Beak, Tooth and Claw: Living with Predators in Britain

Introduction

As ravenous wolves come swooping down on lambs or kids to snatch them away from right amidst their flock … so the Achaeans mauled the Trojans.1

The term predator is usually ascribed to large meat-eaters such as birds of prey, wolves and big cats, and is derived from praedator, the Latin for plunderer. Predation, a verb to describe hunting and killing for food, comes from praedari, to rob. The word ‘predator’, therefore, means a thief that steals life, and predation is the act of plundering and pillaging. These harsh definitions evoke immorality and ruthlessness and appear in ancient literature to portray violent human behaviour – a dominant force attacking and consuming the weak and vulnerable. The Roman poet Ovid describes the rape of the mythical goddess Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus as an act of predation:

The captive has no chance

To escape, and the raptor sits eyeing his prey …

She [Philomela] trembled like a quivering lamb, who,

After it has been wounded and then spat out

By a grey wolf, cannot yet believe it is safe;

Or like a dove whose feathers are smeared

With its own blood and who still shudders with fear

Of those greedy talons that pierced her skin.2

Writing in the pre-modern era, James Tyrrell, in his 1697 History of England, uses a word which has predation as its root – depredations – to describe an English army setting out to repel a violent Scottish invasion: ‘The Yorkshire men, being resolved to put a stop to these depredations … raised an army of about 10,000 men.’3 In modern vernacular, the term predator has been appropriated to describe someone who hunts down a victim for sex or even murder. Throughout time we have used the natural behaviour of wild creatures by analogy to impose moral judgement, and although we think of our twenty-first-century selves as enlightened, rational and scientific, the ancient idea that ruthless predators attack innocent victims still has a hold on the popular imagination.

Contradictions swirl around predators. We may fear and often revile them, but we also admire their beauty and strength. Beguiled by their fur or their plumage, we have stripped these from their bodies and fashioned them into coverings for our own skins, often to convey status, wealth and sex appeal. For thousands of years we have folded our dreams and our flaws into predator pelts, playing with the image of ourselves. If we don’t literally inhabit their skins, we take on their image. Big cats, eagles and bears, creatures we associate with dominance and courage, commonly adorn heraldic shields and advertising billboards. Predators the world over hold our stories.

Even the way we speak and convey ideas is bound to our concept of predators. They weave through our speech as metaphor and simile, casting light onto human nature – sly as a fox, eagle-eyed, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, political hawks and doves, brave as a lion … And yet, our primal fear of predators and the damage they can cause to both our bodies and our livelihoods can provoke such intense emotions that we drive them to extinction. They are too in-your-face, too disruptive, too damaging – simply too much like us – to be tolerated. Predators large and small are the most persecuted creatures on earth.4 They always have been, and still are, gods or vermin, heroes or villains. There is nothing straightforward about how we use the terms predator and predation; they are redolent with meaning beyond the necessity of killing to eat.

The pure biological definition is much broader and simpler – predators kill other living creatures for all or part of their diet. This applies to vast swathes of life on earth, including some plants. Sharks, peregrines and wolves are predators, but so too are minnows, blue tits and dormice. But as the complex, emotional and cultural beings that we are, we have discarded the biological definition and formed our own human-centred categorisation, which holds on to vestiges of the past associations. In the modern mind’s eye, it is still a laden term for animals with an array of sharp beaks, claws, talons and teeth; weaponry that can damage us physically and metaphorically.

Predators are, therefore, what we want them to be, and that is very often far beyond reality. This book focuses on British meat-eaters; the ones living alongside us now, the long-gone, extinct creatures, and the predators that may reappear in the future. It is about our relationship with them, but because of our complex perceptions, it is as much about people as it is about the animals themselves.

It may feel as though the realm of predators and predation is remote from our modern, urban lives; that these bloody activities belong out there in the wilderness and shown in wildlife documentaries, but in reality, we are all surrounded by predators every day.

As I sit and write on a bright spring day in Bristol, a blue tit pecks aphids off roses to feed its chicks, and overhead swifts swoop and swerve, snapping insects from the air, not unlike sharks feasting on shoals in the ocean. Over Somerset’s fields and copses, mewing buzzards soar on thermals to hunt rabbits, small birds and insects, while crows scan the landscape from their perches, searching for nests of chicks. Along the Bristol Channel, seals pursue fish, a bounty they share not only with us but with myriad screeching seabirds that plunge into the tidal race. As evening falls, the languid song of a blackbird is a wild-wood lament for a long-gone landscape of open forest. This black-coated chorister is also a prolific killer. On one birding forum an astonished gardener writes:

Whilst digging up my very neglected garden to grow veggies I am enjoying the company of a male blackbird. He appears within minutes of me starting to dig and approaches to within a metre or so. In one ten-minute session he consumed 3 medium sized worms, 2 big ones, 5 centipedes, 1 leather jacket, 1 grub species unknown and 1 spider. He also appeared to consume 6 insects that were too small for me to see. In two more visits this afternoon he seemed to eat similar amounts. He is not taking food away and I have not seen any sign of a female so I am assuming he has not paired up yet. I am amazed at the quantity he can put away.5

When night falls, moonlit woodlands will see tawny owls land on branches, as silent as ghosts; listening, waiting for the small and scuttling creatures to feed their owlets. Tiny bones and teeth will appear in pellets scattered among the leaves. This witching hour sees bats replace the swifts as aerial hunters, and in the milky shadows, hedgehogs devour worms and foxes feast on rabbits and voles. All over the country, day and night, in the city, out in the fields, under the water and in the air, there is an orgy of predation, an ‘odious scene of violence and tyranny’, in the words of philosopher John Stuart Mill.6

Yet, despite the plethora of killing, blackbirds and blue tits are considered garden delights and we assign them a different category to sparrowhawks, which hunt and kill these small birds. Perhaps it is because common garden birds eat worms and insects, creatures we don’t relate to, and their act of predation doesn’t involve spilling blood, that we downgrade them to something much softer and less menacing than a full-blown, meat-eating predator. They are, though, officially in that category. So too are great tits, only slightly larger than their blue cousins. These tick-tocking, busy-body birds are opportunists that are as happy feeding off a bird table as on a carcass left by large predators. They have even been recorded eating the flesh of hanged people. Ornithologist John Barnes wrote of their ‘murderous tendency’ and described a group of pied flycatchers, ‘found dead with smashed skulls in nest-boxes taken over by great tits’.7 Their powerful bills can crack acorns and hazelnuts as well as the skulls of hibernating bats, where they splinter the bone and then eat the brains. Author Becky Crew dubbed them ‘zombie tits’.8 Even so, they are still one of the nation’s favourite birds.

It is part of the predator paradox that we consider some creatures as predators but exclude others; and even this restricted category is filled with subtle subdivisions. There are courageous predators, such as lions and bears, on whose muscular shoulders we project our ideal of strength and dignity in battle. Aerial predators like eagles and hawks speak to our yearning for mastery of the skies and freedom from the shackles that bind us to the earth. We admire the endurance and teamwork of pack hunters like wild dogs, wolves and hyenas. Most fearsome of all are the alien, cold-blooded killers in the form of sharks and crocodiles, chilling in their seeming lack of emotion.

These are apex predators at the top of the food chain. They eat large prey and have big territories; they are the ‘red-in-tooth-and-claw’ creatures, the ones most likely to spring to mind when the word predator is mentioned. Beneath them are the smaller and more numerous meso (middle-sized) predators, which usually have a wider diet and are often regarded as a nuisance rather than with fear. The cunning fox and the fast and furious weasel, for example, are exasperating in their ability to evade our control. There are also those predators that occupy a shifting hinterland, a permeable place, where creatures come and go depending on who is looking at them. Badgers are lovable bumblers when they eat grubs, but we are thrown into cognitive dissonance when they overturn a hedgehog and devour the soft underbelly. Hedgehogs themselves are cute when curled in a ball, but they also devour the helpless nestlings of ground-nesting birds. These are the confusing creatures, the ones that challenge our concept of ‘adorable’ and sit uneasily alongside wolves and eagles. The hunters we place on the outside of the bloodied ‘predator’ box are creatures such as songbirds, waders and small mammals because they target prey that we dislike or have no relationship with. We cannot understand our reaction to hunters without acknowledging our attitude to the hunted.

We know this scenario. A wildlife documentary shows a lioness crouched in long grass. She is hungry and locked-on to a young antelope that has strayed from its mother. It walks with delicate poise through shimmering heat. The lioness inches forwards. Time slows down and the moments stretch. The calf is naive and unaware of its imminent, violent death, and we will it to flee. Then, without warning, a burst of energy, confusion and the sound of fear sees the calf die with its throat in the grip of canines that are ten times longer than our own. It is helpless in the face of such overpowering aggression. As life ebbs from its body we are flooded with complex emotions. Most of us will never have direct contact with antelope in the wild, yet there is an understanding of the terror and pain that is woven through this narrative; we have entered the drama.

The word empathy combines the Greek word for feeling, patheia, with the prefix en, giving a sense of within. Enpatheia: literally, to be in-feeling with something or someone, to be inside what they are experiencing. The word empathy only appeared in common usage in the early twentieth century, but it gives additional depth to the term sympathy, which is a more surface recognition of suffering. Sympathy acknowledges distress, empathy shares it. Empathy is not abstract or conceptual, it is focused on an individual; we place ourselves in the position of the one who is suffering and imagine their pain. Empathy for prey is the other side of the fear of predation, and it is deeply human.

As humanity evolved as hunter gatherers, first in Africa and then across the world, it was safer to live in small groups with strong social bonds. The ever-present threat of attack from other tribes or dangerous wildlife required social cohesion cemented by caring and sharing. Empathy emerged out of this sociability, the ability to connect deeply with another’s feelings. It is highly developed in human beings, but it is also found in varying degrees in primates, elephants, cetaceans and rodents. Without empathy we too easily disregard suffering, causing relationships and communities to fall apart.

The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal believes empathy is so important he places it at the heart of mammalian societies:

This capacity likely evolved because it served our ancestors’ survival in two ways. First, like every mammal, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring. Second, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates. Taking care of them is just a matter of enlightened self-interest.9

To reach across a boundary and vicariously feel another’s anguish, which then translates into a desire to help, is a powerful driver. Humanity can do it so well that it can spill outside the human sphere and be extended to other species; especially if those species are appealing. A mother bear protecting her young from an aggressive male, a deer being run down by wolves, baby turtles being picked off by gulls; these are the kinds of situations found in nature that stimulate our empathetic brains. We, too, feel overwhelmingly protective of our children, battle against the odds, understand the feeling of being chased. The struggles in nature reflect the struggles in our own lives. Natural history documentaries play on it and Disney films make their millions by manipulating our feelings of empathy towards other species. But it only works if we see the predator as a danger to ourselves and if we can relate to the plight of the prey.

When a song thrush eats a snail, there are no tears for the alien-looking mollusc that would otherwise ruin our garden plants. The act of predation itself involves no obvious pain; there is no heart-racing hunt or agonising death, and it certainly helps that the thrush has a heavenly song. This act of predation seems scarcely worthy of the description. However, if a sparrowhawk swoops into the garden and grasps the thrush in its dagger-like talons, we can feel hostility towards the hawk and a desire to help the songbird.

In personal correspondence Frans de Waal wrote, ‘we consider predators those animals which eat animals we care about. Krill doesn’t interest us, so a humpback whale is no predator, but an orca is, because it may eat the whale.’

We humans, then, are contrary creatures. We have evolved in a dangerous world, assailed by both actual and imagined pain. Our coping mechanisms leave us scanning the skies and peering across the horizon searching for danger. We are spooked by a slight shift in the shadows; a noise in the night, a looming shape in the mist, and we turn to each other for safety. We are empathetic, we feel for our family, friends and neighbours, as well as for the wider world. Yet, we are predators too, capable of callous killing and appropriation, especially of creatures that are deemed a threat.

Britain once had an impressive array of apex meat-eaters, but we had removed native bears and lynx by early medieval times, and wolves by the end of the sixteenth century. We had virtually exterminated birds of prey and wildcats by the time Queen Victoria had left the throne. There are many mesopredators that still live alongside us, and they continue to test the limits of our tolerance. This is where the potent battles in conservation are to be found today, in the unstable interface between people and the foxes, corvids, seals, badgers and raptors of Britain. They raise vital questions, not only for conservationists but for society as a whole. Should we control predator numbers? If not, what are the consequences? If so, how many should we kill and over what area and timescale? Who does the controlling and who pays for it? Whose opinions matter? The answers to these questions are varied and complex, and they depend as much on social factors as they do on conservation science. Logic may dictate one course of action, but there is so much more to our decision-making than what makes sense in an equation.

Woven throughout human history are dreams and aspirations, heritage and respect for ancestral toil. Different communities imprint their mark on landscapes and those communities build strong bonds and establish cultures that deepen over time. They become part of a place and its landscape. It is impossible to look at Britain, be that countryside, village or city, and not to see the mark of generations of people and their relationships in the warp and weft of the tapestry. When face to face with a fox predating lambs or a hen harrier taking grouse chicks, our reponse may not lie in a simple assessment of a problem and its rational solution, but in the realm of fuzzy logic. This concept was invented by Berkeley mathematician, Lofti Zadeh. In summary it states that when the number of elements to be considered increases, definitive statements lose meaning and precision, and the harder it becomes to provide simple solutions. Most predator–prey issues can’t be reduced to A + B = C; they are much more complex than that.

David Macdonald, professor of zoology and conservation at the University of Oxford, is firmly of the belief that today, conservation sits alongside social science, politics and, increasingly, ethics, when it comes to finding solutions to the problems of predators in a human-dominated world. In the twenty-first century we have reached a place where a more holistic view of the natural world and our role within it has to be considered. In an interview I did with him for this book, he said:

‘We are no longer in the era where the only good one is a dead one, you can’t get away with that, or indeed the only good one is a live one, you can’t get away with that either. As the complexity of the problems has become clearer, and the gridlock between positions based on natural science and social science has become clearer, and the fact that there is no right answer and no silver bullet to any of these issues, I think people find themselves having to acknowledge that different views of the landscape lead people to have different conclusions. Accepting that is the case, then we have to take a philosophical position on what is the right thing to do – what should we do.’

This view was echoed in a Scottish report on predation, ‘Understanding Predation’, published in 2017, by a partnership of organisations – the British Trust for Ornithology, University of Aberdeen, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and the University of Stirling. Focusing mainly on birds, but with findings applicable more widely, it states:

Predation is a natural process. Yet it often causes controversy and divides opinion, with the scientific understanding of different predator–prey interactions not being recognised by those who work on the land, whose local understanding derives from what they see on a daily basis, and vice versa. To identify better solutions to longstanding problems, it is clear that we must first bring together the differing views about predation. A polarised and adversarial approach to our understanding of predation only serves to perpetuate the problems.10

Predation is a philosophical issue. It involves not just a practical assessment of the act itself and its consequences, but demands ethical and moral judgement. Predation is so powerful a concept that it goes to the heart of who we think we are and how we believe we should relate to each other and the natural world. It even infiltrates religion. In the West, where Christianity has held sway over cultures and ideas for 2,000 years, predators and the act of predation have played a defining role in Christian concepts of good and evil. Wolves, snakes, foxes, scorpions and lions sit alongside lambs, deer and doves as essential symbols for the presence of evil and good in the world, their traits projected onto human behaviour. But the fact that predation exists at all, the necessity of killing to eat, has proved challenging to theologians. Christianity has struggled with the biological necessity for killing to survive on a planet that has been brought into being by a good and loving god. Jefferson McMahan, professor of philosophy at Oxford University, believes that our understanding of predation has fundamentally challenged how we view the forces behind the universe; questions he explores in his essay ‘The Moral Problem of Predation’:

Virtually everywhere that there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. The means of killing are various: dismemberment, asphyxiation, disembowelment, poison, and so on … The unceasing, incalculable suffering of animals caused by predation is also an important though largely neglected element in the traditional theological ‘problem of evil’ – that is, the problem of reconciling the idea that there is a benevolent, omnipotent deity with the existence of suffering and other evils.11

Writer and Christian theologian Nick Mayhew-Smith also pondered this dichotomy. In his book, The Naked Hermit,12 he explores how the founding fathers of Christianity, saints Augustine, Basil and Bede, came to terms with the existence of predation. St Augustine, writing in the fourth century CE, thought it served a useful purpose by reminding people of the terrible disharmony introduced into the world through original sin, when Adam and Eve fell from grace in the Garden of Eden. Pain and bloodshed are consequences of the havoc we have wrought upon the earth and we should view it with humility. On the other hand, St Basil, also writing in the fourth century, and St Bede in the seventh took a more positive view, focusing on the contentedness and lack of aggression in the world before the Fall, when the whole of creation was friendly and vegetarian, a state to which we will return in the fullness of time. According to this doctrine, Mayhew-Smith tells us:

… there was such harmony in the cosmos that even lions and wolves did not hunt for prey but were originally vegetarians, something implied in Genesis 1:30. ‘Nor did the wolf search out and ambush around the sheepfold … but all things in harmony fed upon the green plants and fruits of the trees,’ writes Bede in his commentary on this happy state of affairs.13

The desire for a world without killing is reflected in the writings of the prophet Isaiah, who lived through tumultuous times in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. His prophecies express a yearning for a non-violent, vegetarian state of holiness, where the world is without any form of violent death for people or animals; a return to the tranquillity of the Garden of Eden.

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and the little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.14

For Christianity, the necessity of killing to eat has become a sign of humanity’s sinfulness, and the absence of predation is a pure, God-like state. Surely, then, argues McMahan, this is something we should strive for. His essay takes the idea to its logical conclusion. If it is morally good to reduce pain and suffering on earth, then it follows that a vegan world for both people and animals is not only desirable but something we should actively promote. In this painless existence, predators and predation are eliminated; there is no more agony inflicted on suffering prey. He uses the example of the Siberian tiger, a big cat that is on the verge of extinction. If we allow it to die out, he argues, then the pain it would have caused to its future prey is also removed from the world. Allowing the extinction of predators could be seen as an act of goodness by removing the burden of future pain from the planet. Furthermore, he suggests, biological engineering could also be explored to remove an animal’s desire to kill, by manipulating its genes. The only logical conclusion to desiring a world without killing is to remove the act of predation from the workings of ecosystems:

Ecological science, like other sciences, is not stagnant. What may now seem forever impossible may yield to the advance of science in a surprisingly short time … we will almost certainly be able eventually to eliminate predation while preserving the stability and harmony of ecosystems. It will eventually become possible to gradually convert ecosystems that are now stabilized by predation into ones resembling those island ecosystems, some quite large, that flourished for many millennia without any animals with a developed capacity for consciousness being preyed upon by others. We should therefore begin to think now about whether we ought to exercise the ability to intervene against predation in an effective and discriminating way once we have developed it. If we conclude that we should, that may give us reason now to try to hasten our acquisition of that ability.15

McMahan is not ecologically naive; he is aware that large numbers of herbivores, unchecked by predation, can degrade a habitat so much they will die from starvation, which is also not a desirable situation. He therefore argues that allowing predators to disappear must only be considered where that scenario could be avoided, as in the case of the Siberian tiger, where its numbers are now so low through human persecution that its total disappearance will have negligible effect.

It is an intriguing but disturbing vision of a soft-play planet, where pain and fear are eliminated. From a western Christian perspective, it will be a return to a holy state, a world without killing, where we will no longer have treacherous wolves, untrustworthy foxes, evil snakes and malevolent scorpions, those creatures that have traditionally borne the weight of our dubious behaviour; we will, though, still have a profusion of gentle lambs, pure doves and swift deer to help us express what we believe is good and pure about humanity. But a beige earth that lacks the potency of predation would surely lose an essential essence of what it is to be human and extinguish the sparks of our creativity.

A Lion Attacking a Horse, by the eighteenth-century artist George Stubbs, shows a white horse being predated by a dark lion. The lion is already on the horse’s back, tearing into its flesh. The horse’s ears are flattened against its head and it twists around to stare at its killer, eyes wide and bulging. This overly dramatic style from the Sublime school of art strips back the veneer of sophistication to reveal our inner, primitive passions. The lion symbolises primeval ferocity, the white horse represents the finer qualities of purity and nobility. Sublimists believed that the feeling of dread experienced by contemplating paintings such as this is an acknowledgement of our atavistic appetites. Within all of us, our good natures can be overwhelmed and consumed by far baser desires. Predation and its connection to our inner nature fascinated Stubbs and he made at least twenty versions of lions attacking horses in different media, all of them designed to evoke ‘pleasurable terror’, the feelings that emerge as we face the reality of who we really are.

In the lighter world of children’s literature and illustration, predators can be topsy-turvy, out of kilter and delightfully unpredictable. A tiger creates havoc in the home of a little girl in a delicious tale of reaching out to the wild in The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr. A kind-hearted black panther leads a young boy to safety and later into adulthood in the fantastical Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. Honey-pot philosophy sees Pooh Bear walking hand in hand with Piglet (an image that could be used to illustrate Isaiah’s vision of holiness) as they muse on the