Inappropriate pets

The urge to keep animals as pets is a strong one.  Dogs have been living in our homes for at least 15,000 years, and maybe much longer. Cats are more recent companions, becoming domesticated around 10,000 years ago (though some say they aren’t domesticated yet).

Photo credit: Getty

But these solid traditions are not good enough for many. Cats and dogs? So uncool. How about a snake, a ferret or a lion?

Wild animals don’t necessarily make good pets – but if you want to insist that you’re the Dr Dolittle that can tame a wild beast and make it love you, well go right ahead. Keep in mind though there’s a reason this tends to be a hobby of the super-rich, and it’s not just the high cost of feeding and housing a chimp, a wolf or a leopard. I’m talking medical care. Facial reconstruction. And, of course, your funeral.

But let’s not get too smug: we all know the stats on ‘dangerous dog’ maulings in this country, and even the humble Jack Russell has its dark side.

Why are we so weird about animals? One minute they’re our ‘fur-babies’ (shudder), next minute we’re eating them. Cat, dog, lamb, pig. We give our kids books

Jemima Puddleduck: before and after
Image credit: Beatrix Potter/Gordon Ramsay

populated by rabbits in waistcoats and bears eating marmalade (you wish), and wring our hands about pandas, orangutans and the ivory trade while happily supporting an industry that slaughters animals for our dinner tables.

Can’t we appreciate animals without either commodifying them or demanding that they interact with us?

At least in New Zealand biosecurity restrictions are too tight to allow people to import and keep random animals the way they can in America – and our native wildlife is harmless (apart from your katipo). Good luck finding one of them, I spent my whole childhood searching for them and I’ve never seen one yet.

The dangerous species here are all things we’ve brought in ourselves, and it’s not us that’s at risk: it’s the remnant wildlife that we haven’t yet finished driving to extinction. The fairy tern, the kiwi, the pekapeka. The kaka.

In Wellington you’d hardly know that kaka were a threatened species. Fifteen years after their release inside the safety of the Zealandia fence, their population has grown so much that they’ve become a common sight in gardens and parks across the city.

And Wellingtonians are quite besotted (mostly). Many encourage the birds to visit by feeding them in the garden, but this is where it gets tricky, because

kaka are wild birds, not pets, bold and cheeky though they may be. And they’re hugely vulnerable to cats (as well as dogs, and people annoyed about having the bark stripped off their trees).

Cats are a threat anyway outside the safety of Zealandia, without you actually luring birds to their turf – the suburban garden – so please be conscious of this if you set up a kaka feeder at your place. Set it high, and out of reach of cats, and don’t encourage the birds to come to you, or get too hands-on with them.

Kaka are our own native wild parrots, the monkeys of the bird world. As we learn to live with them in an urban environment, we need to remember they’re not our pets. And if you think they’re a nuisance, stripping your trees and nibbling on your guttering, consider what a nuisance we’ve been to them: destroying their habitat and allowing rats, stoats, and cats to nearly wipe them out. Please remember who was here first, and let them be wild.

Dinner*

It all started so well. Salmon with green pea and lemon risotto on the Monday, Vietnamese glazed beef sliders on Tuesday, and never the same thing twice. No one had time to do this stuff from scratch anymore but now we could all eat like kings, every night, without racking our brains. No more dragging the kids around the supermarket after daycare, no more arguments over what to make. Just there on your doorstep every night – the menu, the ingredients, the recipe.

The food bag.

It was a dark time in the world outside: the global financial crisis, bombings, riots and fear. But as the nation hunkered down and re-focused on home renovation,

Photo credit: isaynotomato.com

cooking shows and family values, it was an exciting time as well. Homes around the country were mesmerised by Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules, Jamie and Nigella. But who has time for all that hard work! This way everyone could be a foodie, without the prep and planning. Well, everyone who could afford it. At work the next day, everyone was on the same page: did little Oliver eat his broccolini last night? How did your family like the fennel dressing? And all over New Zealand kids were learning about the world while they helped Mum and Dad cook Sumerian lamb with roast parsnip and spinach couscous.  It was quality family time.

No one claimed responsibility when it happened. On Thursday, everything was normal - by Friday the world had turned upside down. It started like any ordinary evening, with the bag on the doorstep and a recipe for Catalan pork fettucine with a parmesan garlic crumb. And all over the country, life coaches, software developers,

Photo credit: Ibelieveicanfry.com

conveyancing solicitors and real estate agents were chopping and mixing and firing up the Le Creuset. Instagram was going off. Little Sophies and Jacobs set the tables in a hundred thousand households, and dinner was served.

And then, suddenly, silence. Where were all the tweets, reviewing this one? The eye-rolling teenagers’ ironic dining-table snapchats? What on earth was going on?

The next morning it became startlingly, horrifyingly clear. The entire middle class of New Zealand was gone. Wiped out – by a food-bag-borne illness. Was it accidental? Botulism? Or something more sinister? A food bag hack. There was simply not enough of the medical fraternity left to run the tests. But as the survivors slowly came to grips with this disaster, the realisation dawned that no matter who was responsible, things would never be the same. The balance between production and consumption was lost. Trade, policy, finance – the entire personal training industry – nothing could be sustained. The corridors of power were deserted and the million dollar homes stood empty. And this was how The Collapse began.

 

Photo credit: Chris Luckhardt

*From an idea by Nicola Little.

Nature lovers

In the 19^th century, you could be a nature lover and go off on a jolly expedition blasting animals with your shotgun. Perfectly normal. You might also be a taxidermist (handy), preserve your little friends in formaldehyde,

Photo credit: UCL UK

or be a dab hand at jamming pins through beetles. All very respectable, and a noble pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Find it, kill it, own it seemed to be the Edwardian and Victorian ethos: a childish drive to collect and possess. This still goes on today among trophy hunters, but these days naturalists are more focused on preserving wildlife in its context (or what’s left of its context).

This change seemed to begin in the 20^th century, but even then naturalists were such busybodies. It was as if they’d emerged from their childhood of pulling the wings off flies and developed some empathy, but they still just couldn’t leave the animals alone.

Gerald Durrell for instance, a very engaging writer, conservationist and educator. But he had some strange ideas about wild animals as pets.

Photo credit: Hermann Tirler

 Amazing for kids obviously (I would have loved it), but a huge disservice to the animals (if I’d been that sloth I would’ve been really annoyed). And Gavin Maxwell, what a terrible egotist. I was captivated by Ring of Bright Water as a child, but when I read the book as an adult I was horrified by his determined mistreatment of otter after otter, as he tried to domesticate them and bend them to his will.  

And then there were the Adamsons. Born free indeed. Couldn’t she have just got a tabby? 

Why do we do this to animals? Maybe it’s all the childhood literature, the way we’re brought up to think of animals as fictional characters, with human traits. Little

George, Elsa, Joy.
Photo credit: Classic Safaris Africa

friends to have tea parties with. Is that what those naturalists were acting out, while they thought they were ‘doing science’? What kind of ego buzz were they getting from pestering wild animals and believing they had a special rapport? They were like emo teenagers, “nobody understands me – except animals.”

You have to ask, was it doing the animals any good? Did it do the natural world any good? It would be fair to say these mid-century tv shows, books and movies

Dr Dolittle. Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox

influenced a generation of kids, and made them more conservation minded than their parents. But I think it skewed our perspective on what respect for the natural world really entails.

There were other naturalists of course, more interested in context, and education. Jacques Cousteau inspired a generation of marine biologists, they are just everywhere these days. And of course there’s David Attenborough – a more gentlemanly naturalist altogether, but still, not above getting too hands-on with the wildlife.

But I worry that time is running out for us to finally grow up, and learn to appreciate animals in their own habitat, valuing them as part of the fabric of the world rather than for the uses we can put them to, or the emotions we can project onto them.

Sometimes I wonder if naturalists like David Attenborough are just the same as the Victorians, really. Still collecting. Wanting to categorise and record every little thing, every part of the planet. There’s a sadness and nostalgia that permeates Attenborough’s later work, as if he’s getting ready to say goodbye to this beautiful world. Or as if he knows this beautiful world, that he has so lovingly explored and catalogued, is saying goodbye to us. He’s been quoted as saying that humans are like ‘a plague on earth’. And he’s seen more of it than any of us - he should know.