The natural world is not a Disneyland of cuteness. Just look at the badger
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Version 0 of 1. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s former guru, once suggested compelling all food producers to livestream on the internet the entire farm-to-plate process. This strikes me as a near flawless way of shaking up the great conspiracy of ignorance in which we pick and choose what to care about and in what order. The process of killing and butchering an animal is so far removed from the experience of 99.9% of us that to be introduced to it would probably close down the meat industry overnight. That may have been Hilton’s ambition (he uses the story more as an example of his willingness to think innovatively than as evidence of his attitude to meat-eating). Anyway, Downing Street let the proposal lapse. Yet if we acknowledged our status as top predator, we might also recognise the implicit obligation to respect and nurture what we have the power to harm. We might be more sensitive to the hierarchy of the rest of the natural world too. Yes, badgers, I mean you. Farming on the whole (I know there are fine exceptions) does not dwell on the natural order, because it is a business that is shaped largely by supermarkets which tend to prefer cheapness to quality. It is a very big business indeed, worth more than £100bn. More than one in 10 of all employees in the UK works in some aspect of the food trade. And while most people around the world want cheap food, in Britain we really like cheap food, cheaper than almost anywhere else in Europe. Of all the types of farming shaped by the supermarkets, dairy is the most vulnerable. Small farms are swallowed up into big ones in a bucolic version of the collapse of the mining industry. Those lovely green fields are, in fact, a barren monoculture. And anything that interferes with the smooth, swift processing of grass into meat and milk is ruthlessly dealt with. And so we get to badgers. We all love badgers. They are an easily identifiable link to a past where we were more in touch with the natural world. But they harbour bovine TB, giving it to and catching it from cows. TB can be transmitted in cow’s milk. If a farm has cows with TB it cannot move any of its cattle at all. The cow or cows with the disease are culled. This is quick and efficient because cows are domesticated animals used to human contact. It is also expensive, costing the government £36m in 2013 . In some places, badgers are also being culled, which is logical although not very efficient and, because they are wild and nocturnal creatures, not very easy either. And of course it is wildly controversial. The number of badger setts has doubled in the past 30 years . In the absence of, say, wolves, nothing much troubles them apart from cars, and now in parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset, men with guns. All the same, they have many stalwart defenders, some of whom have now so intimidated the baristas at Caffè Nero, a chain of coffee shops, that it has promised to stop buying milk from areas where the cull is taking place. But here’s a thing. In England, and of course after humans, badgers are top predators. They eat anything. They breakfast on baby birds and they dine on baby hedgehogs. In the areas where badgers are being culled, according to a careful, peer-reviewed study published in PLOS One last year, the number of hedgehogs has doubled. It’s not just the badgers. Our skewed understanding of the natural world is distorting the whole fragile balance between predators and their lunch. Crows and jays, magpies and rooks flourish and multiply, prospering on roadkill and the half-eaten takeaways tossed out of car windows. Then they sit in ever greater numbers on overhanging branches or a handy fencepost and pick off the dabchicks and the ducklings, and raid the nests of songbirds. They even peck out the eyes of newborn lambs. We let this happen because instead of seeing and understanding hierarchies in the natural world we see one great cuddly Disneyland of cuteness. The natural world isn’t like that. Watch your cat teasing an injured bird, and remember that man is merely the most damaging of the exploiters of natural power. |