On “Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw”
Tennyson wrote In Memoriam A.H.H. in 1950, after his young Cambridge friend died unexpectedly. It took him seventeen years to write and edit the narrative poem, yet most of us know only a few of its 2,916 lines. The lesson from line fifteen of Canto LVI haunts me nearly every day.
I’m a sensitive vegan, so it should come as no surprise that I have issues with “Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw.” I’ve written about becoming vegan and my hope for a peaceful world, and if you combine them, you enter a fantasy realm where only plants die. Call me a speciesist for discriminating against plants, but we animals all need to eat something—we can’t survive on minerals until we invent a machine that can assemble complex molecules like the replicator in Star Trek.
One of my earliest memories of confronting nature’s brutality was a movie they forced on us in elementary school. It was a special day when the teacher set up the projector and screen in our classroom, dimmed the lights, and treated us to moving pictures (this was before our school had a VCR). Cute ducklings swam in a sun-dappled river until, one by one, a turtle pulled them under. I remember it as my first biology lesson, and one on how insensitive adults could be. Was it one of the learning outcomes in a state-mandated lesson plan? It didn’t feel like one as the mother duck watched her young become turtle food.
I had seen fish caught and filleted, but I had not yet witnessed a chicken, pig, or cow killed for food. I was still developing the psychic barrier we all build between ourselves and the animals we call food.
Something in adulthood broke that barrier for me, and it may have been the bloody struggle for life in our backyard. First, there was a pond that came with the house. I bought a few goldfish at our local nursery, imagining they would add colour and interest. I soon realized that as they multiplied, they attracted raccoons and herons. We suffered many disorienting, heart-pounding awakenings as the raccoons fought over the pond and goldfish.[i] It ended only many years later, when we gave the pond and goldfish to a local breeder.[ii]
Next came the birdhouse. I think Sarah brought it home as a decoration and placed it on a chest-high patio table we used for potting plants. It was next to the patio door, but a family of chickadees recognized it as the perfect place to raise a family. We had to sneak out our back door, afraid the parents might abandon the nest and its hungry, chirping chicks. The next year, we hung it in our wisteria, away from the door, and then the trouble began.
We enjoyed a brief honeymoon watching the parents flit in and out of the nest as they fed their young, only to be followed by the horror of dead and missing chicks when raccoons and crows inevitably attacked them. I built a predator-proof chickadee nest out of PVC and aluminum, only to face the same crushing pain when rats killed and dragged off the fledglings in the garden below. Last week, I watched a crow attack an adult robin, who narrowly escaped a late breakfast fate.
As anti-trans sentiment grew in the UK (2004-present), I noticed that BBC Earth began posting more violent interactions between animals on their website and YouTube. The video thumbnails and titles took me back to elementary school, and I felt like history was repeating itself.[iii]
I couldn’t help but feel that the British fascination with animals attacking one another came from their colonial history and a need to rationalize their horrible treatment of the trans community under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. The anti-trans movement in the UK escalated over the past decade, especially after the House of Commons’ Women and Equalities Committee recommended updating it in 2016. Amplifying animal violence also reinforced the belief that if nature is bloody, why should humans fight an instinct to treat animals as prey and other human beings as animals? Veganism and trans rights were the abominations in this worldview.
Like Rodney King during the LA Riots, I think, Can we all get along?
It won’t happen overnight. Empathy begins at home, when children see their parents show kindness to others. It erodes when their parents glorify domination and violence. Maybe I have a mental health issue to address with a therapist, but when my vegan awakening occurred, I couldn’t rationalize keeping some animals as pets and eating others. Thirteen years later, I can’t rationalize keeping a pet either, so it was a slippery slope.
My scientific mind looks for mechanisms, and I see a lack of empathy towards animals as a prerequisite for normalizing violence between people, a short hop towards thinking less of others, dehumanizing some, rationalizing violence, and then war. It’s my unified theory of the mess we find ourselves in, with case studies including Russia’s assault on the Ukrainian people, Israel’s Palestinian genocide, and U.S. Republican-led dehumanization of immigrants and trans people at the state and federal levels.
I was struck by something that Stephen Colbert said as he addressed more than twelve million people on his final episode of “The Late Show,” “Be kind to people. Not because they’re nice, but because you are.” It’s too easy for me to hate those who want to erase me, but I sense that the emotion harms me more than it helps, so I step back from the abyss. For my own sake, I choose love, and as Tennyson wrote at the end of In Memoriam’s Canto XXVII, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”
Any thoughts? How are you doing? Let me know…
For a themed musical pairing, consider The Ettes’ Red in Tooth and Claw.
[i] If you’ve never heard raccoons fight, listen to the video; it’s a sound you’ll never forget. If you camp on Galiano Island, you will hear them fight in the dark over food scavenged from campsites.
[ii] There are more lessons from the pond I can share, off the record, so if you’re considering one for your backyard, let’s go for coffee first.
[iii] The line I draw between these two observations is purely coincidental, but it won’t stop me from making it.