Unfortunately this is what so often happens when humans and animals come into contact. It was evening when I found it, its flesh still glistening in the warm sun - killed sometime earlier in the day. Undoubtedly it had been sunbathing in the morning when attacked. Maybe it was by human - but I think most humans have sensitivity and its injuries seem odd for a stick or stamping as you might imagine or even for some childish sadistic killing. It seems much more likely this is the work of an unrestrained dog, its teeth biting clean through the narrow neck crushing the spine and ripping the belly. It is not the fault of a dog, too stuffed on tinned meat to eat its own prey, it is not entirely the fault of the owner (who clearly didn't heed the signs insisting on a lead, and reminding them they are in a nature reserve) because a dog needs to play. It is just the fact that humans are animals and where animals compete there is death.
Yet humans are not entirely animals, it is when we realise (dialectically) we are animals that we become man. No animal creates a Nature Reserve. Few animals lement the loss of creatures from other species. It is a shame that so many humans are still only animals.
Dialectically I should not lash out against dog ownership but over the years I have developed nothing but disdain for dog owners. I've commented upon this before in the blog. Take a walk anywhere in the UK and you will meet other people taking a walk... and you will meet their dogs. I have always wondered whether these people would take walks if they didn't have dogs. If not, then the dogs are really walking the humans - a very sad state of affairs! The other time you will see people walking is when they have kids with them - this is very good, but what happens to kids that they stop doing this? All kids are fascinated by living things - the movement even from a snail is a wonder to a child. How do adults become so jaded that they learn to take for granted the one thing which dominates this planet and our whole existence namely life itself? Without the bird in the tree and everything that this entails this is just a barren rock where nothing stirs and the shadow of the rising and setting sun falls upon forgotten lands.
Yet you almost never see a "human" walking. It is because we are dead - dog owners are dead - preferring to mediate their experience of life through the childish yapping of their captured creature enslaved unknowingly into an ungodly alliance between man and animal. It is rather good for the dog - a social animal instinctively tuned to "status" struggles in the pack finding a new master a whole order of morality and intelligence higher than the top-dog, a master who also liberally shares out the packs kill. For the human however one wonders what can be sought in a dog? It is alive, so is a snail. It is intelligent, so is an octopus. It was once a critical member of a long standing symbiosis with man where dogs and man hunted together - but so are E.colli bacteria in the gut. It is very unclear what the concept of "pet" brings to the symbiosis these days. Dogs have been morphed like freaks at a circus into bizarre unworkable shapes, with no logic or purpose - living works of art. Would it be disgraceful to bioengineer further freakishness like double heads or six legs? Or just stick to the tail removing which is like having the muscles for our smile cut out?
This however is not my main criticism. I'm not always careful (at this stage) about by sources I'm more interested in getting the overall picture and fine tuning critical specifics when that is visible - but here is a statistic for the "recent" population of dogs in the UK 6.2 million. That is a dog for every 10 people in the UK. The dog niche is taken by the fox in the UK with a rough population for between 0.5 and 1 million. Crudely the UK environment could support around a million dogs - yet each day 7 times this are unleashed on the environment (6.2 + the foxes). While these pet dogs are mostly kept under control, their kills like the grass snake above represent a massive pressure on the environment.
Interesting facts unearthed just now. Only out a third of foxes find mates and breed, the rest are sub-ordinates who must wait for dominant individuals to die. If this is true there is evidently large competition for burrow sites in foxes. In harem animals the competition is for females - like with deer and some humans strategies also. I realise that many viable individuals may naturally never breed because they are low in the "status" heirachy, but this inefficiency enables rapid response to environmental changes. Fox hunting doesn't work because you kill one dominant fox and another comes out of the margins to take its place. This is exactly what auditing firms discovered in the 60s when over streamlines companies were seen to fail because they had no surplus resources to mobilise in times of stress. Low Status and non-breeding are critical aspects of Life's mechanism - tho from the individual perspective it amounts to being a "loser". Now that is more dialectical than anything on the subject of Status so far!
An irony is also found here. Foxes are hunted because they kill game birds (apparently). But game birds are hunted and eaten anyway. And the dogs used to hunt the foxes are fed from farmed meat also. And actually more meat is consumed by the hunting dogs than is consumed by the foxes that are hunted! The only difference is that dog owners pay farmers for the meat the dogs eat, while foxes don't pay farmers. So the simple economic argument to fox hunting is to replace hunts with compensation for farmers who lose livestock to foxes. This would cost the huntsmen less than the rigmaroll of hunting... now it is clear what hunting is - a culture and a sport - its got nothing to do with foxes! Hunting is an aristocratic sport. If it wasn't foxes it would be lions or elephants or something. How the whole UK media got all mixed up on this simple subject is beyond me.
Worse than dogs are cats. These creatures do still have a symbiotic relationship with man. With or without pet shops cats would still gravitate to urban environments and live near humans because of the population of rodents that abound near the amassing of foods in cities. I am very thankful to the cats near my garage. But at the same time there is 1 cat for every 6 humans in UK! With cats quoted as preying on 300 million animals a year (which is an underestimate I would have thought - it could be ten times this) there is a huge pressure on the environment - far greater than I suggest is warrented by the population pressure of rodents.
The obvious solution in both cases of dogs and cats is to either exclude dogs and cats from the environment all together, or stop feeding them and let there population come to carrying capacity. The former solution is simply cruel and raises the important question of what point dogs and cats do serve at all - we can just take walks ourselves why have a dog? In the latter case we would find out what pressure the UK environment really can sustain from cats and dogs by letting the cats and dogs take the pressure themselves. The one thing which would come under pressure is the industry of pet ownership and pet food and most of all the enduring idea that we must individually replicate each item in this country for each person so that each person can see themselves as the same as everyone else. I get all the pleasure of cats without the ownership from the cats that live near my garage - indeed propably more than the owners who evidently hardly ever see the cats because they are with me. I get all the pleasure of nature without the faintest whisp of ownership. As is always the case ownership distorts things and ultimately leads to death as we see in this picture. R.I.P. Grass Snake Aug 2006- 8 Apr 2009
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