by Brian Griffith
Over recent centuries, we’ve grown more self-aware about projecting our own qualities onto the universe. The way many languages treat most things as either masculine or feminine, including God, now strikes us as slightly contrived. We treat traditional characterizations of animals as quaint expressions of popular prejudice—the way spiders seem industrious, foxes are known for treachery, doves seem to be creatures of peace and love, and ermines used to symbolize chastity. But some beasts, like bats, just strike us as satanic.
Back in ancient Greece, Aesop explained that bats were at war with the other animals. They were a non-valid sort of half-breed mix between bird and beast, and were duplicitous by nature. They told the hairy beasts that they were birds, and the birds that they were beasts, and then got into a war against both. Proving themselves faithless creatures who were neither fish nor fowl, they were left friendless ever after. To many people, nature’s tendency to cross boundaries or to generate mixed-type creatures seems to violate natural law. The old revulsion for bats has survived to modern days, so that when the residents of Katherine, Australia, recently found their town swarmed by around a quarter of a million fruit bats, most people felt it was a disgusting curse rather than a big boon to insect control. To most of us, it may seem almost unbelievable that some Central Americans see bats as holy creatures, and in China they bring good luck. But times are changing a bit, as many Westerners have learned to appreciate bats, and organizations are forming to protect them.
Clearly, the divisions we make between what we love and what we fear, or between the sacred and the diabolical, change over time. As most dogmatists for universal truth totally deny, these divisions are matters of taste, culture, and sometimes choice. But if we change our minds and declare peace with one enemy, we tend to begin hostilities on a different front. We might move the boundary lines between allies and enemies, but we still draw the lines somewhere. Also, our sense of what’s good or repugnant goes deeper than mental awareness. I’m simply not in conscious control of the revulsion I feel toward toads. I will bury my face in the fur of a stray cat, but would recoil in horror if a raccoon touched me. If we categorize certain creatures as diabolical enemies, we also treat others with reverence, or else we change our minds.
Many Westerners assume that we’ve moved beyond characterizing animals and other people as inherently evil. But it seems this view is wrong. We are far more prone to demonize others than we knew. Even as many people discard old hates and fears concerning wolves, black cats, bats, or reptiles, new enemies arise in our minds. Concern over West Nile fever may require massive spraying across North America, with untold collateral damage. Fear of rabies could spark mass culls of urban raccoons. Our pest control industries may yet produce the means of eradicating rodents and cockroaches from whole regions. Developing nations in Africa might go for a final solution to hyenas, and why not cobras?
Rachael Carson reported on the first mass spraying of the later banned pesticide Aldrin, which happened in Detroit in 1959. The chemical bombing campaign was a response to an invasion by the Japanese beetle, which had actually been in the area for around 30 years. The insect was quite rare, and several naturalists said they hadn’t actually seen one. But a generalized alarm over this insect prompted the whole city to be sprayed with a variant of DDT, which killed masses of birds and reportedly many pet animals. The warlike offensive on this beetle may have been largely due to its name. If it was “Japaneseˮ in post-war America, then it seemed to require aerial bombardment.
The Telofol people of New Guinea used to believe that the long-beaked echidna was the favorite child of their divine ancestress Afek. Afek had warned her children against injuring the echidna, as it was their sibling. Until the 1950s, these people felt it was unthinkable to hunt or eat echidnas. But then Baptist missionaries offered modern education, and taught that worship for animals was a demonic superstition. As a new generation of Telefol people gave up their old beliefs, they promptly hunted echidnas into extinction across their region.
These days it’s fashionable to read spirituality into animals. Our owls and bears seem to be benevolent figures of timeless wisdom, and this can get presumptuous. But it seems that there’s a religious dimension to our relations with other creatures. The religious options are legion, and they seem to matter. Basically, our collective attitudes toward animals are forms of racism. Some animals we seriously love (like horses) and some we fear and respect (like bears). Some we eat, and some we try to totally exterminate. Popular revulsion against rats is so strong that New York pest control operator Jack Wiler reports being called into apartments where bags of cocaine and revolvers lay on the table, while the residents stood about terrified because they’d seen rats. And though concern has grown to preserve biodiversity, Joanne Lauck estimates that Western culture has classified around 10,000 species of animals as pests to be annihilated from the earth. As biologist Vernon Bailey explained in his 1931 book Mammals of New Mexico, “The many species and subspecies of mammals recognized in New Mexico may be grouped under the useful species, such as game animals, fur-bearing animals, and destroyers of ants or rodents; or under harmful species, such as predatory animals and rodent pests.” But different human cultures disagree over which animals are their friends, enemies, neighbors, or alien invaders. And the animals of each region seem to sense this.
Based on the manuscript of “Animal Wars: Our Battles, Truces and Alliances with the Beasts.”
Sources:
Flannery, Tim, 2010, Here On Earth. HarperCollins, Toronto, pp. 102, 164–165).
Janowski, Kazimierz, 2005, “The Rat Pack,ˮ BBC News, June 9,
Lauck, Elizabeth, 2002, The Voice of the Infinite in the Small. Shambhala, Boston, p. 35.
Schaefer, Jack, 1975, An American Beastiary. Houghon Mifflin Co., Boston, pp. 102–103
Shepard, Paul, 1996, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Island Press, Washington, pp. 59, 73)