Of geese and men

Grumpy Gertie was killed in a drive-by shooting. This resident of the village of Sandon, near Letchworth, was shot at close range from a passing 4×4. There seems to have been no motive. Apart from pleasure, perhaps. Flowers have been placed at Gertie’s favourite spot, a reward of £250,000 has been offered for information about the killers, and the Sandon villagers are distressed and appalled.

Gertie was a goose. A white male farmyard goose — the name indicates an understandable confusion about gender; geese don’t go in for pronounced sexual dimorphism. It’s a strange little parable about the confusions, contradictions, paradoxes and inconsistencies that govern human understanding of non-human life.

Are the flower-laying villagers sentimental and mistaken? Is the shooter an inhuman brute? Do non-human animals have a greater right to exist when they are given names? (Call this the Cecil the Lion Perplex.) Are we supposed to measure only the human cost of Gertie’s death? Or should we also take into account the anserine cost of capricious goose-slaying?

Gertie was a village mascot. Sandon is home to about 200 humans, and Gertie appeared on the village sign. He took over a disused phone-box as a personal shelter; and that’s where the flowers have been laid, in a manner that seems to represent irony, grief and village solidarity all at the same time.

He was, then, a goose of some privilege, one given the honorary-human status that goes to well-loved dogs and cats: that is to say, it was accepted that he had a value beyond mere finance and a meaning beyond simple existence. To kill a beloved pet is an assault on the person doing the loving as well as the creature itself: Gertie’s death was an assault on the whole village.