The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  Descartes, celebrated as the founder of modern philosophy, has a valid claim to be regarded as a genius, one of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century. Three hundred and fifty years after his death, his achievements still merited six whole pages of Encylopaedia Britannica. Very few people, before or since, could claim to be his intellectual superiors. And yet he chose to devote his huge mental power to a densely argued theory which demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the leading scholars of his day that animals had no conscious life. To have a conscious life you needed an immortal soul, and animals had no immortal souls. They believed nothing, desired nothing, felt nothing. They were like machines. If you applied a stimulus, out would come the matching response. If you shot one, or stuck a knife into it, the noise it made was purely mechanistic, not a cry of pain. Lacking consciousness, animals could not feel pain. Anyone who thought otherwise was guilty of anthropomorphism. This comforting misapprehension paved the way for what opponents of laboratory procedures on living animals still like to call ‘vivisection’. If an anatomist wanted to study the innards of a dog, he could simply nail it up by its paws and open it with a knife. By the same logic, a hunter in search of specimens could blaze away with no apprehension of cruelty.

  That was the theory. The reality, I suspect, was somewhat different. The romantic poets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well before Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming dipped his pen, had urged their readers to show kindness to animals. As Coleridge writes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798):

  He prayeth well, who loveth well

  Both man and bird and beast.

  He prayeth best, who loveth best

  All things both great and small.

  What would be the value of kindness and love to creatures unable to respond? Philosophers could argue, and scientists seek for proofs, but there was little doubt in the public mind that what looked like pain in animals was pain in animals, and that pain meant suffering. The passions that drove Anna Sewell to write Black Beauty, probably the most widely read plea for animal welfare ever published, were burning long before the book appeared in 1877. It would be easier to acquit Gordon-Cumming if we could be sure he held the Cartesian view and was of innocent mind. But his writings demonstrate unequivocally his awareness that animals could suffer, and that in some instances their suffering is deserved. This is made obvious when his wagon-driver is eaten by a lion. In pursuit of the killer, he writes: ‘I wished I could take him alive and torture him, and, setting my teeth, I dashed my steed forward within thirty yards of him and shouted, “Your time is up, old fellow.”’

  What would be the point of torturing an animal if you thought it could feel no pain? That ‘old fellow’, too, is typical of Gordon-Cumming’s tendency to anthropomorphise, or to describe animals in terms of their characters. He certainly understands that dogs can suffer. ‘On proceeding to seek for Shepherd, the dog which the lion had knocked over in the chase, I found him with his back broken and his bowels protruding from a gash in the stomach; I was, therefore, obliged to end his misery with a ball.’ Whatever his reason for not extending this sensitivity to elephant, hippo or lion, it cannot be that he believed them incapable of suffering.

  It is obvious from the celebrity Gordon-Cumming enjoyed that no great opprobrium attached to his spree. But it ill behoves the twenty-first century to accuse the nineteenth of double standards – we have enough of our own. My favourite example of moral confusion is from the 1980s at the University of Tennessee. At that time it was home (as it probably still is) to some of the world’s most privileged mice. Their accommodation was temperature- and humidity-controlled. Their bedding was fresh, their diet a masterclass in nutritional exactitude. But there was, inevitably, a price to be paid. The mice were purpose-bred for the university’s laboratory, and their ultimate destiny was to die in the service of human health. To compensate for this sacrifice, and for as long as they lived, their comfort would be guaranteed. Their welfare was legally protected, and nothing could be done to them without the informed consent of the university’s animal care committee. At the end, attended by their own dedicated vet, they would be wafted to the hereafter on an overdose of anaesthetic. Few humans would live and die as painlessly.

  But these were not the only mice at the University of Tennessee. In secret places beneath floors and furniture, behind skirting boards, lived another quite separate population – genetically identical to the five-star specimens in the laboratory, even directly related to them, but socially a world apart. These mice were pests whose health and well-being were of no concern to the US Department of Agriculture or to the university’s animal care committee. Their welfare was left to the caretakers, who trapped them on sheets of cardboard spread with glue. The irony of their sticky end was not just that it would have been indefensible if practised on their upstairs cousins. It was that the gluepot victims had once been five-star mice themselves. Their fatal error had been to escape, and not to understand the small print of human ethics.

  But the moral maze doesn’t end there. The university housed yet another group of mice, procured for the benefit of the zoology department’s snakes. It was a core principle of the animal care committee that animals should be fed their natural diets – which, for the snakes, meant live mice. The ethical proviso was that this must be done for dietary reasons alone, not for the sake of an experiment. If a researcher decided to increase the value of his snake project by studying, say, the fear responses of the mice, then there would be a further, seismic upheaval in the ethical landscape. The mice themselves would become the subject of an experiment, and being fed to snakes undoubtedly would cause them to suffer. The animal care committee therefore would need to hear a very convincing explanation before allowing the observations to continue.

  The story of the Tennessee mice was told by an American psychologist, Harold A. Herzog, in the American Psychologist magazine. He drew the obvious conclusion. The moral judgements that humans make about other species ‘are neither logical nor consistent . . . The roles that animals play in our lives, and the labels we attach to them, deeply influence our sense of what is ethical.’ In plainer language, we are prejudiced. Our attitudes to animals are determined by the labels we attach to them – pet, food, pest, vermin. Shuffle them around, and the result is almost viscerally disturbing. Pony-veal? Cat-traps? A dog-shoot? Moral duplicity is inescapable. A few months ago I paid a man to put ferrets down the rabbit holes in my garden, to flush out and snap the necks of the wild breeding stock. Later the same day, like a repentant Mr McGregor, I offered fresh carrots to my neighbours’ pet rabbits. Afterwards, with a glass of good red burgundy in hand, I enjoyed a pie made from one of the ferreter’s victims. There is no moral consistency in any of this; only a kind of self-interested pragmatism. At the very same time as I was developing my fascination with the Somali golden mole, I was laying traps for the all too common-or-garden local mole, Talpa europaea. The one is rare to the point of invisibility; the other abundant to the point of nuisance. Two similar species; two very different attitudes.

  There is no reason to wonder, therefore, how it was that Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming made such distinctions between dog and wild beast. They were irrational, but they were not incomprehensible. And he was in good company. Back home in Europe and America, public interest in zoological exotica was such that showmen like P. T. Barnum and the Ringling Brothers could make fortunes from it. And science, too, had much to learn from the hunters’ specimens. In its early years even the Zoological Society of London owned more dead animals than live ones, and museums of natural history throughout the world relied on the bullet to fill their display cases. With all due reverence, one recent writer describes the great Central and North Halls of the Natural History Museum in London as a ‘Valhalla for British natural history’. Here stand memorials to the museum’s first superintendent, Richard Owen, and to the secular gods Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Owen, who loathed Darwin and all his works, stands gowned on his pedestal, han
ds outstretched like a prophet in mid-sermon. Darwin himself sits cross-legged in his chair, hands in lap, as if resting from the burden of his own huge brain.

  But there is another, more flamboyant figure, a man in a bush hat brandishing a rifle above a bas-relief of lions. This is the hunter, explorer and naturalist Frederick Courteney Selous (1851–1917), the real-life inspiration for Rider Haggard’s fictional adventurer Allan Quatermain. The presence in Valhalla of a famous killer, arguably the deadliest white hunter ever to load a gun, is not an aberration. In honouring him with a bronze, the museum was simply acknowledging its debt. Men like Wallace and Darwin may have given the museum its raison d’être, but it was men like Selous who filled its display cabinets. His marksmanship in Africa provided the museum with jackals, hunting dogs, hyenas, lions, leopards, cheetahs, buffaloes, antelopes, gazelles, wildebeest, reedbucks, waterbucks, bushbucks, kudus, elands, elephants, giraffes, warthogs, hippos, zebras, rhinos and elephants. From elsewhere in the world came wolves, otters, lynxes, bison, goats, chamois, deer, moose and reindeer.

  Great white specimen hunter – bust of Frederick Courteney Selous at the Natural History Museum in London. It was his rifle that stocked the display cabinets

  Alas for me, he never shot a Somali golden mole. More ominously in retrospect, neither he nor Gordon-Cumming ever killed a bluebuck (Hippotragus leucophaeus). This was not by accident or because they thought it to be not worth the price of a bullet. In 1799, twenty-one years before Gordon-Cumming’s birth and fifty-two years before Selous’s, this large South African antelope, also known as the blaubuck or blaauwbock, had passed from the veldt into the history books – the first large mammal in historic times to be hunted to extinction.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Beings Akin to Ourselves

  Men like Gordon-Cumming and Selous must have known something about the way species interacted, and have had some idea that the tiniest scraps of life at the bottom of the food chain were in some way important to the behemoths at the top. But they were showmen as much as naturalists, and their audiences were not much attracted by small and drab. Who would queue to see a mole? Who knew or cared anything about ‘ecology’ (the word did not even exist until coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866). People wanted drama – living colour and bold brushstrokes. Everything else could bide its time. Most species of golden mole were not described until after Gordon-Cumming’s death, and Calcochloris tytonis had to wait until 1968. It may be commonplace now to talk about ‘biodiversity’, ‘ecosystems’ and ‘symbiosis’, but these are modern concepts built jigsaw-fashion over decades. The hunters saw only what was in front of them, one species at a time, biggest first. Who could be surprised that they showed little interest in anything smaller than a dik-dik?

  Given the challenges of surviving the African climate, never mind the impossibility of heavy haulage through unmapped forests and plains, it is easy to understand why most of the trade was in heads, horns, tusks and skins. A man with an ox-cart and a rifle – even one as resourceful as Gordon-Cumming or Selous – was not going to bring home a fully grown live hippopotamus. The Natural History Museum would have been nothing without marksmen and taxidermists. There is no irony, intentional or otherwise, in the elevation of Selous to its pantheon of heroes.

  All the same, showmen knew very well that live action would sell better than static display, and zoos by definition needed life. There was a powerful incentive to ‘Bring ’em back alive’, as the twentieth-century Texan adventurer Frank Buck would put it in the title of his bestselling book. The problem was that wild animals did not travel well. What started out alive was more than likely to be delivered dead, and few of the survivors would last long in captivity. It was a vicious circle. The high mortality rate only increased the demand for replacements, thus inflating the prices and attracting the kind of entrepreneur for whom the scent of a fast buck was made no less sweet by the stench of corpses. But again we have to understand the spirit of the age. Men in the early nineteenth century did not inflict upon other species any cruelty they were not willing to inflict upon their own. The slave trade in the British Empire was abolished only in 1807, and slavery itself remained legal until 1833. Even during the lifetime of my grandfathers, in the 1890s, African and Arab slave traders were still resisting attempts to close them down. Despite the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, and of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866, there were very few curbs, legal or moral, on the worldwide trade in birds and beasts.

  The heightened sensitivity of the twenty-first century would have been as impossible for the nineteenth century to imagine as the loss of Victoria’s empire. Our double standards might have struck them as absurd. On my way to see London Zoo’s okapi, I linger in the giraffe house, and I ask myself: What do I think about this? Where is my moral centre of gravity? I try to work out how I score. On killing for sport I have a clean sheet. Never done it; never will. People who stand in fields and pick off tame pheasants strike me as, at best, laughable. Great white hunters, eh? Beyond that I am in difficulty. My misgivings about pet-keeping are compromised by the cats and guinea pigs beneath the plum tree in my garden. My tolerance of other species sharing my space is widely variable. I won’t tread on an ant if I can avoid it, and I work at a desk under a tent of undisturbed spiders’ webs, but I’ve killed rabbits and moles, and there are mouse-traps in the kitchen. I eat meat, lots of it, and I have made a public defence of animal laboratories. Nobody could mistake me for a Jain. The zoo therefore triggers a maelstrom of conflicts. The giraffe is not a threatened species. Its range in sub-Saharan Africa has been sadly reduced, and there may be uncertainties about its long-term future, but the IUCN calculates a viable wild population in the region of 100,000 and classifies it as a species of least concern. Its survival does not depend on conservation by zoos. I ought therefore to feel unease, perhaps even indignation, at the sight of these miraculous creatures in confinement so far from their natural habitat. But I don’t. Wherever in the world I go, I am unlikely to come across a happier contrast than between these sleek, apparently contented animals and their unfortunate historical forebears who might have died for nothing more than their fly-whisk tails. I pass on with contradictions unresolved. Situation normal.

  High risk – big animals were frequent victims of accidents at the docks

  All trafficked animals in the nineteenth century suffered in handling, but the giraffes’ great height, their long necks and gangling limbs, made them particularly vulnerable. Being the most awkward of cargoes, they all too easily fell from dockside cranes. In 1866 two were killed in a fire at London Zoo. In 1876 at Hamburg, three more broke their necks against a wall. In the wild, where they loomed high above the low African skyline, they drew a dangerous amount of attention to themselves. Along with the golden moles, aardvarks and hippopotami, they were counted among the ‘very peculiar forms of mammalia’ celebrated by Alfred Russel Wallace, and were conclusive evidence of Africa’s weirdness. No animals ever caused more of a stir in Europe than the first giraffes, delivered in 1827 by the Viceroy of Egypt as gifts to the British and French governments. They were also easy to shoot, and provided men like Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming during their travels with a regular supply of meat. He reminds us again of the cheapness of animal life:

  As we neared the water I detected a giraffe browsing within a quarter of a mile; this was well, for we required flesh . . . He proved to be a young bull, and led me a severe chase over very heavy ground. Towards the end I thought he was going to beat me, and I was about to pull up, when suddenly he lowered his tail, by which I knew that his race was run. Urging my horse, I was soon alongside of him, and with three shots I ended his career.

  Another day he chased and shot ‘the finest bull’ in the herd, but took nothing from it but the tail. It was against this ingrained tradition of kill-as-you-go that the live animal traders moved in and developed their businesses. There would be change
s in practice but not in outlook. The merchants were not monsters – memoirs reveal some concern for animal welfare – but they were pragmatists who accepted the crude realities of their trade. Purposely or by accident, they would waste as many lives as it took to satisfy their customers.

  Where big animals such as giraffe and elephant were concerned, the safest option for a trapper was to target the young. If anything, this actually increased the number of dead. Before you could catch a baby you had to kill its mother and the herd leaders that would defend it. Losses of breeding stock were immense. A zoo official in London reckoned that the price of one live orang-utan was four killed in the wild. Yet this was only the beginning. There is no record of how many captive animals died on the journey from forest or veldt to the coast, but on the evidence of later chroniclers such as Frank Buck we may assume the number was huge. Even that was not the worst of it. Of those that survived long enough to go aboard ship, half were lost at sea.

  Good intentions were no guarantee of a humane outcome. In January 1867 Frank Buckland visited Charles Jamrach – a well-known and reputable London animal trader who counted many zoos among his clients. In Jamrach’s shop Buckland noticed the skulls of two Indian rhinoceroses. How had his friend come by these? It was a terrible story, which began when Jamrach sent his son to India to pick up a pair of rhinos and bring them alive to London, where they would have had a value of £1,600 (£151,699 in today’s money). The first part of the enterprise went well enough. Jamrach Junior successfully acquired the animals and, with forty coolies hauling on ropes, walked them 200 miles to be loaded on the Persian Empire, probably at Calcutta. Along with them went food sufficient for 120 days. This should have been enough, but for reasons not explained the voyage was protracted far beyond its normal duration and the animals starved. ‘The poor things were reduced to such extremities that they ate sawdust and gnawed great holes in a spare mast,’ wrote Buckland.