The call of the wild: Part One

The call of the wild variously sounds like “GRRRR!” (wolf) or “Hrmmph” (hippo) or “KWAAK!” (vulture) or “Where the hell’s my mosquito spray!?” (disorganised tourist).
Be that as it may. This column is in part a follow-on to my pieces about South America, as I want to concentrate on wild animals I encountered in the Peruvian Amazonia.

I’ll start off, though, with pets. I like dogs, though have only once kept one, inherited from a British friend who left northern Nigeria before I did. I’m a cat lover and have kept a succession of wonderful, affectionate cats, but don’t want to write about them or I’ll go all tearful.

I also like hamsters. The only one I’ve ever kept made friends with my cat of the time and used to enjoy riding around the house straddling the back of the cat’s neck. The poor beast (the hamster, that is) met a spectacular death. During a family holiday (me, my mum and dad and younger sister) one of my aunts took charge of the hamster, delivered to her in his cage.

One day when she let him out of the cage to run around her living-room he got behind the wainscotting (the wooden bit at the bottom of the wall) and—for reasons best known to himself—he bit into the mains electric cable. The result was that the entire street blacked out and the hamster was reduced to a spoonful of ashes.

When the family got home from holiday and my aunt delivered the empty cage I suppose I must have cried; my cat peered into the cage and gave a puzzled miaow, like “where’s my little buddy?”
Now to wild creatures and our relationships with them. I could, and should, focus on animal rights here (like the utterly vile business of killing African rhinos to acquire their horns because large numbers of brain-dead people believe these have medicinal properties), but I’ll leave that for a later time.

There is a large literature on the subject of our relationship with wild animals and—just to stick with animal rights for a bit—two of the most significant, powerful and enjoyable, examples of these are books by the South African novelist J M Coetzee: his essay collection The Lives of Animals and the novel he later built around this, Elizabeth Costello (the title character is an animal rights advocate).

Then there is a long succession of books—about twenty of them, I think—by British naturalist Gerald Durrell. Many of these record his adventures with animals in South America, although at least one—The Bafut Beagles—is set in Cameroun. The best known, which was made into a popular television series, is My Family and Other Animals, which takes place in Greece, where Durrell’s family lived when he was a small boy and already a budding naturalist.

My favourite moment from this occurs when one of Gerald’s older brothers comes racing downstairs wearing nothing but a towel and yells: “that rotten boy’s filled the bloody bath full of sodding snakes again!”
Perhaps the most remarkable work I’ve read dealing with humans and wild animals is Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, which was made into a very successful film.

I used to discuss the novel and show the film to students at the NUL when I taught a course on Literature and Critical Life issues. The issue involved here is the largely spurious conflict between religious faith and science (for example, regarding the theory of evolution). Spurious, because the clash has been worked up by fanatics and bigots; it doesn’t have to be there at all.

The film is fabulous, though my students and I discussed the way it evades or sentimentalises the novel’s ending. Suraj Sharma, who plays the teenage Pi, is an incredible actor and breathtakingly good-looking. I don’t much enjoy special effects in films because too often they seem to be there for their own sake and get in the way of coherent story-telling.

But in Life of Pi they are amazing — especially in the scene where a huge whale leaps out of the ocean glittering with phosphorescence.
There’s one bit of dialogue in Life of Pi I want to quote, as it is particularly germane to this column.

Pi’s father owns a zoo and at one point acquires a tiger, one of the most fearsome animals in the world. The very young Pi loves the beast and one day comes dangerously close to its cage. As the tiger advances, no doubt planning to rip his arms off and eat them, Pi’s father grabs him and hauls him backwards to safety. Pi protests: “but he likes me! I can see it in his eyes!”

The father gasps at this nonsense and instructs Pi:

“that is a wild animal and only looks upon you as food. What you see in his eyes is your own emotion reflected back at you.”

Chris Dunton