Wild Goat Rut

Wild Goats Rutting - Isle of Mull, UK

I’ve just returned from the Isle of Mull, where I spent most of my time tracking a herd of wild goats across various different types of landscapes within their habitat.  Over the course of a few weeks, I was privileged to witness a whole variety of behaviour, including a birth, attempts at mating and (as pictured) a rut, as well as numerous types of social bonding and other herd behaviour.  It’s fascinating to watch a group of animals over such a period as this, and witness their social hierarchy in action, as it is established, challenged, and redefined.  Even as part of an established herd who spend most of their time grazing together, life in the wild is my no means straightforward.  This becomes particularly evident in their rutting, where these shy, easy-going mammals demonstrate an enormous level of strength, power and determination – and as an observer, I was very happy not to be caught in the middle of it all!

On the day I took this, I had been sheltering in a rocky spot by the shore, hoping to catch up with a local otter (whose picture I posted in the previous blog), when my attention was drawn to the sound of clashing horns, about 200 yards behind me.  A sub-group of six goats were standing on a grassy mound just above the coast line.  The rutting goats stand opposite each other before one rears up on its hind legs before using the momentum of its fall back to earth to drive its weight head-first into the other.  It’s an immensely powerful move, and as both sets of horns meet with great force, it’s possible to see the shock waves ripple back through the loose woolly coats of each animal, from their heads down towards their back ends. The sheer force is eye-watering, and I found it difficult not to wince a little each time they ram into each other with such force.

In spite of the power and ferocity of the rut, there were many aspects of this behaviour that seemed surprisingly civilised.  The goats had chosen a site for their rut within a rectangle marked by the ruins of an old crofters’ building.  This appeared to be established as their ‘ring’.  As soon as one of the rutting goats stepped outside of this boundary, the clash was over temporarily, and both parties took a few moments to collect themselves before coming together again.  As they battled it out further, the others goats in the group stood around watching, with one particularly dominant bystander looking almost like the umpire of a boxing match, standing close with his eyes fixed on the action, even breaking the goats up when they became too entangled.  In between bouts, the goats go through a complex ritual of communication through licks, sniffs, and scraping at the floor with their hooves, a conversation in gesture which appeared to clarify the outcome of the previous rut, as well as offering them a moment of respite.

Assuming a position close by from which I could observe them (which was not difficult, since the goats themselves were so absorbed in the rut that they hardly paid any attention to me), I rested my camera on a rock.  After taking and reviewing a few pictures, I was initially disappointed that they didn’t convey the sheer power of the battle between the goats – instead the images appeared rather static.  Instead, I started using a slower shutter speed (1/15 sec) to ensure that more of the movement of the tussle was shown in the resulting images.  Using such a slow shutter speed means having to throw away a lot of pictures in which the action appears as nothing other than a blur of wool and horns.  But by moving the camera as precisely as possible with the movements of the goats, it was possible to get one or two shots in which some of the features were suitably sharp.  These pictures demonstrate the turmoil of an individual caught up in this whirl-wind of behaviour, which is just what I wanted, and this shot was my favourite of the whole bunch.  

An unexpected otter

European Otter with a crab - Isle of Mull.

Photographing wildlife can involve a great deal of planning and patience, although on other occasions you can be grabbed suddenly by the unexpected.  When I photographed this otter on coast of Mull, it was a chance encounter that I wasn’t expecting, but one that will stay with me for years.

I’ve photographed otters many times before on Mull’s coast, but never on this particular stretch of coast, where the rocky shore is almost constantly beaten with waves that can reach heights of 12-15 foot on a fairly regular basis.  But, I’m in the middle of nowhere: I’ve hiked a good way over hills and grasslands to get here and the nearest road is around 5 miles away, so I’m virtually guaranteed not to be disturbed. 

So here’s how it happened.  I’m standing right on the water’s edge, photographing some of the smaller waves coming to shore,  when I hear a peculiar grunting noise in the water – I’ve never heard this sound before – a repeated, short, sharp ‘nguh, nguh, nguh, nguh’.  I look up and right in front of me, no more than 12 feet away, a dog otter is in the shallow water, with a crab in its mouth, trying to come ashore – and he’s glaring at me, angry!  It’s rare that otters will approach humans, particular in places like this where they are unaccustomed to seeing us around.  What surprises me most is that this otter has not only come so close, but is actively drawing my attention towards himself to show my his fury that I’ve invaded his territory.

Immediate I hit the deck, and throw myself to the rocky floor, water swishing around me.  I don’t care much about getting wet, but I do care about disturbing a wild animal that is in its home territory here.  Perhaps if I lie still, he might think I’ve gone, and come ashore to eat his meal.  In truth, however, I’m far too close to the shoreline to avoid being seen – the otter’s eyesight might not have great definition, but he will know every rock of this shoreline piece by piece, and can recognise easily when something is out of place. 

The otter swims away and I sit tight, allowing the rhythm of the shoreline return to normal before I get up and move on.  The light is fading, the sun is about to set (although on a cloudy day like today, sunset is more a theoretical event of the clock than anything else), and I have a long walk ahead of me to get back home.  The opportunity to photograph the otter has gone.  Or has it?

I climb back up to a peak in the rocks, a place that affords me a view of a good stretch of shoreline, and see the otter fishing again in another area around the bay.  I have to be careful: if I’m going to make an advance, I need to be absolutely certain I’m not going to disturb him for a second time.  This means keeping my distance, finding a good position where I’m well hidden, and sticking to it.  Slowly and painfully, I work my way between the rocks, high up on the land, moving only when the otter is underwater, until I finally reach a position high up from which I can look down upon the rock where the otter is repeatedly coming to shore.  I’m behind a wall of rocks with a small gap in them – if I stay here, I’m as certain as I can be that I won’t be seen.  And so once again the otter comes to shore, with a crab, and I start photographing.  He flips the top off the crab onto the rock in front of him where it lies in the picture, just about to be swept away by the incoming wave, and tucks into the fresh, succulent meat of the crab.  By now the light is very dim, and I’m forced to use slow shutter speeds which blur the water – I’m just hoping there may be the odd moment in the otter’s feeding frenzy where I can catch some sharpness in his eye that is needed for the picture to work.

The otter continues fishing, coming back to the same rock several times with crabs aplenty, one after another, before moving on. 

Once again, I stay in place for a good fifteen minutes afterwards, waiting to make sure he’s gone and that I’m not going to disturb him by getting up now and moving.  It’s dark now, and time to begin the long walk back across the grasslands, which I’m able to navigate through by following the wild goat tracks.  This, coupled with a love of the land, which I know very well, makes certain that I can find my way from sea level up to a local trig point, and back to the house, all in the pitch black without using my torch, map, compass, satnav, or any other modern gadgets. 

With over 20 kilos of equipment on my back, it’s a gruelling walk.  But navigating through this wild and remote area in the dark, unaided by technology, makes me feel closely in touch with nature, which can be full of such unexpected pleasures. 

Time for a rebrand!

It’s been a good long while since I posted on this blog – in the meantime, I’ve been doing some thinking and asking myself all sorts of questions about my images and their meanings.  Questions about the subjects I write about and want to share here.

And so the rebranding: Human Nature.  It’s nature, but...as we know it – or, as how we as humans think of it.

I’ve been fascinated for a long time with the role of animals and natural images in the human imagination and mythology, and that is where my photography begins.

 

In ancient, mythological stories, as well as in the images depicted in paintings from prehistoric times to great masters of the second millenium, animals often take on a magical, supernatural appearance, and it’s this magic and super-nature that interests me.  Not because I believe in the magical or the supernatural, I don’t; instead, it seems clear to me that people in ancient times must have had a sense of deep connection with nature to the point where real-life encounters with animals, plants, woodlands, etc, led to the experience of some magic moments that triggered their imagination, generating magical stories and associations.  Perhaps it’s a moment of where the light reflects in a certain way, or a mysterious encounter in the dark. 

Wild Goat, Isle of Mull

It’s this kind of magical encounter with real-life nature which triggers such stories of magic that I want to seek out for myself and depict in my photos.   All my photos show real-life encounters with nature.  I shoot and process my photos digitally, but I don’t construct images after the event or carry out techniques of digital manipulation.  I’m concerned with finding the natural facts behind the myths, since the facts often reveal that nature in its purest form can be experienced as fantastically and emotionally as in any myth or story of magic.

What is this emotion, this instinct for a connection with nature? It’s an instinct that every child has, but it isn’t childish.  A primeval instinct that we undoubtedly share in some was with our ancestors tens of thousands of years ago, but it isn’t primitive in the crudest sense of the word.  It's nature as we have come to experience it internally.

So, for now, let’s call it ‘human nature’.

A week of books from 2012 - Day #4

Day four of my seven favourite nature-related books of 2012.  If you've missed the first three, you can catch up with them here (day 1; day 2; day 3). Each book is presented alongside a 'perfect partner', so please scroll right down the page to read both.

And since you'll be thinking about Christmas presents, don't forget that you can order a copy of my colourful British Wildlife calendar here.

As before - direct links are given to online bookstores, but please don't forget to support your local, independent bookshop - they need you this Christmas!

Day 4 - Book of the Day

As You Like It (Norton Critical Editions)

William Shakespeare (edited by Leah S. Marcus)

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

Available from Amazon and Waterstones 

Are you completely mad?! (Probably). Shakespeare?!? (Please, call me Kris). I thought you said all these books were published in 2012!  And you said they were all nature related!

...I did. Let me explain:

While Shakespeare’s play may be a classic of 17^th century drama, this Norton edition is new as of 2012.  I’m a big fan of Norton books, which reproduce not only a classic literary text with a wealth of interesting annotations, but also provide an additional anthology of literature, historical and modern to set a context for the main work, all in one volume. 

And I’ve spent much of this year with my nose in this book.  Shakespeare’s play is a classic of Pastoral literature (although the debate still rages as to whether he was composing true pastoral, or merely parodying the style as anti-pastoral), asking many questions about the interaction between man and the natural world; is life in a civilised society in the city (or in the court) really an improvement over the simple life lived foraging in the woods; does man have the right to leave the city and trespass upon the home of wild animals, killing them for food? Do animals have consciousness that makes them prone to suffering in a way we humans might understand.  Shakespeare balances the dialogues so skilfully that the play provides a debating ground for the characters (and audience) without ever settling the debates one way or the other.  Meanwhile, this book also presents a great many additional articles and chapters  for the modern reader to consider on the subject of man’s relationship with nature.

Alongside the play, the editor has reproduced a wide range of historical and modern articles which set the context for the debate and show its continuation into the modern age.  Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde, on which Shakespeare based his play, is printed here and can be read alongside the play, but there is much else to deepen the readers involvement in the debates.  Among the highlights for me are George Gascoygne’s poem of 1611, ‘The Woeful Words of the Hart to the Hunter’, a four-page anthropomorphic plea (in the words of a deer) which appeals to the hunter for understanding of the pain and suffering of hunted beasts and Montaigne’s classic text on the place of humans in relation to animals (‘When I am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I have in gaming with her’). More modern extracts include those by Keith Thomas on ‘Boundaries between Animal and Human’ (taken from his great book Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800, a brilliant book worth a read in full), and Gabriel Egan’s essay ‘Food and Biological nature in As You Like It’, from Green Shakespeare: from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism.  There are plenty more.

For those readers interested in the historical considerations of man’s place in nature, his relationship with animals, and the nature (and unnaturalness) of civilisation, this is an enlightening anthology that will have pride of place on the shelf to be brought down for many readings.

Perfect Partner

Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings (Norton Critical Editions)

Henry David Thoreau (edited by William Rossi)

Published by W. W. Norton and Company, 2008

Available from Amazon and Waterstones

Those wanting to get their fill of Shakespeare this Christmas won’t be surprised to learn that I considered making Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale the (somewhat predictable) partner of As You Like It.  Nevertheless, Norton has not yet published an ‘anthologised’ edition of the play (although the Arden Shakespeare edition does contain useful discussions of ‘Pastorals’ and ‘Nature and Art’ within the lengthy introduction which I recommend for general interest).

Nevertheless, the chosen partner today is Norton’s edition of Henry David Thoreau’s classic Walden, an account of the author’s experiment over the course of three years to live a life in an area of Massachusetts woodland in the 1840s.  Alongside Thoreau’s great rumination on the burdens of 19^th civilised life, this volume also contains his personal journal from the Walden years, as well as many other great texts, including ‘Walking’, ‘Wild Apples’, and ‘Civil Disobedience’.

At almost 700 pages, this is quite a sizable volume for discovering Thoreau for the first time, and much as I love it, I still seek refuge in my well-thumbed Oxford edition of Walden (no extras here, except for the editor's introduction and some very good endnotes), a much more portable volume for general reading and travelling with (my copy also happens to contain several years’ worth of my own loving annotations and underlinings which make it irreplaceable, and of the several copies I own, is still the first edition I turn to for Walden itself).

A week of books from 2012 - Day #3

So, the blog continues - my favourite seven nature books of 2012 reviewed over the first seven days of December.  If you've missed the first two, you can catch up with them here (day 1; day 2).  Each book is presented alongside a 'perfect partner', so please scroll right down the page to read both.

 

If you're looking for a Christmas present, these would be ideal, but please don't forget that you can order a copy of my British Wildlife calendar here. 

 

Right, no more plugs, I promise.

 

As before - direct links are given to online bookstores, but please don't forget to support your local, independent bookshop - they need you this Christmas!

 



Day 3 - Book of the Day

Waterfall: Nature and Culture
Brian J. Hudson
Published by Reaktion Books, 2012

Available from Amazon and Waterstones

Earlier this year, I made the bold move of getting down on one knee (yes, folks, I did it properly – no messing about) and asking the love of my life to marry me.  What’s more, I chose a waterfall as a suitable place to pop the question.  Had I read Brian J. Hudson’s book in advance of making this move, I might have thought my choice of location was a little contrived—it turns out that waterfalls are one of the most popular places for such declarations of love—but I hadn’t, so I didn’t, and so I did it – if you get my drift (there was a joke that surfaced, pardon the pun, soon after that I had threatened to push her in if she’d said no – I hadn’t made any such threat, but thankfully it didn’t come to that anyway).  The place was Lodore Falls in England’s stunning Lake District, a waterfall much loved and written about by Lakeland poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, both of whom make appearances in Hudson’s book.

Waterfalls carry a great number of associations; not least are they an essential part of the cycle of life on earth, but they are memorable, beautiful, awe-inspiring, dangerous, places that lovers are drawn to, as well as being places that are often chosen by people wishing to ‘make their quietus’.  In short, waterfalls are the stuff of life, both in practical and in emotional terms.

In this book (which is one of Daniel Allen’s Earth Series) Brian J. Hudson, takes on the challenge to provide some sort of chapter-by-chapter narrative that incorporates each of these aspects, discussing waterfalls as geological formations, places of allure, sources of inspiration for artists and writers, models for landscape gardeners, sources of power generation and destinations for tourism.  A final chapter discusses the future of threatened waterfalls today and the future facing them.
It is a noble task to take on, and Hudson acknowledges early on that as a geographer, the book as taken him into areas outside his specialism, but such a caveat proves to be unnecessary.  Each of the chapters is dominated by a great deal of research, woven together by a narrative of clear (and deep) understanding, with a keen interest in all aspects of the study in each area.  Not only is there a wide range of impressive research within the text, but the book is lovingly illustrated throughout with at least one picture, often more, on every opening of the book with few exceptions.  These include not only photographs of waterfalls from around the world, but also historic paintings, classic film stills, engravings and Chinese ink drawings.  This really is a feast of waterfalls for the eyes as well as the mind.

I came to this book with a particular interest in waterfalls as a source of artistic inspiration, not only due to my activities in nature photography, but also in teaching cultural histories to undergraduate students over the last ten years or so, discussing Goethe’s representation of water and waterfalls, and depictions of nature in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  I was interested to read Goethe’s depiction of the waterfall in the second act of Faust wound so deftly into a discussion of European creative minds.  In expressing the waterfall’s ‘mirrored hues’ in which ‘we have our life and being’, Goethe was not alone in likening the flow of water to a man’s life (elsewhere, he once wrote that ‘The soul of man is like water’).  Many writers in the age of Romanticism would personify waterfalls in a similar vain.  John Ruskin features heavily within the discussion here, with a bold characterisation of the waterfall, as painted by Turner, as a living being:

‘Where water takes its first leap from the top,. it is cool, and collected...but it is when it finds that it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go than it thought, that is character comes out: it is then that it begins to write, and twist, and sweep out, zone after zone, in wilder stretching as it falls...’

Within the first half of the book, we hear from key figures in this discussion of landscape; Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, as well as Wordsworth and Turner.  Hudson has many interesting comments to make on bringing this material, not least in the observation that, whilst Milton was writing Paradise Lost, the paradise of his mind was a flat, smooth landscape in which mountains were seen as nature’s deformities.  In the age of Romanticism, the new views of Arcadia and Elysium so often expressed by poets begin to romanticise the mountainous landscape in which waterfalls are abundant, and so the emotions begin to surge forward alongside the waters themself. 

It wasn’t just these figures in the arts who felt this emotional allure around waterfalls, however.  In chapter 3, Hudson quotes Charles Darwin’s account of a childhood holiday in Wales, ‘I remember...a waterfall with a degree of pleasure, which must be connected with the pleasure from scenery, though not directly recognised as such.’  The account is certainly more sober than Goethe and Ruskin, and we’re unlikely to aspect anything else from the great naturalist, but the unfathomable, sublime allure is still clearly evident.  It is a sense of allure that is discussed by Hudson not only with reference to the representational qualities of waterfalls, but also their appeal to all the human senses (of course, you don’t just see and hear a waterfall, but smell and taste it as the spray rises).
Whilst Hudson’s book makes reference to a huge array of waterfalls all over the world, there is a useful bias for the British reader to great waterfalls in Britain.  I read the book whilst on the Isle of Mull, and took time out to visit the great Eas Fors on the Western coast of the island which is both pictured and discussed in the book.  There are many other falls familiar to me discussed too, not only Lodore falls, but Kinder Downfall in the Peak District, but the book also whetted my appetite for visiting a great number of other waterfalls round Britain that are pictured and described so vividly.  Readers elsewhere should not find this slight bias problematic, since the theme of the book is certainly to account for the ideas surrounding waterfalls internationally in all cultures through time.

More scientifically-oriented chapters provide brief overviews of the various formations of waterfalls, in addition to the great array of wildlife that can be found around them.  In addition to species such as the dipper, a bird that is favourite of photographers at waterfall sites in Britain, an intriguing example Hudson gives is the Australian waterfall frog.  This little fella is specially adapted to withstand the torrent without being dislodged, and is able to use hide behind the flow of water if disturbed.

It’s impossible in this short review for me to acknowledge all aspects of this wide-ranging book.  Nevertheless, the most impressive fact remains that Hudson has successfully woven the great variety of information together, often cross-referencing points to provide a book which is not simply a progression of various chapters, but a continuous narrative that deepens the readers’ understanding of waterfalls.  The broad scope of this study also lends great appeal to the Earth Series in general, which will grow to feature similar titles on a whole range of features of our natural landscape – it’s a series well worth looking out for.

 Perfect Partner

Selected Writings
John Ruskin (edited with an introduction and notes by Dinah Birch)
Published by Oxford University Press, 2004.

 

Available from Amazon and Waterstones

Brian J. Hudson’s book above covered so many areas of thought connected with the natural world that I went back and forth between various choices for a perfect partner.  The closest also ran was William Gilpin’s classic Observations on the River Wye of 1770, a central text for the study of the Picturesque depiction of nature which became so popular within the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, and to which Hudson devotes a chapter in his Waterfall book.  This is available in a very slight paper back, like a bookish-person’s stocking filler.  Nevertheless, Dinah Birch’s selection of John Ruskin’s writings for Oxford World’s Classics has won over by the narrowest margin.  As referred to in my review, Ruskin is another figure who features significantly in Hudson’s book, and this book contains many of the most important texts for the reader to get a good grasp on Ruskin’s ideas on art and nature, among other subjects.  It contains the three small essays from the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) on water, space and sky as well as his essays ‘Of the Turnerian Picturesque’ and of Turnerian Topography’ from volume 4 of the same work (1856).  Further selections included here are his lecture ‘Sesame and Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’ (1865), ‘Prosperina: The Flower’ (1875) and his first lecture from ‘The storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884).   And for nature enthusiasts, central to the book is Ruskin’s celebrated essay ‘Of the Pathetic Fallacy’, in which he challenges the general received notion that objects of nature hold within them emotional significances that may be read by humans (‘we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question,—namely, the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us.’).  This is an interesting area to debate, since not even Ruskin is infallible to the fallacy, as can be noted in the quotation in the review of Hudson’s book above. 

This is a selection which offers a superb introduction to the writings of Ruskin on art, architecture and nature, and will also serve as a good general reference for anyone with an interest in the area of 19^th century interpretations of nature.

A week of books from 2012 - Day #2

Every day during the first week of December, I’m reviewing one of my favourite seven nature books published in 2012. Each book will be presented alongside a ‘perfect partner’, a book that might appeal in case you have a nature-loving friend who’s eager for two books in their stocking this Christmas. The books are reviewed in no particular order (although I am saving my overall favourite right till the end too, just to keep you guessing). The books draw together a wide selection of subjects including zoology, geography, mythology, poetry, history, art, philosophy, storytelling and drama (something for everyone, I hope), each with a strong nature theme.

Please use the comments box to say what you’ve been reading this year, and what books you might recommend on the subjects of wildlife, nature, or plants and animals in general. Or if you’ve got any comments on my selections, join in that debate too! 

Direct links are given to online bookstores, but please don't forget to support your local, independent bookshop - they need you this Christmas!
For yesterday's review, click here.

Day 2 - Book of the day:

Why Animals Matter: Animal consciousness, animal welfare, and human well-being.
Marian Stamp Dawkins
Published by Oxford University Press, 2012.

Available from Amazon and Waterstones.

This is a short book with a big punch.  Upon noticing a book entitled Why Animal Matter, you might be forgiven for thinking that Marian Stamp Dawkins is preaching to the converted (would you read this book if you didn’t think animals and animal welfare are important?), but this is a real polemic that seeks to challenge the way in which many people think about animals, and challenge their reasons for thinking of the importance of animals.

In general, Dawkins challenges most people’s anthropomorphic view of animals – that is, the view that animals’ thoughts and feeling are in some way comparable to human thoughts and feelings, a view which might cause us to argue for high standards of animal treatment based purely on our emotional response. The trouble is, we have no evidence that animals feel anything.  We have no evidence that any animals have conscious experience, and while many appear to us as conscious beings, this may in fact be due to us thrusting our experience onto them as a result of their behaviour.

Now, before you get annoyed and throw the computer out of the window and insist that ‘of course they are conscious – it’s obvious’, these ideas and their benefits to animal welfare need some clarification.  Firstly, the author gives hints throughout the book that she is not a cold-hearted, hard-nosed scientist with no compassion or feeling for animals – she tells us, for example that she is a dog-lover (and has a good deal to say about the welfare of dogs in the later stages of the book).  Most importantly, she argues in general that protecting the animal for the sake of its conscious experience is ‘soft’ welfare – not least because it will only appeal to those who care for the conscious experience of animals, and not for those who don’t.  What we need instead is a set of arguments for animal welfare that are scientifically rigorous, and therefore irrefutable.  Scientists who refuse to acknowledge the possibility that animals are conscious are not ‘killjoys’ as they are often termed: some animals, maybe even all animals, might well have some conscious experience, but that isn’t the point.  For all that anthropomorphism may improve people’s compassion for animals, it can only impair scientific method.  More important arguments can be made for their welfare that take into account the practical implications of mistreating animals:

If you are human, there is no escape from animal welfare. Almost all the goals that the human species is now setting itself—feeding a rising human population, reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, conserving habitats—depend either directly or indirectly on other species and their health. To believe that any of these goals could be achieved without taking into account the well-being of animals is to misunderstand our dependence on them. Their health affects our own health, our food, the medicines we have, and the ones we need, as well as making the earth a good place to live...But if, as seems likely, animal welfare turns out to be one of the best defences we have against diseases that affect humans, its whole status will have to change. Animal welfare will no longer be the poor relation, begging to be noticed. It will be there, centre stage, in discussions on the future of human food production and disasters caused by a blinkered pursuit of efficiency at all costs. [page 124]

If this sounds like a selfish, human-centred attitude towards animals, it is not; in the book’s final pages, for example, Dawkins lists the challenges that we face in campaigning for animal welfare as including ‘culture, religion, and a widespread and deep-seated conviction among people that humans are much more important than any animal’ (my italics).  For those scientists who remain ambivalent to the question of animal consciousness are in no way taking away from the values of those who fight for animal welfare on the grounds of animal consciousness.  Quite the reverse:

It’s important to emphasize...[that] by linking animal health to human health and human well-being, animal welfare is given a powerful, new set of arguments for why it is important. Nothing has been taken away. Those who believe that animals are conscious and should be treated ethically for that reason are still able to go on supporting animal welfare for that reason. It’s just that some new recruits have joined the ranks. Those new recruits—the consciousness-free brigade—are bomb-proof in the face of attack by the killjoys. [page 121]

Arguing for the human benefits of animal welfare is simply a means of arguing that the natural balance of healthy life, all lives, needs not be disturbed, and that an imbalance created in one place through mistreatment of animals can ricochet right through the order of life on earth. 

The final message of the book is that good animal welfare relies on satisfying an animal’s ‘wants’ as well as its ‘needs’.  This is not to say that animals need to be mollycoddled to have all their needs met all the time.  Looking to healthy animals in the natural world reminds us that most are ‘a bit hungry, a bit thirsty, a bit fearful, a bit too hot or a bit too cold for most of the time’, but are able to keep a healthy compromise between each of these wants and needs within their environment.  Nevertheless, this provides a strong argument against the rather narrow idea (all too present much of modern farming) that in order for an animal’s needs to be met, it must simply be provided with the food it needs.  Both wants and needs should be considered together in order for animals to be healthy; simply considering one or the other cannot result in good welfare. 

It’s a strong argument, and one which ends up incorporating a consideration for all aspects of an animal’s existence and welfare, rather than simply following the anthropomorphic stance of an animal looking and behaving in a manner which a human would recognise as constituting happiness.  It’s a book which is intended to provide a challenge to your current thinking without providing a difficult read.  And if you are principally interested in welfare due to your own feelings for animals and nature, this is a book which can only sharpen your mind and deepen your understanding in perhaps the most important areas of the debate for good animal welfare.

Perfect Partner

Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism
Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman
Published by Columbia University Press, 2005

Available from Amazon and Waterstones.

The arguments of Marian Stamp Dawkins against attitudes of anthropomorphism are strong indeed, and very convincing, but all arguments should be viewed from both sides.  Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism speaks from the other side, although I don’t imagine that this is not a side of the argument that Dawkins would necessarily take a strong stance against.  Whilst anthropomorphism might well have limitations when arguing for animal welfare, it certainly finds many uses in modern life (as it has throughout history) and this book explores those uses in a series of chapters, written by a wide range of authors.  As the editors put it:

This is a book about the fact, not the value of anthropomorphism. From a variety of viewpoints—philosophical, historical, cross-cultural, political, economic, scientific, medical, and artistic, the authors explore what might be called the practice of anthropomorphism.

These different aspects are approached under four different headings  - Thinking with animals in:

 1) Other times and places (including ancient India and Victorian Britain);

2) Evolutionary Biology;

3) Daily life (including the human-pet relationship and the advertisement industry); and

4) Film (including the media of science, politics and conservation).

All in all this book makes for very interesting and varied reading, and offers the other side of the argument to Dawkins’ Why Animal Matter, without one book necessarily disputing the central argument of the other.

A week of books from 2012 - Day #1

Every day during the first week of December, I’m reviewing one of my favourite seven nature books published in 2012.  Each book will be presented alongside a ‘perfect partner’, a book that might appeal in case you have a nature-loving friend who’s eager for two books in their stocking this Christmas.  The books are reviewed in no particular order (I’m starting with one of my top choices, although I am saving my overall favourite right till the end too, just to keep you guessing).

The books draw together a wide selection of subjects including zoology, geography, mythology, poetry, history, art, philosophy, storytelling and drama (something for everyone, I hope), each with a strong nature theme.

Please use the comments box to say what you’ve been reading this year, and what books you might recommend on the subjects of wildlife, nature, or plants and animals in general.  Or if you’ve got any comments on my selections, join in that debate too! 

Direct links are given to online bookstores, but please don't forget to support your local, independent bookshop - they need you this Christmas!

Day 1 - book of the day:

Tim Birkhead
Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird

Published by: Bloomsbury, 2012

Available from Amazon and Waterstones.

How would it feel to be a bird? Never mind just feeling, what would the world look like? How would it smell? How would it sound and taste? If you wanted to navigate your way around the world as part of a mass migration, how would you go about it? What would be your impulse?

These are all difficult questions to answer and ask us consider the classic problems such as whether or not birds have consciousness and whether they experience true emotions.  In the hands Tim Birkhead (author of the brilliant and hugely successful The Wisdom of Birds, a tough act to follow!), whose career as a Professor of Zoology at the University of Sheffield has been spent being engrossed in researching such matters, these questions unravel in a book of strong, authoritative but clear sense (and Birkhead reminds us that there are many questions which remain unanswered in these difficult areas). 

The book is divided into seven chapters, corresponding to the seven senses that are up for discussion.  The first five senses are those we humans recognise as our own: 1) Seeing; 2) Hearing; 3) Touch; 4) Taste; and 5) Smell.  In addition to this, there is a chapter on magnetic sense, and another on emotions.

There are lots of surprising and fascinating things I learned from this. He tells us that nightingales in the noisy, urban environment of Berlin sing 14dB louder than their rural counterparts, and sing more loudly on weekday mornings during the rush-hour.  By contrast, Great tits do not adjust the volume of their song, but change the frequency and pitch of their song to ensure that they are heard in an urban setting.  Singing is of course a bird’s way of claiming its territory for the breeding season, and its silence at other times of year isn’t just behavioural but biological.  For male birds, the part of their brain responsible for singing shrinks at the end of the breeding season, growing again in time for spring (incidentally, the same is true of their gonads). Migrating birds that rely on the earth’s magnetic field as their GPS will completely lose their sense of magnetic direction if fitted with an eye patch over their right eye, but remain unaffected if the patch is placed over their left eye.

Not only is it a fascinating read, but it’s also very amusing.  Along the way, we not only learn about the extraordinary capabilities of many birds, but were introduced to a large number of human characters: mad scientists and amateur mavericks who have carried out all manner of crazy experiments on birds over the centuries in an attempt to untangle the unfathomable wonders of various species.

There is great humour and clarity throughout, all performed without irreverence for the subject and him without patronising the reader.  Birkhead has a great affection for his subject which never descends into revere, but remains firmly in the realm of the fascinated scientist who has lost none of his curiosity from years of research, and who’s able to communicate his infectious fascination in this highly readable book.

Perfect Partner

Karen Shanor and Jagmeet Kanwal
Bats Sing, Mice Giggle: the Surprising Science of Animals’ Inner Lives

Published by:Icon Books, 2009

Available from Amazon and Waterstones

Unlike Bird Sense, this book provides gems of insight to many species of animal which are cherry-picked for interest from across the world.  Despite this general appeal, both authors write with great experience as academics in their field; Shanor is neuroscientist having worked at Nasa’s Life Sciences department, including many other positions; Kanwal is professor a Physiology and Biophysics.  The book is in three parts: Sensing, Surviving and Socialising, with an Epilogue on ‘Human Nature’ Reconsidered.  The authors do seem very keen to make this an ‘easy read’, and so the tone of the book is rather on the simplistic side, although the great array of facts put forward will certainly be of interest to most general readers.

In the course of the chapters, we encounter accounts of coyotes with regional accents (including those in the mountains which, having learnt by ear, incorporate the mountainous echo into the calls), polar bears who can smell a meal up to 20 miles away, and charming stories such as the rooster that learnt to deceive by pecking at bare ground in order to find himself surrounded by large numbers of hens (they’d previously ignored his mating call, poor boy).  Even when the writing is at its most lightweight, there are some fascinating facts that will make your eyes water.  Cockroaches, we are told, can have up to two million ‘babies’ a year (I’m not sure what a young cockroach is called either, but I can’t help thinking they’re rather too small to have babies); they can live for up to two weeks after being decapitated (the authors remind us kindly that this means they’ve had their head chopped off); and they can withstand about 100,000 times the level of radiation as humans (‘It has long been said that if humans are ever stupid enough to destroy our planet, it would be the cockroaches that would survive and start a whole new zoological cycle.’).

Much as it is a lightweight, easy read, it’s an entertaining read, and certainly a book that would make a good present for young readers as well as adults.  It is certainly one of the most quotable books for grabbing people’s attention in an instant...if you’ve already tried pecking at the floor, that is.