Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
campaigns against. Singer seems blissfully ignorant about the perils of growing vegetables.
Virtually every herbivore in the animal kingdom, from slug and carrot fly up to deer and
wild boar, has long since sussed out that humans are more proficient at growing tasty food
than nature is, and all do their utmost to partake of the feast. The smell of bacon may not
awaken murderous feelings in the breast of vegetarian gardeners, but the sight of all their
pea seedlings ripped out by pigeons often does. And nothing causes sleepless nights for
conscience-stricken vegans so much as the sound of rats scuttling in the cavities of their
walls.
Most vegans are currently protected from the ravages of pests through the discreet meas-
ures taken by the rest of society to keep them under control. Nonetheless a shift towards
a vegan ethic has altered our relationship with wild animals. Fifty years ago a fox who
dared approach a village in daylight would have been greeted by kids throwing stones and
telling him to piss off, thereby establishing a mutually beneficial barrier between civiliz-
ation and nature. Now we welcome nature with open arms, and when Reynard saunters
down the street people point and say 'ooh look, a fox!' - with the consequence that foxes
feel at liberty to take chickens in broad daylight. Savory complains that whereas baboons
naturally run at the sight of people, in his neighbouring national parks they became so tame
that 'they sat on cars or got into them and trashed everything and had to be destroyed as a
nuisance'. Similarly:
The remaining elephants in the park no longer fear humans. Although they are be-
ing culled at a high rate, they do not know that humans are doing it, as whole fam-
ilies are gunned down so that none lives to tell the tale. This deception is considered
necessary as it is a national park and tourists require tame elephants. And they have
become remarkably tame: their response to human scent is very different from what it
was in the late 1950s when they were much wilder. Unfortunately tame elephants, or
any other game interdependent with predators, are not natural and therefore lose their
natural relationship with the plants in their community. Basically they linger too often
and too long in the most favoured areas and thus overbrowse or overgraze.
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They are becoming like cows who hang around the gate waiting for feed. It is not only
animal lovers who are responsible for this domestication of the wild, but also people who
hunt for sport (as opposed to those who hunt for the table). As Ortega y Gasset noted,
hungry hunters kill the first animal that comes along, and thus select for wildness - where-
as sports hunters demand a challenge, ignore easy prey, and so select for domestication.
When I worked as a beater on our local shoot, nothing we could do - shouting, firing guns,
throwing stones, despatching dogs through the water - would persuade the ducks on the
pond to take fiight. Having observed what happened to those who flew on previous shoots,
