War on badgers; war on wildness

(source)

For the record: I oppose DEFRA’s proposed badger cull, which I recently read ‘could wipe out 100,000 badgers, a third of the national population’. I’ve signed the petition calling for it to be stopped, and apparently this now has enough signatures (over 100,000) to force a parliamentary debate on the subject. However, I don’t accept the unspoken premise underlying even much of the criticism that has been voiced: namely that if it can be proved that the continued, relatively undisturbed existence of wild badger populations poses any kind of threat to the vast population of domesticated cattle in this country then a cull is justified. This agrarian fundamentalist* logic is the main driver behind the current Holocene Extinction in which between 150-200 species are now being driven extinct every day through the actions of farming cultures destroying diverse wild communities in order to impose a chosen few domesticated plant and animal species upon the land – with the purpose of channeling as much of the planet’s biological wealth into the growth of the human population as possible and/or enslaving it to the economic machinations of the vampiric global mega-civilisation. Farmers and capitalists see economic value in cows. They see none in badgers, just like they saw none in wolves, bears, wild boar or aurochs (each driven extinct in Britain over recent centuries and millennia as a consequence of active policies of extermination and secondary effects of other activities such as destruction of habitat, most often related to agriculture) – therefore, on the slightest pretext and with the flimsiest of justifications, they have to go. Witness the insanity with which this topic is debated on national TV, hosted by a household-name naturalist:

Can you hear the sublimated hatred of all things wild – all things living according to an independent will; all things damaging to our religion of total control; all things reminding us of that which we fought (and continue to fight) so hard to put down in ourselves – the coldhearted militaristic language (‘take them out’), the tight grip of irrational fear (those ‘reservoirs’ of disease), the refusal to countenance reality and plough on regardless (‘No, I’m afraid culling will have to take place.’)? Do you see these things as clearly as I do? Do you find them as disturbing?

A while ago I read this article on the badgerland website, talking about the supposed threat posed by badgers to domesticated cattle. This passage in particular made sense to me, supporting Brian May’s contention in the above footage:

Some respectable scientists ^{[citation needed]}, believe that cattle must meet several conditions before they can catch TB. The argument goes that rather than getting TB immediately they are first exposed to the TB bacteria, the cattle must have most of the following conditions: climate history, certain vitamin deficiencies, compromised immune system, intensive living conditions, high-stress lifestyle, lack of natural immunity to infection and disease, and multiple-exposure to the TB bacteria in a short space of time. In other words, cattle which are raised in natural field-based conditions, with minimum use of anti-biotics and other drugs, low-stress organics lifestyle are much less likely to succumb to TB infection. In organic terms, the higher incidence TB in cattle in the south-west of England is more likely to be due to more intensive cattle-rearing and animal husbandry, than the presence or otherwise of TB-infected badgers.

Another aspect is that TB can be passed from one individual to another by contact with infected breaths, coughs or sneezes, or infected urine or faeces. A very good place for badgers to catch earthworms and dung beetles, is in cow-pats. Perhaps, the argument goes, it is the cows who have TB, who pass it to badgers when the badgers snuffle through cow-pats looking for worms and beetles.

I bet this is the way it works in most, if not all, instances where wild creatures get the blame for the problems plaguing domesticates. I think that, despite what we hear all the time about ‘weeds’, ‘vermin’ and other undesirable interlopers in the grand schemes of human cultivation†, diseases, parasites and other pathological conditions are actually far less prevalent among robust & resilient wild individuals than among the sheltered, dependent, inbred and highly concentrated populations of domesticated plants and animals. As appears to be the case with endemic Bovine TB, the trouble only comes when the conditions have been created for it through the aforementioned hoarding of biological wealth. The disease manifests as ever more forceful attempts at wealth redistribution.

I’ve only seen badgers on a couple of occasions, but that was enough to utterly endear me to their character. I think going after them in this crass, viciously stupid manner (or allowing others to do so when we might have prevented them) can only serve to alienate ourselves further from the wild world at a time when we desperately need to start learning the lessons it has to offer. If we wish to someday beg a home in the spontaneous ecology of this country – ie: woodland – then we will need to apprentice ourselves to those who know how, having done so for many thousands, if not millions of years through an unbroken ancestral lineage. How likely are we to find willing teachers among those whose last contact with somebody who looked like us was through the sight of a gun?

Oh, I forgot to say: I support those engaging in direct action against any attempted badger culls.

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* – hat-tip: Urban Scout

† – you could even apply this to the cultivation of human cultures: as we touched on before, think of all the diseases attributed to ‘inferior’, ‘mongrel’ groups of people such as Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and any strange immigrant culture. How often has this prejudice been used as a justification for campaigns of persecution, even genocide?

The Revolution comes to Britain

Forgive me for posting another video (I’ve got quite a bit of original stuff waiting on the production line but am having some trouble engaging the machinery needed to crank it out) but last night I watched the second episode of ubiquitous Scot, Neil Oliver’s BBC series, ‘A History of Ancient Britain‘, and thought it provided a pretty decent exploration of the arrival of intensive agriculture in the British Isles some 6,000 years ago – an important subject to me for obvious reasons. Anyway, some kind soul put the whole thing up on youtube, so when you’ve got an hour to spare…

I wasn’t aware of the theory about multiple ‘first contact’ with farmers in Kent, Ireland and even the Orkneys (voles in grain sacks, you say? – well okay, unless they arrived on driftwood or hitched a ride with a friendly eagle), or that the Carnac stones in Brittany were put in place by hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic (‘We will be remembered’, eh? – reminds me more of the civilised preoccupation with stamping a mark on the landscape in the form of dead monuments rather than preserving a living legacy in thriving ecosystems, but I could be wrong…)

I spotted the old trope of hunter-gatherers ‘struggling for survival’, even alongside evidence of the backbreaking nature of the farming lifestyle – cutting down all the trees, killing all the wild animals & plants, building walls to protect livestock, yearly ploughing, the ‘daily grind’ of an hour or more of processing wheat for a family’s daily bread, the insecurity of next year’s crop being dependent on this year’s harvest…etc. He also says they stuck to the coasts and waterways and perceived the forested interior as a ‘dangerous, forbidding world’ [8:06] after making it clear that they derived a large proportion of their subsistence from hunting woodland animals and saying himself that ‘these people didn’t just live close to nature – they were part of nature’ [2:36]. I would’ve thought it was the farmers who were far more likely to see the forests in that way. As Luther Standing Bear put it:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.

Although he does his best among the Carnac stones and with the meditation at the end on how ‘sad’ it was that the farmers were trying to ‘separate’ themselves from the wild, undomesticated world (or rather, I would say, trying to impose their way of doing things and thus destroying that world), I thought Oliver’s account was rather ‘embedded’ in the experience of those oh-so courageous pioneer farmers. He could have looked at examples throughout the historical record of clashes between hunter-gatherer and farming cultures to convey the likely attitudes of prehistoric British tribes towards the people clearing the land of all the species necessary for their subsistence. I even saw an exploration of this on the BBC in the form of Marco Bechis’s film, ‘Birdwatchers’, about the struggle of the Guarani Indians in Brazil who are in the process of being displaced from their land by cattle ranchers and sugar cane farmers:

I was struck by the stark contrast in the visuals throughout the film of lush, green rainforest on the one hand next to bleak, brown farmland on the other. There must have been a similar disparity between the early wheatfields and stone-walled livestock enclosures of Neolithic Britain and Ireland and the vast, peopled Wildwood they too were setting out to conquer. At one point in the film a Guarani shaman instructs his pupil to not eat the meat from a domestic cow the tribe has just poached, because such a beast does not belong to that landscape in the way that the rainforest species – considered brothers and sisters by the Indians – do. After showing us [55:33] the difference between the ankle bone of domesticated and wild cows in prehistoric Britain, I wish Oliver had followed in the footsteps of Jared Diamond and Weston A. Price in showing us the difference between domesticated and wild humans. Is the evidence here consistent with evidence around the world indicating that hunter-gatherers lived longer, were taller, healthier, stronger, less stressed, more … human than their genetically identical farming counterparts? Who most truly belongs to the British landscape; to any landscape – Homo sapiens domestico-fragilis or Homo sapiens neo-aboriginalis?

(hat-tip to C)

Altogether, though, I want to applaud Oliver’s effort here in shedding light on this important transition, putting modernity into its ancient context and going some considerable distance towards rescuing what was surely an epic, richly meaningful drama from the precious few scraps of evidence that survive.