‘Little we see in Nature that is ours,” said Wordsworth in that back-to-front way that poets write. In a way, though, he was wrong. Human beings know with biblical precision that nature and everything in her is theirs for the taking or the taming.
What lies beneath the surface or grows from it are meant to be resources for resourceful people. Other creatures are meant to provide food or comforts or pleasures for us and if they don’t may be swept aside or “culled.”
That word, which has been bandied about around here lately, implies an act of selection, like the picking of a flower or the removal of an unwanted animal from a flock.
The way it’s used by people in authority these days, though, betrays an indiscriminate intent to slaughter for an assumed general convenience. It should be described as what it is: a specific cleansing.
I don’t believe that Oak Bay’s mayor is all that keen on killing a few of the deer that roam his municipality. I’ve never seen Nils Jensen in a deerstalker hat and I know he likes well-behaved dogs.
But I do think he and his council have volunteered too readily to take part in the Capital Regional Districts’s deer “management” pilot project — a project that seems to lack a pilot and doesn’t even approach the severity that would be required to protect Oak Bay’s dogs, cyclists, children and hydrangeas.
I grow flowers and tend shrubs. But I don’t believe any living being should be caught up in a net, suffer a bolt through the head and its throat slit so it can bleed to death with minimum damage to the meat and pelt and antlers that might be worth something to somebody, just so a blossom may give me pleasure for a few days a year.
I think that folks trying to grow crops for a living in our shrinking arable areas on the Saanich Peninsula have far more call for a cull of predators than the trowellers and secateuristes among us.
Our carrot-complexioned vegetarian neighbours will mock those of us who claim to love animals but consume and are nourished by other creatures.
I’m sorry, but when I brush my remaining teeth in the morning, I see in the mirror not just grinders but slashers and renders: My mouth, at any rate, is made for meat. I don’t need the Bible to tell me that.
And for generations, the English-speaking world has found words like mutton, beef and venison (two syllables, please) to disguise what we are eating.
I relish venison, and once had a deer in the sights of a rifle. It bared its neck in fine appreciation of the bond between predator and prey. But I was unable to pull the trigger.
Others are made of sterner stuff. There are those who kill for “sport,” which sounds to me like the thrill of killing something, and there are those who kill for trophies that are the parts of once-living beings.
There is an industry to pander to those who would be guided to the kill and to operate lodges for the killers. And there are governments that “manage” the slaughter and share its financial rewards.
The marketing research company Insights West last week released the results of a survey suggesting that while 73 per cent of British Columbians support hunting animals for their meat, only 15 per cent support killing animals for their fur and 10 per cent support trophy hunting.
The pollsters apparently missed the opportunity to ask respondents whether they support deer culls, but I’d bet not many do, for in this province many are children of the rainforest and want to share it with other creatures.
It’s not easy for us to understand why the government in Ottawa is appealing a decision by the World Trade Organization that the European Union ban on seal products is justified — on the grounds that animal welfare is “a matter of ethical responsibility for human beings.”
It’s not in the Bible, but what we see in nature is ours to look after. Now I’m going out to fill the bird feeder.
