Giant badgers, baby-biting foxes – these are monsters of the mind

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/17/giant-badger-monsters-of-mind-natural-world

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Now that we’ve destroyed all the monsters, we have to reinvent them. Urban foxes going for babies in their cots. Dive-bombing gulls that predate your fish and chips. Weasels after your lunch. And in headlines this week, the latest horror: in the deepest West Country, a badger the size of a horse – or is that a pig? – nearly attacked a pensioner. Terry Cooper, a 79-year-old Somerset man, was out in his garden with his Jack Russell when the fiend appeared. No cuddly Brock, no Wind in the Willows chap this. “He was the size of a pig, with teeth about six inches long. They were as long as a lemonade bottle is wide”, Mr Cooper reported. “My dog turned me round and quickly pulled me in. The badger didn’t attack me,” he admitted, “but I was left badly shaken. If I hadn’t have had my dog there, the badger could have had me.”

What made these animals so vicious? Perhaps it is our collective imagination

What made these animals so vicious? Our disconnection from nature, one is tempted to say. But perhaps it is our collective imagination, too, that fuels this scenario. We ceaselessly anthropomorphise, in an attempt to extend our dominion over the wilderness – never more so than now, when we have tamed it and put it in a box and on TV and YouTube.

Ever since we discovered that the world wasn’t flat, and there weren’t dragons at its edge, we’ve sought to reassure ourselves of our own supremacy by investing the wild with danger in order that we may triumph over it. And when nature nibbles at the edges of our constructed world – now that a British suburb contains more natural diversity than the sterilised fields surrounding it – we must dramatise the encounters. Hence the wild big cats reported from the last wildernesses of England. As George Monbiot wrote in his book Feral, these sightings seem to play to our will to believe. Such beasts, Monbiot says, “inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means”, awakening “vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival … Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.”

Like William Blake’s Tyger, with its dread hand and feet and fearful symmetry, or Henri Rousseau’s stripey beast prowling through the storm, these fantastical creatures live more in our dreams and nightmares than they do in our reality. And so we attempt to genetically revive mammoths, Tasmanian tigers and, now that dinosaur DNA may be capable of recovery, even the real monsters which once roamed the Earth. Of course, they’ll just be put into an enclosure, like all the others. The natural world has been reduced to a petting zoo. And yet – pet chimps tear off their owners’ faces, snakes slither on planes, and your cute labrador, with its doe eyes, would soon – should you drop down dead in your kitchen – begin to gnaw at your flesh.

Related: The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell – review

The real tragedy is the fate to which we have consigned every living thing on this planet – including ourselves. “I am secretly afraid of animals” the novelist Edith Wharton wrote in 1924, “ … of all animals except dogs, and even of some dogs. I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them; left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.”

I write this from the shores of Cape Cod, where later today I will witness true monsters, just a mile from these pretty beaches. Gigantic fin whales, the second largest animal on earth, surf these Atlantic waters. Once they too were feared, then commodified, consumed by our industry – only to be reinvented once more as emblems of natural threat. They too have been enslaved. Throughout our sway over the wilderness, we have ceaselessly reinvented its threats, creating necessary demons. We do the same with our own species. The other will always be fearsome. It is what convinces us of our own innocence.