A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 139

Slaughter of this kind revolts us, but are not most of our great myths
built on such adventures? Do Ulysses, Sinbad, Sigurd, Beowulf, Cú
Chulainn, St George, Arjuna, Lâc Long Quân and Glooskap not sur-
vive in a thousand current tales? All of us have ancestors who, regardless
of the continent they inhabited, must have battled with beasts many
times their size, armed with horns and tusks and claws and fangs, and
must have passed down tales of their triumphs and tragedies, sagas
which mutated and evolved across hundreds of generations, but which
maintain their essential form today. Are these struggles with the beasts
of prehistory not imprinted in our subconscious as surely as Homer's
epics were eventually committed to papyrus?
To re-enact these quests, the Romans scoured Africa for monsters
to release into their amphitheatres. The Spanish breed black bulls
with the temperament of giant aurochs. The Maasai risk long prison
terms, mutilation and death to hunt lions. Societies throughout
Europe engaged until recently in cruel sports involving bears, badgers,
dogs - any creature fierce enough to reawaken the ancestral thrill. The
absence of monsters forces us to sublimate and transliterate, to invent
quests and challenges, to seek an escape from ecological boredom.
An interesting question arises. Why, when the megafauna was elim-
inated in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar and
Europe, does it survive, at least in part, on mainland Africa and in
some places in Asia? There creatures exist which, were we not famil-
iar with them, would invoke the wonder and incredulity with which
we contemplate the glyptodont, the elephant bird and the marsupial
lion. Elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, hippos, eland, cheetahs, tigers:
all of them, had they lived in other parts of the world, would have
been - or were - exterminated. The answer is surely that in Africa and
southern Asia, they evolved alongside hominids and early humans.
They learnt to fear the insatiable ape, the diminutive monster which
could look back upon its deeds and forward to their embellishment.
People who call themselves Pleistocene rewilders seek to recapitu-
late the prehuman fauna of the Americas. 54 They point out that the
extinctions terminated trophic cascades and other processes that must
have shaped the ecosystems of the New World. Species which evolved
alongside the missing megafauna, such as the pronghorn, whose
remarkable speed - up to sixty miles per hour - is likely to have been