Adam Nicolson

A chronicle of brutality

From wholesale, hate-filled abuse to the modern taste for concealed exploitation, our treatment of the animal kingdom confirms us as the world’s cruellest brutes, says Adam Nicolson

In the 1820s and 30s, London used about 20 million goose quills a year. The government’s Stationery Office on its own was still getting through half a million a year in the 1890s, roughly a quill a clerk a day. The administration of Victorian Britain and its global empire rested on a vast flock of geese. So fierce was the demand for quills that many were pulled from living birds, a process that was agonising and sometimes fatal. Travellers in rural England occasionally found denuded goose bodies lying quill-less at the side of the road where the quill robbers had left them shocked to death. Only the invention of the type-writer released the goose population of Britain from centuries of pain.

This enormous and dazzlingly encyclopaedic history of our relationship with animals over some 900 years is, largely, a tale of such barbarity and imposition. If we needed it, or wanted it, animals were made to provide it. One Puritan writer of the 17th century maintained that the creation of animals was God’s way of keeping meat fresh. That expectation of dominance lies behind a long story of use that carelessly drifted into abuse, of abuse as a form of delight, of a kind of intimacy with the animal world which generated behaviour that seems now merely weird. Most 17th-century recipes for rabbit pie insisted, for example, that the head and ears should always to be left on. There was to be no concealing of the nature of the prey in an anonymous stew or a deep-fried nugget. Sometimes the ears of the rabbit were threaded through so that they lay along the top of the crust, giving no doubt as to the contents beneath.

Why? And why does this seem so distant from us? Arthur MacGregor, who until recently was curator of antiquities at the Ashmolean, carefully uses the super-neutral word ‘Interaction’ in the title of his monumental book, but this is not, with some exceptions, a tale of symbiosis.

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