BY JOHN NASH
Sometimes, Dear Reader, amid the present dark and dismal forest of terrible weather, the daily struggle against the parasitic blobberati, the equally exasperating snivel service, Sir Keir Harmer and, of course, Mad Miliband’s blind dash back to the palaeolithic, it is sheer joy to be reminded of England when you suddenly come across a sheltered glade of genuinely delightful and wonderful, heartwarming, fully-flowering eccentrics, living well in complete ignorance of reality.
It was brought to my attention by three Oxford ethicists, who “expose the con in conservation” in their new book titled The Ethics of Predator Control – A Scottish Case Study. The book has a silly pop at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) for lethally managing pest species. Quelle horreur. In turn, it “defends an original report by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, titled Killing to Kill, written for members of the Scottish Parliament” and claims, gushingly, that “over 120 scholars worldwide have endorsed the original report”. Truly a bandwagon of magnificent proportions. The fact that it is an edifice of idiosyncratic nonsense, and about as relevant as an ejector seat on a helicopter, is quite beside the point.
That led me to the mentioned Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, founded in 2006 by the British theologian and ethicist Professor Andrew Linzey. It’s an independent academic centre (not formally part of the University of Oxford despite its Oxford spires intro video) dedicated to promoting ethical concern for animals through scholarship, teaching, publication, and public debate. Its goal is “to put animal ethics on the intellectual agenda across disciplines — philosophy, theology, law, science, and media — by attaching academic ethical “research” to real-world treatment of animals”. In other words, it is a parasite that lives by commenting on the management of animals by others, without actually managing any real ones itself. It’s another modern blob, staffed, no doubt, by sophisticated herds of lovely people with distinguished credentials in pointless academic blobbery.
Of course, these modern academic theologians mystify Countryfolk – after all, in living memory, theology meant the local vicar, who used to officiate at every hunt, to provide the Lord’s blessings upon man’s ancient enterprise as he still does, so cordially and comfortingly, every Sunday here on the hallowed pages of CSM. But modern academic theologians, like bookworms, once hidden in libraries, are now increasingly seen on the parapets of the church spire these days, hurling contempt, wokery and insults at rural peasantry below them.
To explain why, I must return to a familiar theme. Nature is not a green and pleasant place – it is a winner’s parade in a four billion-year war of evolution, a war without rules except that of survival. The Garden of Eden was not inhabited solely by vegetarians. Although the Good Lord provided green plants for food, He did not prohibit the eating of meat, and we now know that plants are generally the trophic level of just about every food chain – chains that include predators and carnivores a few rungs further up. Several religions get lost in this Lord’s Veggie assumption, including that of the Adventist Kellogg, who gave the world breakfast cereal to prevent us from the sins of eating meat and spanking monkeys, and it was a couple of Quakers who wrote that the animals in the Garden were like John Lennon and Yoko Ono; all peace, harmony and love. They influenced Singer, the father of the modern brain-fart called animal rights.
In reality, when we humans arrived in the Garden of Eden long ago, we had to compete or be eaten. It gave us, as Adam, a problem. To reproduce and nurture our kind, apart from getting a leg over, male Adam had to find a sheltered place for female Eve to continue our species. It’s a rotating evolutionary cycle that requires the male function, Adam, to go first, survive long enough and collect enough resources for the female function, Eve, to then use those resources to reproduce and send out the next generation to try again. It’s a cyclical process, represented by the Ouroboros, the now familiar serpent, with its tail in its mouth, the never-ending cycle that alternates and so enables us to live on as a species through the generations. In death, there is life.
Eve’s shelter was our human sanctuary – we left the dangerous male Garden and hopped into our female cave. Thanks to our growing human brain and its ability to store and share information (knowledge), back then, Eve’s cave grew into today’s notional human cave – human civilisation.
Unlike competitive nature (the male Garden of Eden outside), inside our cave had to have non-violent, cooperative female rules. Thanks to our growing ability to use and store knowledge, these instinctive rules grew into our modern, feminine, indoor ethics and morals. Ethics are our indoor human rules, and we judge against them to work out good from bad, kind from cruel, and so on. In that way, we, as Eve, “ate from the Tree of Knowledge” and became aware of indoor rules, judgments, and thus “sin”. But these are all human indoor things – they do not exist in nature. There was, and still is, no sin in the Garden of Eden.
That is why all the other animals are innocent. Outside of their instinctive dens and nests, they are uncivilised. Their world is governed by competition, appetite, hierarchy, and survival. They have no rules, no ethics, no morals, no judgments and therefore no sins, even though they still kill each other in vast numbers, often without reason, and often to the point of extinction. When ethicists mistake their animal innocence for benevolence, they make their first error.
There were no resources for Eve in our cave of civilisation, and poor old Adam still has to go out into the Garden to compete for the necessary resources that we, as Eve, need. It doesn’t matter whether they are living, sentient resources or not – he has to compete, win, take resources into ownership and bring them back for our cave. Without hunting, farming and today’s primary industries, there wouldn’t be any human cave of civilisation. We might have followed the dinosaurs into extinction. We have survived because we have been predatory humans (Adam) for as long as we have been civilised humans (Eve). God no doubt knows this – He designed the system after all – and it’s a pity that some of His earthly academics, more concerned with the health and safety aspects of angels dancing about on the slippery, unfenced heads of a pin than with the messy realities of evolution, have apparently ignored it.
When ethicists try to apply our nurturing indoor rules of civilisation to our necessary outdoor competitive behaviour, they make a second and profound categorical error, bless them – the Garden of Eden works by outdoor evolutionary competition, not by indoor human altruism.
So, why do they do it?
Well, there is another glaring reality. Modern animal rights (for that is what we are really talking about) is a mental disease of high consumption, well-fed Western democracies. Animal rights are not found among hunter-gatherers (who live with and revere real wild animals) or in starving refugee camps because animal rights are a luxury of the well-fed who no longer hunt for a living and instead anthropomorphise wildlife. In reality, there are no animal rights in nature. None. Life in nature is “red in tooth and claw” and “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Sudden, painful death is perfectly normal in nature, where animals are entirely adapted to it – unlike academics, who would be more than a tad surprised if a lion leapt out from behind the artisanal cheese counter at Waitrose. When dealing with nature rather than simply looking at it, humans sometimes have to become predators, too.
Which brings us back to this abstract book that attacks the GWCT instead of minding its own business. It is the usual anti-hunting, vegetarian trope that is all too familiar to working Countryfolk…in this example, that the killing of predators on moors in Scotland “serves the purpose of supporting the grouse-shooting industry rather than conservation.” It goes on to state that “the appeal to conservation is little more than a cover to continue the GWCT’s ‘management’ practices”, and more often fulfils the “primary objective of game managers (larger shooting bags) but less often the objective of conservation managers.” Thus, they conclude that “any appeal to conservation is, by the industry’s own admission, simply a cover to support the grouse-shooting industry”.
Well, doodle me gently, Sherlock – the grouse shooting industry supports the grouse shooting industry. Amazing. I’ll make a note of that.
Of course it does, you sanctimonious half-wits.
That’s its damn job.
But if you can put aside your angel-counting for a moment and take off those rose-tinted glasses of piety, here’s another revelation for you. The management of a grouse-friendly environment requires the encouragement of all those things that make grouse very happy little birdies. It requires the management of the number of predators that kill grouse and the encouragement of all those things that nurture them. It’s basically what all good farmers or parents do, but this time farming the environment rather than destroying all the plants and animals simply to grow performative quinoa and pulses for myopic human bookworms.
It might be a difficult reach for people who don’t know the difference between a grouse and a greenfly, but there is a huge conservation dividend to this kind of land management – it produces the kind of actual environment that is supportive of all ground-nesting birds and, in turn, for everything that they live on, too. All the way down to healthy soil biota. In a way, it is the greenest, most regenerative form of regenerative farming one could imagine.
And it is management – balance, active, sometimes difficult, like keeping a marble in the middle of a plate. It takes long hours in all weathers to maintain the whole environment. It exchanges large numbers of common predators for a large number of much rarer creatures, one species of which, grouse, happens to produce the income necessary to pay for the management of the whole damn thing. It manages the numbers, not destroys them. If any predator is rare and precious, for example, it is not managed, but allowed to exist because, being rare, it does little damage. But you can’t do it sitting on your arse in a library in Oxford. There are no stipends for grouse moor owners, managers or gamekeepers, no bottomless money-wells of crafty NGO’s diverting the donations of gullible urban animal-lovers to support research bias and the indulgence of well-fed moral pontiffs.
And Countryfolk know this well, know that many academics are guilty of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, in which they cherry-pick a few charismatic animals out of the many and apply only evidence of the most robust management techniques, unfamiliar to urban civilians, then gather them into a net of emotional outrage, bearing a fictitious ethical label taken from the library indoors.
As mere eccentrics, academics like these are a welcome addition to freedom of speech, especially if one needs assistance in sleeping or a way to stay out of the local Jobcentre.
They, in turn, and much less welcome, enable the true parasites, the NGOs that rely on academics’ lucubrations to support and dress eco-larceny with acceptable authenticity, yet they, too, keep a lot of unemployable people safe from starvation, all the time demonstrating that high-consumption Western human civilisation can support a carbuncle of even the least helpful, vampiric residents inside our cave.
But the joke stops when their eccentric ruminations escape academia and find their way into laws that directly interfere with and affect rural people who have a real job to do in the real world. At this point, kindly and eccentric ethicists turn good laws rotten, and at that moment, the parasitic NGO carbuncle becomes a cancer on rural society and proper conservation.
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.