On Bonfire Day twenty-eight years ago, I accidentally killed a lapwing, something that I have regretted ever since.
It was on Bodmin Moor, late on a foggy afternoon, and I simply mistook it in the thin mist above me for something else, and pulled the trigger. Leaving aside any arguments for or against recreational shooting, I was a young man, it was a protected bird, and I felt dreadful.
I self-imposed a hefty fine which I paid to the RSPB, and then proceeded to make myself eat every last bit of it, carefully following Mrs Beeton’s old recipe.
It was black, muddy, vaguely fishy meat, and quite disgusting, and I only mention it in the first place to make the point that I am as culpable as anyone else in respect of nature. However, for me, a glass house with a broken roof is the ideal place to throw stones from, so here goes.
Whether or not the benighted pangolin turns out to have been an unwitting contributor to our global pandemic, the local appetite for their meat (for eating) and their crushed scales (for ‘improving’ libido) is already pushing them to the brink of extinction.
The pangolin has the unenviable distinction of being the world’s most trafficked animal, with somewhere around 100,000 being dragged from their habitats each year, to slide around in some wet market, like that Wuhan one. For somewhere around $700 a kilo for the meat, and $3000 a kilo for the scales, they make a decent living for the stall holder, and presumably make some vain idiot fancy he is getting an erection sooner than he normally might have expected it. Lucky him, and poor old pangolin.
But then add to the pangolin the 800 or so rhinos who are poached each year to satisfy roughly the same human body area, plus the blue fin tuna, the giant salamander and the sturgeon, to name but a few, and you have something akin to a conveyor belt of dawning extinction. And, directly or indirectly, we are all part of it.
Now obviously, you knew all of that, just like I did. You probably support one of the many wonderful NGOs, pressure groups or charities trying to fight it. I am sure that you evangelise about it, when the mood takes you, just like I am now.
But the problem (and the joy) of writing about conservation for a living is that you can’t just learn things and unlearn them. The books and papers that you read, one after the other, aggregate in your brain to become a niggling barometer of how the world is around you.
And whilst much of it is still awful, there is real progress being made in other areas, such as a knowledge of the true cost of non-organic pesticides, for example, or direct action on ‘bycatch’, the seabird casualties of long-line fishing. From time to time, I am genuinely optimistic.
And yet, and yet. If you haven’t seen it already, I heartily recommend a watch of the documentary called ‘The Serengeti Rules’. The basic thesis is that each ecosystem has a keystone species, the disappearance of which has a massively disproportionate effect on all the others, and that the Super keystone species is, of course, man, and that just about all environmental catastrophes begin and end with him. Think Trump, think Xi, think Bolsanaro, and then multiply by a million or so.
So what really matters is that we make our minds up, either to reassure ourselves that, in the great scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter, or that it does.
And if we come to the latter conclusion, don’t we all need to do more than bellyache, like I am? Don’t we actually have to use our voices, our votes and our wallets to say: ‘Thus far but no further’.
No further in my name, anyway.
But how?
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