by Brian Griffith.
I think my generation of kids growing up in Texas in the 1960s was crueler that the kids I know now. When armed with BB guns in our neighborhood or .22 rifles in the country, we shot at most anything that moved. We stomped on ants and burned their colonies for fun. We got a boost of adrenaline from killing things. It was a bit like the propensity for cruelty that Rod Preece observed in West Africa: “There is apparently … a physical delight in cruelty to beasts as well as to men. The sight of suffering seems to bring them [the local people] an enjoyment without which the world is tame …” (p. 161). Linda Merz-Perez and Kathleen Heide wrote a book about this called Animal Cruelty: Pathway to Violence Against People. It sounds judgmental, but it probably recaps world history. Almost all countries have a heritage of serious cruelty, but in 2002 Germany amended its constitution to “guarantee” animal rights. A 2005 survey across China, Korea, and Vietnam suggested that 90% of the population now agreed that “we have a moral duty to minimize suffering” of animals (Rifkin, 471). I suspect this represents the wave of the future.
Still, our civilizing drive to sterilize the environment rolls onward with a certain relentless momentum. The pesticide arms race races on, private landowners still scatter poison bait to eliminate varmints, and as animal welfare advocate Kelle Kacmarcik commented, “If you have a very poisoned rat, you’re going to have a very poisoned hawk” (Lohan). Where populations of bees are collapsing, we have a rumor that the insects are being summoned to Heaven in a “bee rapture.” Clearly, the urban pest control industry is only getting bigger.
As people increasingly move to condominiums that do not allow pets, maybe our cities will dispense with animals altogether in a final victory for biophobia. I should mention that I recently met a cat in the hallway of our condominium, which is an officially “pet-free” building in Toronto. The cat was sitting by a door, waiting to be let in. It was such a pleasure to touch a cat again, and to know that a resident was breaking the rules. Who knows, I thought, maybe someday we’ll get over the urge to eliminate other lifeforms from our surroundings. I was suffering from a problem that Richard Louv terms “nature deficit disorder,” which emerges where development progressively eliminates nature. This syndrome, as observed in British children, involves “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illness” (Black). George Monbiot describes the problem as “ecological boredom,” for which exposure to wild nature is the only cure. But of course, children in high rises are usually offered artificial solutions. In their natural hunger for some kind of interaction with nature, they play in a cyber environment with cute Pokémon GO animal companions (Wallin). Where climate change is threatening to pull the rug from under the feet of wild animals everywhere, the market demand for children’s toy animals is going through the roof. As Jon Mooallem explains, “We are living in the eye of a great storm of extinction, on a planet hemorrhaging living beings so fast that half of its nine million species could be gone by the end of the century. At my place [with my little girl], the teddy bears and giggling penguins keep coming” (pp. 1–2).
As the global war on insects continues, we increasingly hear bits of scientific information about what we are destroying. On the Nature Channel we hear about the enormous role of flies, termites, and ants in building the soil or disposing of decaying organic matter. Back in the 1950s and ‘60s we tended to think that the end of nature would happen from nuclear war. So Philip K. Dick wrote his post-nuclear classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a character hears that somebody found a live spider: “I’ve never found a live animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along” (p. 7 of chapter 19). But actually, things could never get that bad without us dying out first. For example, without flies acting like hordes of tiny vultures, the air would soon be filled with a general stench of decay. As Edward O. Wilson explains, “if invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months” (Stolzenburg, loc. 3323-26). According to an old Quaker saying, “If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.” We really do need them. And for some reason, when the Dalai Lama was asked about the most important thing to teach children, he said it is “to teach them to love insects” (Lauck, 114).
When I went to my father’s funeral in Texas recently, we stayed at a motel on Padre Island. My three young nieces from Austin were there, and they were running up and down the walkways squealing with excitement over various bugs that landed. To my surprise, they seemed absolutely delighted to encounter living insects.
From War and Peace with the Beasts
Sources
Black, Richard (2012) “Nature Deficit Disorder ‘Damaging Britain’s Children.’ˮ BBC News, March 29.
Dick, Philip K. (1968) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Ray Books, e-book version, New York.
Lauck, Joanne Elizabeth (2002) The Voice of the Infinite in the Small. Shambhala, Boston.
Lohan, Tara (2019) “Endangered wildlife are getting dosed with rat poisons.” The Revelator, February 25.
Monbiot, George (2013) Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life. Allen Lane, Toronto.
Mooalem, Jon (2013) Wild Ones. The Penguin Press, New York.
Preece, Rod (1999) Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities. UBCPress, Vancouver.
Rifkin, Jeremy (2009) The Empathic Civilization. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.
Stolzenburg, William (2008, e-book version, 2011) Where the Wild Things Were. Bloomsbury USA.
Wallin, Jason J. (2018) “Catch ‘Em All and Let Man Sort ‘Em Out” Animals and Extinction in the World of Pokémon GO.” In Jagodzinski, Jan (ed.) Interrogating the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland.