Two killers prowl the trees of my garden near Fish Hoek in Cape Town, two predatory animals hunting for prey, without which they would starve. They are about the same size, both harmless to humans, both beneficial to my garden, and if I could assess them in an objective, rational, scientific way I should have equal sympathy for both. But I cannot. My brain is unable to be rational. Emotion and unreason flood it when I look upon these two predators. For one I feel affection and want to protect it in my garden; for the other I feel fear and want to expel it from my garden. The first is the chameleon; the second is the rain spider.
If I fear the rain spider, I am terrified of the bobbejaan spider, which is much bigger and hairier, even though I know it is harmless to humans. This irrational fear shames me and debilitates me. When I’m in a tent in the bush, my main dread is not a hyena, which might tear my face off, or an elephant, which might squash me like a ripe tomato, but a harmless bobbejaan spider. If the magic fairy were a psychologist, and could grant me one wish, I’d wish to be released from my fear of spiders.
Emotions about animals overcame me recently when I heard that the Environment Minister, Barbara Creecy, proposed to ban the hunting of canned lions in South Africa. This is the practice of domesticating lions on farms, rearing the cubs to be petted by tourists, and then releasing the adult lions into enclosures of about 100 hectares or more where tourists spend lots of money to kill them (with the aid of a Land Rover, a game guide, and a high-tech rifle). I feel sick when I think about it, and my immediate reaction was to cheer Mrs Creecy. But when I think about it more carefully, I’m not so sure.
The idea of farming lions to be killed for money seems repugnant to most people. So why don’t they find the idea of farming pigs repugnant too? Pigs are cleverer than lions. I’ve worked on a pig farm (to test my vegetarian beliefs) and seen them to be intelligent, clean, dignified animals, which we horribly abuse. Why does the sight of a lion cub immediately arouse our affection, while the sight of a piglet does not? Maybe it’s because we like animals that look like us, with both eyes in the front of the head, facing forward. There’s nothing rational about our bias.
Mrs Creecy said she wasn’t against “ethical hunting”, namely the hunting of wild animals under strict conditions, such as ensuring that the killing of an individual animal doesn’t disrupt the animal family. Again, this is a massive problem for me, which I can’t resolve. I don’t understand how anybody can get any pleasure from killing an animal that doesn’t threaten them and that they don’t want to eat. But some people do get huge pleasure from it and are prepared to pay fortunes for it, and the money goes into financing wildlife conservation – or so it is usually claimed. Hunters say, correctly, that both the life of the wild animal before it is killed and the manner of its death are better than those experienced by the animal on your dinner plate.
A South African film, “My Octopus Teacher”, has just won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It tells of the relationship between a human diver, Craig Foster, and an octopus in the (horribly cold) sea on the Atlantic side of the southern Cape Peninsula. Most people, like me, found the film engrossing and moving, and it made some cry. Some found it unbearable because of what they saw as Foster’s narcissistic humility: “humble little me communing with nature”. Understandable but unfair, I think. For me, his huge achievement was in arousing sympathy for a creature usually regarded as alien, repulsive, and rather frightening. The octopus with its soft, slithery body, its eight tentacles, and suckers, a beaky mouth hidden away somewhere, and no face or eyes that you can see, normally evokes very different feelings from those evoked by a lion cub. Foster makes you feel compassion for this one – a she, who laid eggs near the end of the film. What about compassion for all the shellfish she killed and ate? Oh, well.
I gave up eating meat 41 years ago after seeing the gratuitous killing of a wonderful wild animal. It was a gesture of solidarity with the animals we abuse. It stinks of humbug since I eat eggs, cheese and fish, all connected with awful cruelty to animals. Some animal questions are simple. Battery farming, especially of chickens, is cruel beyond belief and should be banned. But many animal questions are far from simple, such as questions about hunting, and even canned hunting.
Meanwhile, I applaud Mrs Creecy, love my chameleons, fear my spiders, shed a tear over My Octopus Teacher, never eat pork but often eat fish, and in general behave like an irrational hypocrite.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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Photo by Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash