What do we want from wild animals? Nowadays, they're mere decoration, a cultural add-on in Attenborough HD; nature porn, exquisitely filmed and teasingly revealed. The reality is something else. In the flesh, animals have a magnetic strangeness that transcends their physical reality. At Smithfield, in central London the other evening, I watched a fox calmly strolling along the pavement, across the street, and up a spiral fire escape a presentiment of what will happen when our species cedes its temporary hold and the world is abandoned once more to the wild. We bear witness to animals as emblems of a lost Eden that's why our spirits lift with birdsong. We invest our emotions in animals, often at the expense of expending those emotions on each other.
As Graeme Gibson writes in his wonderful new book, we have "infantilised" animals and no more so than our own pets. It is hard to reconcile the sight which I saw this summer in Cape Cod, of a pair of bichon frises, shampooed and primped under a plastic awning in a dog buggy, with their remote ancestors, the patrolling wolves which once roamed that same sandy spit.
From the brutes of the conquered past the Tasmanian thylacine and Steller's sea cow, which we drove to extinction to those species that still roam free, animals have become barometers of global change, even as we ignore our own culpability in that end game. Gibson, a Canadian novelist and partner of Margaret Atwood (both are vocal supporters of animal charities), enshrines an awareness of this in the follow-up to his Bedside Book of Birds. A collection of literary extracts from Charles Darwin to Angela Carter, accompanied by illustrations stretching from the ancient world to Audubon, it concentrates on "alpha predators and their prey".
In his introduction he explains that these "are central to us, and to our understanding of our place in nature, because the primal fact of hunting and/or being hunted and the inescapable demands of hunger have largely defined animal life on earth, and are undoubtedly among the key engines driving evolution".
The compendium is divided into sections, each prefaced by the writer with essays containing personal observations, from boyhood camps to adult encounters. His subtitles betray that this is no cosy compilation: "Echoes of a Working Eden"; "Death's Golden Eye"; "Mighty and Terrible". The portrait Gibson presents is red in tooth and claw, but rich in philosophy and art, too.
What makes a beast? The author quotes the medieval Peterborough Bestiary on the subject. "The term 'beasts' belongs properly to lions, leopards and tigers, wolves and foxes, dogs and monkeys, and all other (except snakes) which rage by mouth or with claws. They are called 'beasts' from the force with which they rage; and they are termed 'wild' because they are by nature used to freedom and they are motivated by their own will. They do indeed have freedom of will and they wander here and there, going as their spirit leads them."
Beasts define a wilderness; humanity, its opposite. Gibson sees civilisation as nothing more than our own domestication. Compared with animals, we are "alien beings", possessed of remarkable brains with which we have conquered our bestial nature, removing ourselves from it at the same time. Gibson pinpoints this fatal disconnection to the time when man became able to kill remotely, with bow and arrow. The delicate equilibrium whereby a predator targeted only weakened prey for fear of damaging itself was thrown.
Natural predation had the effect of weeding out "the stolid and the slow", and producing "alert and fleet prey". Instead, humans focused on the strongest, biggest individuals and, by taking the most genetically valuable animals, compromised the whole population and thus the ecosystem as a result. Ever since, it has been a slow, inevitable war of attrition, rather than a natural cycle of renewal.
Thus we witness every manner of human-animal interaction, usually deadly for the animal. Occasionally, however, the animal gets the upper hand. Gibson quotes from Dr David Livingstone's journals on his travels in Africa, during which he was mauled by a lion. "Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat," wrote the explorer. Yet the shock of the attack seemed to produce a stupor, "a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror". "This peculiar state," Livingstone reasoned, "is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivora; and if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent Creator for lessening the pain of death." (Livingstone was left badly injured, yet announced brusquely that he required "only the inconvenience of a false joint in my limb".)
A continent away, Leo Tolstoy had his own beastly encounter. Bear-hunting in Russia, the writer was seized upon by one of his would-be prey. As the animal closed its jaws around its victim's face, Tolstoy's servant cried, "He's eating the master! He's eating the master!" Tolstoy's reaction was rather more phlegmatic. "I felt that he had seized my forehead just under the hair with the teeth of his lower jaw, and the flesh below my eyes with his upper jaw, and was closing his teeth."
In Tolstoy's description, this attack, too, attains a kind of hallucinogenic quality. He feels the animal's fur on his face, smells its blood, hangs in its violent embrace. Yet even with his flesh "in rags above my eyes", Tolstoy felt no pain. Rescued and stitched up, he returned to have the bear shot and stuffed: "He now lies in my room."
Sometimes we kill out of revenge; sometimes from politeness. When George Orwell shoots an elephant "solely to avoid looking a fool", the animal's lingering, painful death becomes an emblem of imperial hubris. And sometimes death is a mechanism for something else. "Kill every buffalo you can!" Colonel Richard Dodge urged a sport hunter in 1867. "Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."
Many of the stories and images Gibson chooses are from his native Canada, where until quite recently people were outnumbered by predators. As a result, the northwestern Indians saw no border between the natural and the supernatural. Visiting the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver last month, I saw strange, carved chimera, such as a Haida "sea-wolf" made up of three killer whales and a bear's fore legs. These were animist totems of the real creatures that lived in the forests and the seas, and which held sway over the Indians' environment, rather than the other way around. In this mysterious contract, seals would agree among themselves which hunter they would allow to capture them. Death was dignified, by leave of the animal's consent: "Let's wrestle,/ my little man, my little son, nay little death, my brother", in John Newlove's poem, "God Bless the Bear".
Once we humans were no longer prey, that subtle balance was gone. We lost respect for them and, perhaps, for ourselves. "Strange to say, he himself was beginning to realise that his growing sensitivity to the process of nature also made him more sensitive to the wickedness of men," wrote Joseph Roth. When abuse and torture is discovered to be rife in our modern world, we are said to be "inhuman", little better than beasts. The fact is, we are far worse. "A wild animal is cruel," said Freud. "But to be merciless is the privilege of civilised humans."
You might want to give this book as a Christmas present, but buyer beware: like its subject, these beautiful pages deceive. They are a snarling, still-living reminder of our own lost nature. Gibson implores us to "reconnect with the animal inside us, with our biological reality". Perhaps that means we must reclaim an animal morality, too.
Philip Hoare's Leviathan or, The Whale (Fourth Estate) won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.
