The Hunt for the Golden Mole (5 page)

Hunters' yarns make fishermen's tales seem like essays in modesty. One of the most shameless exponents of the bragger's art was Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming (1820–1866), the self-glorifying Old-Etonian son of a Scottish baronet who was proud to be known as ‘the lion hunter'. His own written account,
Five Years of a Hunter's Life in the Far Interior of South Africa
, published in 1850, contains such a sustained crescendo of bare-chested boasting that the feminist characterisation of masculinity as ‘testosterone poisoning' no longer seems quite so unreasonable. How to remove a wounded hippo from a pool? Easy! Plunging into the water with a knife, Gordon-Cumming cuts a slit in the animal's hide like a belt-tab on a waistband. A thong threaded through the loop is then passed up to his men, who form up like a tug of war team and haul the beast ashore. Perhaps these are lines to be read between, but Gordon-Cumming cannot be dismissed out of hand as a fantasist. His vast collection of hunting trophies and stuffed animals – weighing in all 27.21 tonnes – caused a sensation at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and no less a figure than David Livingstone attested that his book conveyed a ‘truthful idea' of the hunter's life. It remains a classic of sporting literature, which even in its time caused amazement. To the armchair readers of Victorian England it was a tale of heroism drenched in the spirit of Empire. To a modern reader it can seem simply outrageous. No pages ever dripped with more blood; no writer ever found more glory in the taking of life, or showed less remorse for the suffering he caused; no book ever spoke more definitively of attitudes that, in a century of blazing attrition, would bring nature to its knees.

Gordon-Cumming nevertheless was both brave and resourceful. He lurched about southern Africa in a wagon train that time and again would lose its wheels or bog itself down in desert or river, drawn by uncooperative oxen whose lives were sucked out of them by tsetse flies. He spent nights in bothies roofed with elephants' ears, while his animals and men fell prey to disease, buffaloes and lions. In the course of four expeditions he lost forty-five horses, seventy cattle and seventy dogs. All that remained of his best wagon-driver one morning was a leg bitten off below the knee, still wearing its shoe. Gordon-Cumming himself, though weakened by rheumatic fever and too much rhinoceros meat, never faltered in his appetite for sport or his determination to enjoy it. When the barrel of a favourite gun burst, burning his arm and causing temporary deafness, he ‘mourned over it as David mourned for Absalom', but then simply switched to ‘the double-barrelled Moore and Purdey rifles, carrying sixteen to the pound' and made bullets for them by melting down his snuffers, spoons, candlesticks, teapots and cups. His accounts were declared by some commentators to be ‘romantic'. They are certainly graphic.

. . . I was loading and firing as fast as I could, sometimes at the head and sometimes behind the shoulder, until my elephant's forequarters were a mass of gore, notwithstanding which he continued to hold stoutly on, leaving the grass and branches of the forest scarlet in his wake.

Having fired thirty-five rounds with my two-grooved rifle, I opened fire upon him with the Dutch six-pounder; and when forty bullets had perforated his hide, he began for the first time to evince signs of a dilapidated constitution.

The tally of elephants rises to fifty, then to a hundred. Many of them die after prolonged ‘fights' that go on for hours, with the quarry constantly harried by dogs and fired upon by Gordon-Cumming from his horse. One such bout goes on from half past eleven in the morning until after sundown, by which time the ‘venerable monarch of the forest' has received fifty-seven bullets. The high price of ivory adds an economic impulse to the sport, but Gordon-Cumming doesn't stop at elephants. Antelopes, rhinoceroses, hippos, giraffes, lions, wildebeest, buffaloes, zebras, kudus, elands, wild boars and crocodiles are all ‘bowled over' by his fire. In one pool alone he kills fifteen hippos. Bullets pierce shoulders, legs, flanks, necks, breasts, eyes, mouths and brains. He does not say that killing is better than sex, but it certainly beats anything else he can think of. Taking your pick of five old bull elephants, he finds, ‘is so overpoweringly exciting that it almost takes a man's breath away'.

He is not blind to the animals' beauty, but it seems only to increase his pleasure in killing them. ‘I was struck with admiration at the magnificence of the noble black buck, and I vowed in my heart to slay him . . .' After a wounded lion has crawled off and died, he regrets the inadequate power of words to convey his feelings. ‘No description could give a correct idea of the surpassing beauty of this most majestic animal, as he lay still warm before me.' There is an aesthetic of death. As beauty enhances the thrill, so ugliness must diminish it. Afterwards, returning to camp, he spots and kills an ‘extremely old' black rhinoceros, but can find little or nothing to commend it. ‘His horns were quite worn down and amalgamated, resembling the stump of an old oak tree.'

The numbers of dead were prodigious. The 27 tonnes of exhibits that drew the crowds in 1851 were not the total weight
of animals Gordon-Cumming had killed but just the heads, horns, tusks and skins that he stripped from the bodies. Apart from some meat and fat taken for food, all the rest was left where it fell. Where the specimens were not of exhibition quality, he might not take anything at all. The only benefits were to vultures and hyenas.

And not all the animals died – or at least they did not die quickly. Gordon-Cumming forever complains of wounded animals dragging themselves away, leaving only trails of bloody footprints into the bush. He is ‘very much annoyed at wounding and losing in the last week no less than ten first-rate old bull elephants'. Another time he bags five ‘first-rate hippopotami', but only at the cost of wounding three or four more. Casually he maims a white rhinoceros but is so preoccupied with the elephants that he does not follow up to kill it. Lions, buffaloes, crocodiles and antelopes are wounded too, but never does Gordon-Cumming's regret extend further than his loss of a trophy. It certainly does nothing to dampen his pleasure. The wounding of eight elephants is all part of ‘the finest night's sport and the most wonderful that was ever enjoyed by man'.

Gordon-Cumming of course deserves to be judged by the standards of his own day rather than ours, and in his own day he was a hero. One of the antelopes he shot turned out to be a new species which still bears his name:
Tragelaphus scriptus roualeyni
, the Limpopo bushbuck. ‘Conservation' in the mid nineteenth century was not an issue or, in its modern sense, even yet a word. The forests of Africa teemed with fur and the oceans teemed with fin. Men by their own efforts could no more deplete this almighty horde than they could fly to the moon or warp the climate. Such things were the province of God alone. Few people now would argue with Jeremy Bentham's caution
on the nature and quality of non-human life. ‘The question,' he said ‘is not “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but rather, “Can they suffer?”' Philosophers and psychologists still argue about the conscious lives of animals, their self-knowledge and ‘intelligence', but none now doubts they can feel pain. Many believe they suffer emotionally too. But what is commonplace in the twenty-first century was not so clear in the nineteenth. It is true that Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, had been dead for nearly twenty years before Gordon-Cumming published his book, but the question was still hanging. Could animals suffer? René Descartes had been dead for exactly two hundred years, but his ideas still cast a shadow.

Descartes, celebrated as the founder of modern philosophy, has a valid claim to be regarded as a genius, one of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century. Three hundred and fifty years after his death, his achievements still merited six whole pages of
Encylopaedia Britannica.
Very few people, before or since, could claim to be his intellectual superiors. And yet he chose to devote his huge mental power to a densely argued theory which demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the leading scholars of his day that animals had no conscious life. To have a conscious life you needed an immortal soul, and animals had no immortal souls. They believed nothing, desired nothing, felt nothing. They were like machines. If you applied a stimulus, out would come the matching response. If you shot one, or stuck a knife into it, the noise it made was purely mechanistic, not a cry of pain. Lacking consciousness, animals could not feel pain. Anyone who thought otherwise was guilty of anthropomorphism. This comforting misapprehension paved the way for what opponents of laboratory procedures on living animals still like to call ‘vivisection'. If an anatomist wanted to study the innards of a dog, he could simply nail it up by its paws and open it with a knife.
By the same logic, a hunter in search of specimens could blaze away with no apprehension of cruelty.

That was the theory. The reality, I suspect, was somewhat different. The romantic poets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, well before Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming dipped his pen, had urged their readers to show kindness to animals. As Coleridge writes in
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(1798):

                 
He prayeth well, who loveth well

                 
Both man and bird and beast.

                 
He prayeth best, who loveth best

                 
All things both great and small.

What would be the value of kindness and love to creatures unable to respond? Philosophers could argue, and scientists seek for proofs, but there was little doubt in the public mind that what
looked
like pain in animals
was
pain in animals, and that pain meant suffering. The passions that drove Anna Sewell to write
Black Beauty,
probably the most widely read plea for animal welfare ever published, were burning long before the book appeared in 1877. It would be easier to acquit Gordon-Cumming if we could be sure he held the Cartesian view and was of innocent mind. But his writings demonstrate unequivocally his awareness that animals could suffer, and that in some instances their suffering is deserved. This is made obvious when his wagon-driver is eaten by a lion. In pursuit of the killer, he writes: ‘I wished I could take him alive and torture him, and, setting my teeth, I dashed my steed forward within thirty yards of him and shouted, “Your time is up, old fellow.”'

What would be the point of torturing an animal if you thought
it could feel no pain? That ‘old fellow', too, is typical of Gordon-Cumming's tendency to anthropomorphise, or to describe animals in terms of their characters. He certainly understands that dogs can suffer. ‘On proceeding to seek for Shepherd, the dog which the lion had knocked over in the chase, I found him with his back broken and his bowels protruding from a gash in the stomach; I was, therefore, obliged to end his misery with a ball.' Whatever his reason for not extending this sensitivity to elephant, hippo or lion, it cannot be that he believed them incapable of suffering.

It is obvious from the celebrity Gordon-Cumming enjoyed that no great opprobrium attached to his spree. But it ill behoves the twenty-first century to accuse the nineteenth of double standards – we have enough of our own. My favourite example of moral confusion is from the 1980s at the University of Tennessee. At that time it was home (as it probably still is) to some of the world's most privileged mice. Their accommodation was temperature- and humidity-controlled. Their bedding was fresh, their diet a masterclass in nutritional exactitude. But there was, inevitably, a price to be paid. The mice were purpose-bred for the university's laboratory, and their ultimate destiny was to die in the service of human health. To compensate for this sacrifice, and for as long as they lived, their comfort would be guaranteed. Their welfare was legally protected, and nothing could be done to them without the informed consent of the university's animal care committee. At the end, attended by their own dedicated vet, they would be wafted to the hereafter on an overdose of anaesthetic. Few humans would live and die as painlessly.

But these were not the only mice at the University of Tennessee. In secret places beneath floors and furniture, behind skirting boards, lived another quite separate population – genetically identical to the five-star specimens in the laboratory, even
directly related to them, but socially a world apart. These mice were pests whose health and well-being were of no concern to the US Department of Agriculture or to the university's animal care committee. Their welfare was left to the caretakers, who trapped them on sheets of cardboard spread with glue. The irony of their sticky end was not just that it would have been indefensible if practised on their upstairs cousins. It was that the gluepot victims had once been five-star mice themselves. Their fatal error had been to escape, and not to understand the small print of human ethics.

But the moral maze doesn't end there. The university housed yet another group of mice, procured for the benefit of the zoology department's snakes. It was a core principle of the animal care committee that animals should be fed their natural diets – which, for the snakes, meant live mice. The ethical proviso was that this must be done for dietary reasons alone, not for the sake of an experiment. If a researcher decided to increase the value of his snake project by studying, say, the fear responses of the mice, then there would be a further, seismic upheaval in the ethical landscape. The mice themselves would become the subject of an experiment, and being fed to snakes undoubtedly would cause them to suffer. The animal care committee therefore would need to hear a very convincing explanation before allowing the observations to continue.