A very small matter with very big implications
By Colin Tudge
Every morning for the past 10 years or so I’ve been scattering crusts and spaghetti and other beaksome leftovers for the birds that come to the communal garden around our flat. Jackdaws and, less commonly, Magpies, are the chief clientele, plus the odd Robin to clear up the crumbs. All these birds are highly intelligent of course as passerines and their relatives generally are and I am sure that if I was a better naturalist I could get to know them all personally, or at least individually. As things are I am too lazy to make the effort but they are good to watch and they seem to appreciate what’s on offer, meagre though it generally is. So it’s been a happy relationship.
But now a new neighbour has complained. Usually my offerings disappear within minutes, if not within seconds, but occasionally the crows miss a bit, at least temporarily, perhaps interrupted by cats. And, says our new neighbour, the occasional residue could attract “pests”, among whom he listed unspecified species of rodents, and foxes.
Since I don’t want to end my days in a state of neighbourhood strife I have suspended operations. But it rankles. The matter is trivial, of course, but I feel it opens up issues of enormous and global significance that have to do with human relations with other animals, and human attitudes to the natural world in general, and hence – since our species is so influential — to the future of life on Earth. Mass extinction is already a huge and horrible reality, and we, human beings, are the cause, partly because we consume so much individually and collectively and partly because not enough people take issues of ecology seriously enough, either on the local or the global scale. The people with the most influence in the world certainly don’t.
The on-going mass extinction is more than a crime. It is a sin; a sacrilege; a crime against the universe, which some would say is a crime against God. Those solipsistic and exclusively anthropocentric people who think and feel that only human beings really matter (or at least some human beings) tend to be self-righteous about it. They see themselves as rationalists – realists — bravely facing up to life as it really is, prepared to take what governments are wont to call “tough decisions”, including, evidently, the decision to wipe out any non-human creatures that get in the way of our material ambitions or are presumed to do so — and especially the material ambitions of the rich and powerful. Those who do care about the non-human creatures that Robert Burns called “our earth-born companions an’ fellow mortals”are written off as dreamers and bunny-huggers: well-meaning, perhaps, but misguided, and irresponsible. Not serious.
But the anthropocentric solipsists might care to reflect that if the natural world collapses, as it seems to be well on the way to doing, then we, humanity, must collapse with it. We need a flourishing biosphere. Our own wellbeing and indeed survival depend absolutely on the wellbeing of the global ecosystem as a whole – what James Lovelock called Gaia, after the Greek Goddess of the Earth. The wellbeing and stability of ecosystems at all scales depend in turn to a significant extent on their overall diversity. When one species goes, others are likely to follow. Some – the “keystone species” — are more influential than others but we can’t tell for sure which ones are most influential until they are gone. Ecological stability – though resilience is a better concept than stability: the ability to recover from setback – isn’t a given. Gaia as a whole evolved over billions of years but it can be disrupted in an instant; and in general, the more it is disrupted, and depleted, the more precarious the whole becomes.
In short, it must be in our own and the world’s best interest to do all we can to keep the global ecosystem in good heart, including all the creatures within it, or as many as possible. If we simplify the world’s or local ecosystems too much in our own short-term material interests or for reasons of fashion or whim they are liable to collapse, and if they collapse then eventually we must collapse as well. In short, an exclusively anthropocentric attitude is a recipe for mass suicide, which doesn’t seem very rational at all.
Human beings are of course immensely influential. Very few creatures on this Earth are unaffected one way or another by our presence and our actions and our policies. Yet we are not gods, although some aspire to be so and some in high places from Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to Nero and Caligula evidently believe or believed that they are, or were. We could not be omnipotent unless we were omniscient and we must always fall very far short of omniscience, not least because we could never know how much we don’t know unless we were already omniscient. Socrates was surely exaggerating when he claimed to know nothing – but probably not by as much as we might like to suppose.
Yet despite our limitations, or perhaps because of them, we can demonstrably do enormous harm – although we may also, sometimes, do great good, either by intention or by chance. Mercifully, as James Lovelock pointed out (or at least it is a small mercy), with all our bombs and chainsaws and pollutants and carelessness and often downright nastiness we do not have the power, not by orders of magnitude, to wipe out all life on Earth. But we do, demonstrably, have the power to wipe out a great deal, and even the smallest extinctions, unnoticed and unrecorded, can have immense knock-on effects. In ecology the so-called “butterfly effect” is a huge force. We do therefore have the power, intentionally or unintentionally, to influence the course of life on Earth for ever more; and although Earthly life cannot surely be the only life in the Universe it may well be the richest and most diverse and most highly evolved. So our species has a huge responsibility which, I suggest, we don’t take seriously enough, or anything like. “Forgive them, Father”, said Jesus when he was at the point of death “for they know not what they do”. To a very large extent we, humanity, don’t know what we are doing to the natural world, but whether or not we deserve to be forgiven is a moot point. (Though to paraphrase various verses in both Testaments, “Judgement is mine, sayeth the Lord”.)
Reality and perception
What matters, as always, are both the facts, insofar as we know them and they can be known; and, crucially, our attitude to the facts. We can never be 100 per cent certain of the facts, and when we look closely we often find that reality is very different from what is commonly supposed. Once the facts are revealed, or supposedly so, it’s up to us to decide what we do about them. Donald Trump simply declares that whatever he finds inconvenient is “fake news”, and can or should be ignored, or actively suppressed — and millions of people apparently take him seriously. To be sure, many governments, or some members thereof, may accept that the ecological changes that now are so evident – global warming leading to climate change, and mass extinction for all kinds of reasons including climate change – are real. But for all kinds of reasons they tend nonetheless to carry on more or less as before, perhaps with fingers crossed or with rosary beads a-clicking.
Radical change is needed both in attitude and in action and few governments have the wherewithal or the courage to be radical. Those who seek to do the things that really need doing, if we really care about our own future and the future of life on Earth, tend to lose votes, or fear that they might. Only despots have the power to be truly radical but none, in practice, has ever been wise enough to make the kind of decisions that could keep the world in good heart. Very few have ever aspired to do so. Most apply some off-the-shelf political or economic doctrine to the problems of their times or are content, like the would-be despot Trump, to wing it, and do whatever comes into their heads. Almost all succumb to self-interest. In the long run only democracy can achieve what’s needed, but democracy is difficult and it doesn’t work unless people at large take a real interest, and are well informed, and have the time and inclination to get involved. If people are uninformed, or don’t care, then “democracy” becomes mob rule: not many heads a-thinking but everyone following some “charismatic” leader.
In practice, few manage to tick all the necessary boxes and the education system that could change hearts and minds in general is not on the case, while the “media” are controlled more and more by people who want to run the world in ways that will enrich themselves. In short, the task before us is enormous — if we seriously want to turn things round. To rescue the world from its present decline, not to say our headlong plunge into oblivion, we need to make radical change rooted in the bedrock principles of morality and ecology, both in turn rooted in metaphysics — but our politics just aren’t up to it. All in all we’re in a bind. In the end, it seems, as things are, the only solution to the world’s otherwise terminal ills is for everyone who gives a damn to do what they feel in their bones, as well as in their brains, is the right thing, As David Attenborough said to me in the one conversation I had with him, back in the late 1980s, “We can just do our little best”.
Indeed, although it is not quite true to say that “attitude is all”, attitude is certainly what the lawyers used to call and perhaps still do, a sine qua non – “without which nothing”. If life is to flourish on Earth, or indeed if humanity is to survive in a tolerable form for more than a few more decades, then we need first and foremost to care. We need truly to care about humanity – and we also need to value our fellow creatures, and want them to prosper, and act accordingly, and that requires us at least to be tolerant. Other creatures can be inconvenient and sometimes exceedingly dangerous but we surely must be prepared at least as far as is compatible with our own continued lives to take the rough with the smooth.
Of course, in all contexts, we need to temper our concerns with common sense, as various philosophers have stressed (although some seem content simply to follow the logic of their own arguments to the point of absurdity). Thus it surely made sense way back in the 1970s to seek to eliminate the smallpox virus, except perhaps in secured laboratories – and this indeed has already been achieved. The polio and measles virus could follow, if the world could get its act together. But, for example, the frenzied and often panicky attacks on sharks and wolves or birds of prey that are still perpetrated and self-righteously defended in some circles are surely misguided to the point of wickedness. Still less should we suppose that other creatures are our property and were put on this Earth exclusively for our benefit. Genesis (1:26) tells us in the King James version that God said:
“… Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”
But, it seems, the Bible is not always incontrovertibly wise; at least not in its various translated forms.
So how does all this high-fallutin’ talk bear on the local and apparently trivial issue of bread and Jackdaws?
Should we feed garden birds or shouldn’t we?
Of course there are drawbacks. Contact with wild animals in general can of course be dangerous. Some of the world’s fauna are big and strong and most can be fierce on occasions and some are toxic and some sting.
Some even kill people – of whom the most important by far are insect vectors, carrying and transmitting parasites. According to the web, about a million people a year die from the agents of malaria, dengue, and the rest, borne by mosquitoes. Venomous snakes are next on the list – though a long way behind: somewhere between 50,000 and 138,000 people per year die from snakebites. Dogs apparently kill 30,000 to 35,000 people a year, mainly because of rabies. The rabies virus apparently can infect all mammals but direct contact is needed (there is no transmission via insects or wind or water) and it’s dogs we have most contact with. Rabid dogs are famously mad and vicious and bite people but some infected dogs become ultra-friendly and seek to be cuddled – and they, evidently, are the most dangerous. We allow or encourage the friendly ones to get close and their slobber may be infective too.
Scorpions kill around 3,300 people a year and crocodiles and alligators another 1,000. Among large mammals, elephants are the most dangerous, when measured in human deaths. They kill about 600 people a year – some of whom are mahouts though many or most are farmers who seek to protect their crops from their raids (often aided by dogs who tend to excite the raiders and make matters worse). I was told in India that the traditional Hindu farmers are remarkably forgiving, however. They recognise that the elephants are desperate because humans have destroyed what was once their jungle. The farmers acknowledge too as modern biologists are also wont to do that elephants are creatures of intelligence and sensibility with close and complex family lives. They are compassionate and humorous and mourn their dead — fellow mortals indeed. The traditional Hindu farmers do not simply take it for granted as is the modern western norm that we, humans, have an absolute right to all that we survey and that anything that gets in our way should be done away with, not simply by right but in effect as a matter of duty. The relationship between Asian elephants and traditional rural Indians might reasonably be seen as an inter-species culture clash. The same, I suggest, applies to our relations with all intelligent animals.
The most dangerous large animals in Africa as every pub quizzer knows are the Hippos, which kill around 500 people a year. Then come lions – 100 to 250 deaths per year, although this figure presumably includes both Africa and Asia. Then come tigers – 100 deaths a year, all in Asia (though I don’t know if this figure includes zoo keepers the world over). Sharks, which have aroused such fear and loathing worldwide and have launched spectacular movies with wonderfully sinister music by John Williams, kill around 15 people a year — though only among people who bathe in places where sharks live and hunt. Sharks do tend to be territorial but they seem to kill people mainly by accident. Among other things, they seem to mistake surfboards for big fish to eat or as threats. Modern scuba-divers seem singularly unconcerned about sharks. I have little or no direct experience of such matters but it seems that when people don’t panic and over-react, most wild animals including sharks are remarkably accommodating. They are not looking for trouble. Naturalists who have worked closely with wolves have been known to remark that they are “well-mannered”. Indeed there is no good reason to suppose that humans invented manners. Or humour, or friendship, or love. “O judgement thou art fled to brutish beasts”, said Mark Antony after the murder of Caesar. But the beasts are not as brutish as all that. No wild predator can properly be called “ravening”, as the sensationalist expression has it. They just want to make a living with minimum fuss, like the rest of us. That, and defend themselves and their families.
Personally, I can’t think of anything more terrifying than to be attacked and killed by a wild animal. According to the web, four people have been killed by Polar Bears over the past few years: a young campsite manager in Svalbard, Norway, in 2020; a young mother and her one-year-old son in Alaska in 2023; and – the most recent – a young man working on a radar station in an island off Canada in 2024. Polar Bears are truly awesome. Beyond doubt, each and all such deaths are truly horrifying. But they are very rare (though they could become more frequent as the ice shelves melt and the bears are forced ashore. Then the stranded Polar Bears will presumably become more bear-like, as they are perfectly capable of being. Polar Bears are, after all, close relatives of European Brown Bears).
Clearly, though, the principal danger from animals comes from the parasites they carry – viruses, bacteria, protozoans, and worms. The diseases those pathogens cause are known collectively as zoonoses, and zoonoses worldwide are a very big deal even if they don’t always or usually kill us, at least in the short term. Indeed, most of the parasites that may still lay us low and are now transmitted mainly or exclusively person-to-person evolved first in other species. Malaria, apparently, almost certainly originated in birds. Ebola, first identified in 1976, seems to have arisen in African fruit bats. I learnt in my undergraduate days that syphilis and/gonorrhoea first arose in American Grizzly Bears – though that colourful tale has now been discredited.
In Britain, according to the web, the commonest zoonoses are Lyme disease, caused by bacteria carried by ticks; gut upsets, sometimes very serious and sometimes lethal, caused by Salmonella and Campylobacter from farm animals; and Leptospirosis, known in its severe form as Weil’s disease, caused by the spirochaete bacterium Leptospira, and carried by various wild animals. Brucellosis from cattle caused by the bacterium Brucella was once a big issue among British farmers (I wrote about it at length in the 1970s) and TB from cattle was once a major threat, though in these days of testing and pasteurisation transmission from animals is rare, at least in Britain. Children in particular may still be infected by the roundworm Toxocara picked up from soil or dog’s muck, and this can lead to blindness. It is still possible to be infected by the protozoan known as Toxoplasma, picked up not least from cat poo – which can be particularly nasty in pregnancy.
In my younger days too I wrote at length about the flatworm Echinococcus. Dogs and foxes are the principal hosts. They excrete the worm’s eggs in their faeces, which are then picked up by a rodent or sometimes by sheep and other grazers which serve as intermediate hosts. The emergent worms then form cysts in various tissues. Dogs may then consume the infected flesh and so the cycle is completed. Humans too may serve as intermediate hosts. For the parasites human beings are a dead-end host. Dogs do not kill people for food and it surely is rare in the world at large for canids of any kind to eat human cadavers. So when the worms get into humans their cysts – known as hydatid cysts — just sit in the body, filled with fluid, and may become very large. They may cause no symptoms but especially when lodged in the liver or lungs they may cause serious illness. Sometimes the hydatid cysts burst and the results may be fatal. These days in Britain the disease seems to be rare but back in the 1970s when I wrote about it, it was quite an issue in Wales. The worms got into the local dogs via hungry sheep that came into the villages to raid the bins; and from dogs were passed on to people. The sheep, feisty beasts from the hills and hungry with it, could be quite menacing, if challenged.
Badgers transmitting TB to cattle are still a significant problem but the jury is still out on how best to deal with them. Attempts simply to wipe them out with poisons and dogs and the rest might properly be seen to be unacceptable. They may also be counterproductive, causing the animals to scatter into new territories.
There must be many thousands of comparable instances the world over, and a great many more that as yet are unreported and indeed unsuspected, let alone understood. As people encroach more and more on the natural world there surely will be more still. Most will be of little significance although some, like Ebola, show us that newly evolving zoonoses can be very nasty indeed. The world needs to be on the alert, and to a very large extent it is. But all the zoonoses together do not compare numerically with the hazards we create for ourselves, including those of traffic and war, and cases of serious zoonotic disease in temperate Britain with its advanced if beleaguered health services are rare. The only way to eliminate the risk of zoonoses altogether would be to eliminate all other animals, but that would kill us all as well since in so many ways we depend on other species for our own survival and wellbeing. A policy of containment backed by astute science but mainly by common sense is surely the best we can do, and for the most part this should be sufficient. Certainly, a wholesale attack on wildlife in anticipation of theoretical disaster is most inappropriate, not to say neurotic. But it happens.
Overall too we must – surely? – keep a sense of proportion. According to the WHO about 1.19 million people a year are killed by traffic, and another 20 to 50 million are injured. Traffic in short is more dangerous than mosquitoes. The WHO tells us too that around 300,000 people are drowned each year including 400 in the UK, although half of those instances are thought to be suicides. So the sharks that have launched a thousand myths and a hugely lucrative movie franchise account for only one in 20,000 of water-related deaths. According to the web too an average of between 100,000 and 240,000 people each year are killed in or because of wars and, of course, the lives of many millions more are ruined. Then again, according to a report in The Lancet on November 27, 2024, which was cited by The Guardian on August 8 2026, 1.5 million people a year are killed from smoke from wildfires, thick as it is with largely organic, micro-particles. That, said The Lancet,is “more than floods, flames, storms and heat combined”. That figure also far exceeds the total who die from all contacts with animals, including parasite-bearing mosquitoes. Nowadays, too, when it seems that half of Europe is ablaze, the original Lancet figure must be far exceeded.
Finally we might note that although we do catch sometimes fatal diseases from animals, by far the most dangerous vectors of parasites are other human beings – by many orders of magnitude. People carried covid 19, not foxes or fruit bats. In this too as in all things, most of what’s needed to stay out of trouble is at least rooted in common sense. Of course, as things are, in some countries it can in practice be very difficult to stay out of trouble. Even when effective measures exist they often are not applied, again for a whole raft of reasons. Thus there are now some effective vaccines against malaria but they are not yet freely available in the countries where they are needed and millions still don’t have even a mosquito net. In some countries cobras and vipers may lurk among horticultural crops that are picked by hand. Animals can pull surprises, too, venturing into spaces we might not expect to find them, like the occasional black bear in the occasional Alaskan out-house. But no wild animal that I know about ever goes looking for trouble. They can’t afford to waste energy on gratuitous conflict. Tales of wolves chasing troikas over the Russian steppe seem much exaggerated. But people love drama and often put more store by myth than by reality. Most animal attacks on humans result from provocation or panic. Wasps rarely sting if people don’t try to swat them. Hornets only attack if you knock over their nests – and not always even then. I once disturbed a nest of bumblebees and although the females have a nasty sting this lot just looked puzzled, and somewhat hurt. Sorry bees. As Robert Burns said to a fieldmouse he disturbed while harvesting in 1785:
“I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken nature’s social union, / An’ justified that ill opinion, / Which makes thee startle …”
On a considerable point of detail, too, none of the creatures that pose a significant, quantifiable threat to human life is now to be found in Britain. There have been no reports of cobras on the lawns around our house and although “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” I reckon we can be pretty sure that this is because there aren’t any. Nor adders, which prefer heathland and are rare in Britain and rarer still now that one of their remaining strongholds at Dunwich in Suffolk is still, as I write, being destroyed by fire. The root cause of the fires of course is global warming.
But of course zoonoses and outright attack are only part of the story. Wild creatures of all kinds can do us harm or cost us money or otherwise prove inconvenient in many other ways as well. The question always is whether the harm or the inconvenience justifies our attacks on them, with guns and traps and poisons, or requires us to send them into exile, and banish them from our homes and gardens.
Give and take
Wild animals – or indeed domestic animals gone feral or otherwise at large – can and sometimes do damage crops, and sometimes destroy entire harvests. In Britain it can be hard to grow nuts because of squirrels. Bullfinches among others can make short work of berries. A former tutor of mine at university told me that the local muntjacs who raided his allotment came with a shopping list, and singled out the most desirable and valuable vegetables and fruit; though I know another allotmenteer who lures the badgers away from his sweetcorn with votive offerings of peanut butter. It’s expensive but effective, he says. Rabbits in Britain can be very damaging – which in 1954 prompted the Conservative government to recommend their complete elimination and to allow or encourage farmers to spread the newly imported myxomatosis. People at large were seriously shocked. Young Phil, as he was then, expressed reservations on The Archers, to which I was then an avid listener. In the end it didn’t happen and the rabbits are still with us. Then again, it can be hard to raise new woodlands without serious protective measures if there are deer around. In India, elephants can and sometimes do wipe out a season’s produce in minutes. The newly reintroduced White-tailed Eagles in Britain feed mainly on fish, small mammals, and carrion but farmers say they also take the odd lamb. And so on and so on. From the world at large there are endless case histories and anecdotes.
Feeding birds in gardens can be bad for the birds, too. I am fully aware that bread is not a complete diet for Jackdaws, even if eked out with the odd bit of fat and gristle. But I don’t aspire or pretend to provide full board. My offerings form only a small part of their diet which I hope helps at least to boost their energy intake in the harsher months, and when they have chicks. The provender on offer is not all good but I reckon it does more good than harm—which, when you boil it down, is the most that any of us can aspire to. If we all did thus aspire, that should be enough.
More of a problem for garden birds is disease. Ducks in the wild may pick up botulism from muddy lake edges. Greenfinches in particular in Britain have declined by 65% over the past decade, mainly it seems because of trichomonosis, caused by the protozoan Trichomonas, which they pick up largely from bird tables and bird baths. The RSPB and others recommend simple hygiene – washing the tables with soap and disinfectant. I scatter the bread for the crows over a wide-ish area, so there is less chance of pathogens building up; and to leave the whole lot exposed to the sunshine, which is nature’s great disinfectant. Thus in my days at New Scientist in the 1980s we reported research which showed that there were more coliform bacteria in the fresh cold waters around Whitby Bay in God’s own Yorkshire than in the legendarily soupy Bay of Naples, precisely because Naples is sunnier than Yorkshire (or it was, back then, before global warming began seriously to bite). The very clever office manager suggested the title: See Whitby and Die. In those days the idea that the bracing waters of north-east England could be more dangerous than those of impoverished and over-crowded southern Italy was rather shocking – though no-one in present-day privatised post-Brexit Britain would be at all surprised.
Then again: Jackdaws and Magpies are known to take the eggs and kill the nestlings of other birds. So their increased presence in our communal garden thanks to my largesse may be bad news for the other birds. I know of no reports of such attacks around where we live, however, though I did once watch a couple of Collared Doves in the Cypress tree outside our window seeing off a couple of Magpies in short order. Doveish they certainly were not. But the population of domestic cats in our corner of Oxfordshire is orders of magnitude higher than wildcat populations were ever likely to be, and they kill small birds for fun (literally, it seems) and also apparently to impress their owners. Stoked up as they are on Whiskas and Felix, they don’t need to hunt for food. But hunting is what cats do. Again, we need to keep a sense of proportion.
Finally: it is often argued that we should not feed wildlife because it may make them dependent on us, which puts them at risk since human beings on the whole are a fickle lot and may cut off supplies at any time. It also reduces their ability to fend in the wild, or so it’s claimed, and in any case such dependence is undignified (a theme explored in Richard Adams’ Watership Down). Wild creatures should be independent of us, as Jack London envisaged. It’s a Romantic view of nature, in the literary sense, with which I sympathise. But context is all. Creatures like crows are opportunists. They take what’s on offer and if nothing is on offer they soon move on. As long as I was dispensing crusts and past-their-sell-by-date digestive biscuits I was on the local Jackdaws’ beat. Now I’m not – and the birds will surely take this in their stride. Urban rats and mice depend on us absolutely but they presumably will continue to flourish as long as human cities last, so what’s the problem? All life, in practice is an exercise in opportunism. Life on Earth has seized the opportunity offered by the Goldilocks effect.
Foxes are standard villains of western mythology, often handsome and silken-tongued but forever up to no good. The myth is instilled in us from childhood by a literature that ranges from Aesop’s fables to Rupert Bear, who was forever crossing swords with the sartorially irreproachable but devious and untrustworthy Freddie and Ferdie. The Hunt, with its elaborate rituals both solemn and ecstatic and with its own ranked hierarchy of employees, ostlers and saddle-makers and masters of hounds, has all the trappings of a formal religion. In short, foxes have been and sometimes still are seen as nature’s own miscreants, out to do us down, and fair game.
But what harm do they do us, really? People have caught rabies from foxes but very rarely and in Britain the rabies virus has not been identified in wild animals since 1922. Foxes do kill chickens and perhaps the occasional lamb. I used to keep chickens when we lived in South London and lost a few to urban foxes, which were and are much more common in town than they ever were in the countryside. But I acknowledged that this was my fault. I should have made their quarters more secure. The greatest misdemeanor of our local Oxford foxes is to turn over the occasional bin. Lawyers I think would classify such behaviour as tort rather than as crime. Nothing that foxes do or have ever done justifies a pogrom, or indeed banishment from suburban gardens. We surely should regard them as our fellow earth-bound companions, charming and good to look at. And, as a bonus, they sometimes get along well with domestic cats.
In general if we take it upon ourselves to keep livestock we must do the job properly, and be prepared to spend time and money keeping them safe. Meat, milk, and eggs ought to be expensive. British governments of all stripes of course are wont to argue that if food were dearer the poor could not afford it. But at least in countries like Britain and indeed in the world as a whole there is no shortage of money. It’s the inequality that keeps people poor; that and our priorities. People in positions of most power seem to prefer to spend society’s wealth on war. In the end war is always a matter of choice, even if it’s not our own choice. Food is kept cheap not for reasons of compassion but to justify an economy that in effect is designed to ensure that the poor stay poor so as to keep them in their place and leave more for the rich. Animals both domestic and wild, and the farmers and growers, and the landscape at large, suffer as a result. Who doesn’t know this? Yet, it seems, many people prefer mythology to fact.
In short, feeding garden birds does have its downsides, for us and for them, and other species like nesting songbirds may suffer some collateral damage. But at least if we apply a little common sense the good surely outweighs the bad. For there are huge upsides too.
The upsides
In effect, in the end, we depend on wild nature for everything, and wild nature includes wild animals. Much is made for example of the need for bees as pollinators – though the emphasis in these commercial times is inevitably on honeybees, which have commercial value, rather than on the other bees, of which there are about 300 species in Britain, many of which are pollinators, or on moths and flies and so on which would do the job even without honeybees, if they weren’t being zapped.
Of crucial importance too, from our point of view, is our psychological and spiritual need for contact with other species, both wild and domestic. How could it not be so? Our species evolved in the presence of wild creatures and we are adapted to their presence, and are seriously deprived psychologically when they are absent, whether we recognise the fact or not. Thus in the 2025 Summer/Autumn addition of RSPB Magazine (pp 22-39) various contributors who experienced depression or were diagnosed with ADHD or some such described how their moods and general outlook on life were improved just by being outdoors, in wild nature, and enjoying the presence of and the companionship with trees and lakes and wild creatures of all kinds. The extent to which the human psyche is undermined by the absence of wild creatures and landscapes can only be guessed, but a great deal of evidence suggests that it is huge. Their absence from so many people’s lives is a recipe for disaster. I touched on all this in a blog called Fellow Creatures posted on August 16 2025. That piece was inspired by the work of naturalist and writer Mary Colwell, who has a special interest in Curlews. Ecologist and author Hugh Warwick continued the theme in The absolute importance of hedgehogs! dated July 10 2026. We should return to the theme again and again. It is of huge importance, and hugely underestimated.
So what can we conclude?
In summary, it is at least abundantly clear that our present knowledge of the natural world is inadequate and present attitudes across the board are crude in the extreme – and if we seriously care about the future of our species and of life on Earth then our cavalier approach to nature is a disaster on every front. Global policies largely fall short of what’s needed and when sensible polices do emerge, such as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in December 2015, they are rarely acted upon with sufficient vigour even when they are legally binding, by international treaty, and, as in this case, have been ratified by nearly all the world’s nations.
Overall, if we really care about the future of humanity and of life on Earth, then we need to shift the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age. Compared to this, whether or not we choose to scatter bread for crows in a suburban garden seems trivial indeed. But once we start to think things through we see that trivia lead us into the grandest ideas of science and morality and aesthetics and metaphysics, and in passing lead us inevitably into politics and economics and all aspects of life. Since everything is connected with everything else, this must always be so. The Zeitgeist and Gaia as a whole are each compounded of minutiae and so the minutiae are of global significance.
In practice, what we choose to do or can do depends in large part on circumstance and on expedience. But it also depends on what we take to be true – what we think is actually the case. So it matters that what we take to be true and act upon should be supported by serious efforts to find out what really is the case. We should not base our choices and our policies on myth, or unexamined presuppositions; and, on a point of detail, it simply does not seem to be the case that foxes, say, or squirrels or wasps, are more than an occasional inconvenience at least in suburban Oxfordshire, and even if they really were a significant nuisance we should surely be tolerant, for reasons both of morality and of prudence. Particularly in our dealings with nature, caution underpinned by humility is vital, for it really is the case that to a very large extent we know not what we do.
Individuals of course are limited in what they can achieve. We can but do our little best, as David Attenborough observed. But then, the all-embracing concepts of Zeitgeist and Gaia are each composed of minutiae and if each and all our minute actions did more good than harm, at least in net, the world would surely be a better and safer place. Indeed if all our minute contributions did more good than harm then that could be enough to save the world from the meltdown that now seems to be inevitable, and which may by now be unstoppable. Indeed I suggest that it’s our best if not our only hope. Grand technological ventures like HS2 and, now, mega-data centres, inspired not by the desire to make the world a better place but to provide short-term wealth, at least for some, not quite invariably but often end in tears.
In short, though some may feel that our attitude towards crows and foxes and the way we treat them is too trivial to bother with, it matters. And, to put the matter as unprovocatively as possible, peremptory banishment or indeed elimination based on unexamined preconception and whim, is simply not what they or the world need.
Share this article: