s too old. But … rhinos have more of a complex social life than anybody ever thought. And they’ve been seen congregating – even black rhinos”. In reality, the hunt money went straight into Namibia’s Game Products Trust Fund, used solely for conservation, and as for its complex social life, the old rhino was a proper congregating rectal trauma. No longer very fertile, but strong and very cantankerous, he killed a number of rhinos, including cows and calves and other animals. He also prevented younger, more fertile bulls from accessing the cows. After he was shot and eaten, social life was much improved and the rhino birthrate went up dramatically.

“World-famous primatologist Jane Goodall has admitted to plagiarising several passages in her upcoming book, Seeds of Hope” (NPR) was the news ten years ago, delaying the publication for a year until the sources were acknowledged.  You have to admit – these finger-wagging “conservationists” are a right lot to lecture hunters and farmers about ethics.  

She was also criticised for using feeding stations to attract chimpanzees because it disrupted their natural feeding patterns and led to more aggression. She acknowledged that feeding increased aggression but said it didn’t change the nature of the conflict. She also said that feeding was necessary for her study to be effective. Her approach – associating closely with the animals she studied, naming them and even referring to them as “my friends”, was scoffed at by some scientists. “You don’t have a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a horse and not give them a name. It’s the same as when I studied squirrels in my garden as a little girl – they all had names.”  Ah, little girls and squirrels – hardly science, hardly ecology. 

But then, she originally went to Africa after reading about Tarzan of the Apes and Dr Doolittle. That just about sums up today’s eco-warriors and rural-haters in Parliament, too.

More criticism came in 1975, when Goodall took four students – including two Stanford undergrads and a Stanford Ph.D. candidate – to Tanzania to make field observations. Just over 30 miles from their field site, Laurent Kabila, a rebel leader actively working to overthrow the Tanzanian government, had established a heavily armed camp (Stanford Daily, 2008). The students were abducted, beaten and only released when their families coughed up a huge ransom.  

But you can’t keep a bunny-hugger down, folks – I leave you with her urgent message, “If we don’t get together and impose tough regulations on what people are able to do to the environment – if we don’t rapidly move away from fossil fuel, if we don’t put a stop to industrial farming, that’s destroying the environment and killing the soil, having a devastating effect on biodiversity – the future ultimately is doomed.”

Translation – “ Up yours, everyone. If the cold doesn’t get you, starvation will, but I and my chimpanzees will be comfy.”

What a coincidence – that’s Comrade Starmer’s message to the UK, too.

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John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor.