The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 204

chaotic but as ordered and standardized. They compared themselves to
wild predators which, they believed, had an inherent right to rule the
ecosystem. After the war, Lorenz pursued this analogy, though now in
coded form. He claimed, wrongly, that domestic dogs had two genetic
origins: the northern wolf and the Mesopotamian jackal. Dogs
descended from wolves, he believed, inherited the characteristics of ani-
mals which form 'a sworn and very exclusive band which sticks together
through thick and thin and whose members will defend each other to
the very death'. 24 Dogs descended from jackals, by contrast, were obedi-
ent, but infantile and lacking in loyalty. These traits corresponded to
Nazi characterizations of the 'Aryan' tribes of the North from which
they claimed the Germans were descended, versus the 'degenerate'
peoples of the South among whom, they maintained, the Jews arose.
An attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with
misanthropy, racism and the far right. The extract from D. H. Law-
rence's poem The Mountain Lion with which I began this chapter
hints at this conjunction of interests. In his topic The English Novel ,
Terry Eagleton notes that while Lawrence 'regarded fascism as a
spurious solution to the crisis of middle-class civilization', there are
elements of his thinking - racism and anti-Semitism among them -
which sail perilously close to the fascist creed. . . . at his most danger-
ous he invites us to discard rationality as itself a kind of alienation,
and think with the blood and racial instincts instead. It was this aspect
of his work which Bertrand Russell considered led straight to
Auschwitz. 25 *
The British millionaire John Aspinall, who died in 2000, made his
money running gambling dens. He made his name spending this
money on the zoos he founded - Howlett's and Port Lympne in Kent -
where his breeding programmes enjoyed great success. He fetishized
the tigers he kept. He encouraged his keepers to interact freely with
* I would question the idea that Lawrence invites us to discard rationality, on the
grounds that we do not have a great deal to discard (as the work of researchers such as
Jonathan Haidt and Antonio Damasio shows). What he invites us to discard, and what
I think Eagleton and Bertrand Russell are talking about, is universalism. If blood and
culture are allowed to outweigh the consistent application of universalist principles (in
particular the golden rule), this can become a licence to trample on other people.