p. 17 It’s mindboggling to imagine how they caught, kept alive and trasported the sheer numbers of dangerous animals brought to Rome 2,000 years ago. Carl Hagenback, a German animal dealer in the 1880s, gives us an inkling in his memoir, Beasts and Men. His father, a Hamburg fishmonger, ran a menagerie of lions, cheetahs and monkeys as a sideline, so when 14-year-old Carl was asked if he wanted to be a fishmonger or an animal dealer, there was no contest. So began a lifelong career in the trade that coupled his love for big wild animals with their capture.
“Here’s how to catch a giraffe, antelope or ostrich, chase them on horseback until they are out of gas. To catch a zebra, hire up to 2,000 men to surround the herd, drive them to somewhere they cannot escape, like a dry river bed with cliff sides and then (sorry) whip them with long lashes until they are so exhausted they can be fettered and tied. Elephants and young hippos were caught in pitfalls. Baboons were trapped at waterholes, pinned to the ground with forked sticks, muzzled, bound, wrapped in cloth and carrued suspended from a pole by two men, so that each captive looked like “a great smoked sausage!” On one momentous occasion in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) a group of captured baboons brought down a herd of 3,000 silver-grey hamadryas baboons from the hills by the din of their screaming. The radars made short work of the cage, released their clan, and beat off their human captors by the sheer force of their numbers. Hurray! Thei manes erect, they fought baring their teeth, beating the ground with their hands as they came. In this epic battle an injured infant was seen being swept up “by a great male from the very midst of the enemy”. Alas, most captives were less fortunate. Long caravanserais crept across deserts sands in the cool of moonlight, the shadows of giraffes or elephants walking in harness with drivers at their side. Hagenbeck reports wild baboons running beside the cages of their captive breathren, screaming to each other in an “ear-splitting chorus”. Lions and panthers were pulled by camels, other creatures were strapped to palisades and carried aloft. The six-week journey from Athara to Port Sudan required huge entourages of water carriers and shephers driving sheep and goats to provide fresh milk for the young animals or fresh meat for the carnivores. From the Red Sea to Suez, then by train to Alexandria, to catch a ship to Trieste, Genoa or Marseille, for the train to Hamburg. An unimaginable three-month journey. Those who didn’t make it fed those who did.”
p. 41 “On the Greek island of Lesbos, wading in the warm rock pools of the Pyrrha lagoon, a man is transfixed by the different crabs, sea anenomes, tiny fish, starfish and the vast assortment of life. His mind is not constrained by one god rustling up creatures in a matter of days. It’s 350 BCE…. Aristotle is free, robe slung over shoulder, to ponder and to observe. He collects specimens, cuts them open, inspects their anatomy. … Aristotle orders the animal world into a hierarchy, his Scala Naturae, a narrowing ladder that clims, getting warmer (and better) all the way up to Man. (Man indeed, ascribing them as hotter than women, and so the most perfect of all animals.) .. Aristotle belieced that everything in nature had a purpose. That while the perfect structure of each species lent the greatest advantage to itself, nature had made all things to benefit the next rung up the ladder, to lead inexporably (and purposefully) to us. To see the natural world as an ascending progression from the lower to higher orders became known as the Great Chain of Being. It is an outlook that persists deep in the human psyche and directs our attitudes (and language- spineless, bloodless) towards animals.”
p. 51 In 1637, an age beginning to tick-tock with the new mechanical marvels, the renowned French philosopher and scientists Rene Descartes dismissed animal behaviour as no different from the workings of a clock. Animals were complex automata, so if they yeled when you kicked them it was because of a conditioned reflec. Animals had neither language, nor intelligence, nor feelings, nor reason. All mental activity was located in the mind, which was located in the incorporeal soul – which animals did not have. Animals acted purely out of instinct; they could not fully express pain or pleasure or know anything. What a convenience. It was Descartes’ followers who nailed live dogs to t he dissection table and heard their howls as the screeching of gears. In 1674, ardent disciple Nicolas Malebranche … worte ecstatically “They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”
p. 59 “Until recently Humboldt (1769-1859) had been ‘the great lost scientist’. The revolutionary idea that shaped his understanding of the natural world was the realisation he reached on his expeditions that everyting seemed somehow connected. And what journeys. In 1800 he and fellow explorer Aime Bonpland arrived at the vast South American tropical grassland plains of the Llanos, south of Caracas. Humboldt was struck by how much life gatehred around the tall, solitary Mauritia palms – birds fed on their fruit and their fanned fronds shaded the wind-blown soil that collcted around their trunks, keeping in moisture to provide perfect conditions for insects and worms. Each tree greated a community of life. Humboldt began to see nature as a dynamic living organism, and with that he was more than 100 years before his time. As they were paddled down the ‘Oroonoko’ hundreds and hundreds of large crocodiles lined their route, so numerous they were never out of view. Grazing along the banks were huge herds of capybaras, enormous guineapig-like rodents… escpaing the crocodiles, were as likely to run headlong into a jaguar’s jaws…. Humboldt rehected the man-centre conception of Nature of his predecessors. What he also observed was that rather than improviong nature, man’s interference most usually upset the natural nalance. The indigenous tribe showed him how Spanish monks took all the turtle eggs they could find from the riverbanks for oil to light their makeshift churchs in their remote missions, and how turtle numbers had fallen in consequence.”
p.62 Darwin 1836 “A book published anonymously that year would jog him along. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation rocked Victorian Britain by suggesting man was descended from the lower orders. The thory went that the Divine Maker had designed nature in his ‘terraqueous theatre” to progress, so that primitive life arose out of a vague electro-chemical process to develop gradually, from fish to repitle to mammal and upwards to man… Couched in pious tone, Vestiges remained respectful to God, if not to Genesis. The mystery author was rumoured to be Prince Albert, while men of the establishment suspected a female hand behind it for the guile and ‘hasty jumping to concluions’. It became an international bestseller. (In 1884, the author was revealed to be Robert Chambers, of the Chambers’ Encyclopedia family, 12 years after his death.) The buzz made its way into Benjamin Dsraeli’s 1847 novel Tracred, when Lady Constance explains how everything is proved by geology: “First there was nothing, then there was something; then – I forget the next- I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came – let me see – did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last .. Ah! that’s it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows”.
p. 64 In 9th-century Baghdad, the prolific Muslim polymath known as Al-Jahiz (CE 776-868) wrote books on many subjects: The Book of Misers about greed; The Art of Keeping One’s Mouth Shut; Against Civil Servants… His Book of Animals ran to seven volumers… his death at his home in Basra at the grand age of 93 was report as the consequence of being crushed by a toppling pile of books in his library. But this is what he wrote: “Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms the develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species, Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.”
p. 75 “The German biologist Jakob don Uexkull (1894-1944) tried to imagine the world of an eyeless tick. waiying on a stem of grass for the whiff of butyric acid from the mammalian sevaceous follicles of a potential hairy host. A wait that could be as long as 28 years, until she leaps onto a passing meal of warm blood, embeds herself up to her neck (if she had one), gorges, then lays her eggs and dies. Uexkull believed any organism that reacted to sensory data should be judged a living subject and considered in terms of their sensory world. To describe an animal’s unique sensory surrounding world he used the term Umwelt. .. In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel concluded that a human cannot knwo what it is like to be a bat. His point being that a human imaghining being a bat was not a bat being a bat. Without echolocation, wings or fabulous ears, being unable to hang by our feet, without sleeping upsiode down or catching moths, we were on a losing wicket…. as the primatologist Frans de Waal points out, Nagel could not have reflected on what it felt like to be a bat at all had not an American zoologist named Donald Griffin, in 1940, tried to imagine how it was to be a bat, and so made the astonishing discovery of echolocation.
p. 94 In 2012 a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, which stated that all mammals, birds and many other creatures, octopiuses included, are conscious beings with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviour. The extraordinary thing is that it took so long. More extraordinary still, perhaps, is that it needed to be stated at all … the onus has been on providing incontrovertible proof, and until then we had to remain agnostic. Behaviourists also tended to ignore the golden rule of experimental science that absence of proof is not proof of absence. Antonio Damasio argues that reason actually requires emotion and feeling to guide behaviour and decisionmaking. yet we must still run the gauntlet with cautionary science if we want to talk about animal emotions.Pigs can ce stressed, their corticosteroid levels might rise, but they cannot be unhappy.”
p. 69 “Chuang Tzu and Hun Tzu had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed: “See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes.”
“You not being a fish yourself,” said Hun Tzu, how can you possibly know what comsists the pleasure of fishes?”
“And you not being I,” retorted Chuand Tzu, “how can you know that I do not know?” Chuang Tzu on “The Pleasures of Fishes”
p. 98 Let the animals speak for themselves. “A chimpanzee walks down a track with her two young. The mother chimpanzee stops and looks back at her son lagging behind. Cat Hobaiter, a scientists studying chimpanzee body-language gestures in wild populations in Uganda, stops the video … ‘Right there,” Hobaiter says, pointing to where the mother is showing the heel of her foot and giving it a little widdle. This foot gesture is not very obvious (to us) but once Hobaiter had seen it a few times she worked out what it meant: Hop aboard. Each time the mother stopped and waggled her heel, the infant jumped on board.
Green herons lure fish into their range by dropping berries, twigs, feathers or crumbs of bait.
Archerfish knock insects from overhanding leaves and brancjes by firing jets of water up at them.
Burrowing owls collect mammal dung to attract dung beetles.
Caledonian crowds carry their favourite handy tools with them
p. 99 Kelly the dolphin learnt that whatever the size of the rubbish she collected from her pool at the end of the day she was rewarded… Kelly began to find lots and lots of small pieces of paper, for which she was rewarded with lots of fish. When the pool was drained for maintenance, a stash of paper was found under a rock. Kelly had her future fish supply banked by multiplying her harvest then rationing the humans with torn bits. But Kelly was about to hit the big time. One day a gull flew into her pool; she presented the drowned feathered prize to her trainer, who have her several fish. So Kelly saved some of the fish under her rock and used them to lure other gulls into the pool to ctach and get more fish. This involved planning and delayed gratification. She then taught her calf, who taught other calves, and gull-baiting in Mississippi’s Marine Life aquarium caught on.”
p. 238 Even moth parasites control their populations to protect the habitats they rely on. Dicrocheles mites live in the ears of noctuid moths. Although their occupation means breaking therough the tympanic membrance, which results in defeaning the moth’s ear, they will never migrate to the other ear. That would not do for a moth who needs to detect the echolcation calls of hunting bats … the mites send scouts across to the clear ear to lead any stray wayfarers back home.”
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