I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday I finally surprised the rabbit by the blooming phlox. It must have been right there underfoot when I went to look at the flowers. I didn't see it flee, but I felt a big whoosh close by. Had that been a bird? No, too big for a bird. So I looked, and there it was in the underbrush between the flower beds.
This is a cropped version of the original picture. My friend Jerilee helped me crop it.
The rabbit stood stock still for a good long while. It gave me enough time to both snap a picture and also shoot a very brief video.
Notice that after the rabbit hopped away, it did not go far. It was still there in sight, just a little deeper into the underbrush. I decided the wise course of action would be not to try to follow. I panned the camera so you could see just how close we were to the blooming phlox.
My house is surrounded by fields and woods, and lately we have been seeing lots and lots of rabbits. "There are too many of them," my daughter recently remarked, as several of them ran away on either side of our long driveway when we were going for a drive. "Someone should go hunting."
Someone probably will go hunting. It might be a coyote or better yet a fox.
I have never seen a fox on my property in all the years that I have lived here. But that does not mean that there isn't one. In fact, by making my land so hospitable to rabbits, I am inviting a fox to come live here. Why? Because foxes love rabbits. They are delicious!
Do I say this because I dislike rabbits? Not at all. One of my favorite books is Watership Down. I can very well imagine myself living the life of a rabbit. But then I can turn around and also imagine being a fox. I think the presence of the fox is as much a service to the rabbits as the presence of the rabbits is a service to the fox. We all need each other, and the circle of life depends on a delicate balance between predator and prey.
Without rabbits and other small prey, the foxes would starve, Without foxes and other predators, the rabbits would get fat and sick and overpopulate the land and die of starvation. They need each other, as all living things on this planet do.
Some people think they are very enlightened because one day when they are fully grown they suddenly realize that the burger on their plate used to be a cow. But I think that someone who did not find this out until he was an adult must have led a very sheltered life. True enlightenment is the realization that the cow would never have existed at all, would never have been out in the field grazing and experiencing mother love or companionship or any other joyful aspect of life, if not for the people who were raising it as food.
Balance is a difficult concept. It requires countervailing forces. It is based on conflict of interest. It means there will never be total peace, but a delicate balance of power prevents all out war from destroying everything.
In nature, every being is an exploiter and every being is exploited, and the balance comes from the struggle of each individual to exist. The sense of harmony that we feel when we allow ourselves to experience nature comes from that, but it is a curious thing about humans, that as much as we enjoy the beauty, we are not really willing to pay the price.
Yesterday was father's day, and as Bow was making his usual displays of strength outside, I noticed that right under his feet, tiny little plants were sprouting.
Should I allow the little plants to grow there? Or should I sweep up the dirt and clean the outer pen, for hygiene's sake? It's a tough call. I have seen criticism on the web of concrete floors in enclosures for chimpanzees and other primates. The latest thing seems to be to grow grass inside the enclosures, because that is supposed to be more comfortable to walk on and more natural.
Natural? Do you know that grass grows high and attracts fleas and ticks? Do you know that we have to use insecticide on our lawn to keep the dogs in the backyard flea and tick free? The insecticide would not be good for Bow, so it seems safer just to keep the pen clean.
This reasoning is a constant conflict in my mind, and I can hear it echoed in the discussions of others. On the one hand, we all love nature. But when it comes to the parasites and the diseases and the predators and the risks involved, we don't like nature so much. Take all the rainfall we have been having. It seems more than sufficient for the needs of my pasture, which is green and lush and full of living things.
To me, it looks like almost a tropical paradise. But friends of mine who have horses have told me that we have not had nearly enough rain to maintain the hay and alfalfa needed to support the livestock that everyone depends on.
There's enough rainfall for what naturally grows here. But for purposes of agriculture there is not enough. So how about it? Is the problem not enough rain or too much agriculture? It is a really hard question to answer. In order to feed all the world's people, we need agriculture. And among the left wing contingent, there seems to be a real lack of consensus as to whether we have too many people or not enough farming.
Take this article by a former vegetarian who now admits that eating meat is kind of good for us, and who believes that agriculture is the problem.
Notice that the article makes a certain amount of sense, until it gets into politics. Then all of a sudden it's the wealthy that we have to fight against to save the planet. But whenever someone owns a lot of land and allows everything to grow fallow, that is wealth. Activists don't seem to understand that land ownership is the greatest wealth that there can be, because in order to live like hunter-gatherers and enjoy that healthy lifestyle, each person would have to be able to control a much higher acreage per capita than any of us currently have. We would all need to get to be much more wealthy to revert to that lifestyle. The reason we don't is that we can't afford to. In order to save the bees, we need to grow more flowers and fewer wheat fields.
There are plenty of bees on my land
It's not really just about the evils of GMOs or pesticides. It's about how many humans can we feed and still not lose the ability to sustain the ecosystem that we all depend on. It's a game of numbers. And when it comes to chimpanzees, it's also about the numbers.
I went for a walk in the pasture this morning, and on my way I had brief encounter with a rabbit. A little further on, I met a shy turtle.
The shell of this turtle was damaged, and there were mosquitoes swarming around it. As I was trying to take a picture of the turtle, mosquitoes landed on my hand and took a drink of my blood.
I proceeded to take my walk in the pasture, which now supports a lot of life. But it would not be enough to support the life of a single human or single chimpanzee. We would need a lot more acreage than that.
On the way back I ran into the turtle again.
One of the benefits of being a natural turtle is that you get to decide where you go, instead of being told. It soon decided that it wanted to walk away.
The down side of being a free turtle is that if you get injured or are sick, no one will take care of you. It's survival of the fittest. There is nothing more Darwinian than nature. That's why I wonder sometimes at people who say they want everything to be natural and then support mandatory healthcare. How can they be so inconsistent? What are they really thinking?
As long as I am responsible for Bow's health, I have to keep the ticks and the fleas away, and in order to do that, we can't have wild grass growing on the floor of the outer pen. But the moment I find a large enough ecosystem to support Bow, then he will need to be able to withstand the ticks and fleas on his own, even if it means that some members of his family may succumb to disease because of this. Which is why in nature there is a higher birth rate and higher death rate than the civilized world allows, and populations are kept healthy and fit by the parasites and the predators that feed on them. There is no better health insurance for a population than nature, but the premiums, in the form of infant mortality and death upon disability, are rather high!
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