Animal spirit
Bhikaiji Cama Place is one of New Delhi’s more insalubrious crossings, with crowded arterial roads converging on a signal near a jerry-built office complex that does little to flatter memory of the plucky Parsi nationalist for whom it is named. But for a time, it held a certain charm because of a white breasted kingfisher that perched on an overhead wire every day.
Indifferent to the pollution and din of the traffic, the bird focused with fierce concentration on the road below. This was intriguing because there was no water, its customary habitat, to be seen. What was it looking for? Several enforced waits at the red light yielded the answer: It swooped to catch lizards and insects from a dried gutter — a brilliant example of adaptation to the shrinking of water bodies in the capital.
The kingfisher’s versatility offers a reminder that the animal kingdom is integrated into our daily lives in ways we take for granted and do little to preserve. As whole species of mammals, birds, insects and plants vanish each year under humankind’s inexorable expansion, there is a creeping realisation that we may be destroying ourselves in the process. Sadly, that discourse is still in the realms of the esoteric, which makes The History of the World in 100 Animals by respected conservationist Simon Barnes a welcome addition.
Written for the non-expert, the book is a collection of succinct histories of 100 animals and their role in human evolution. The purpose of these miniature biographies — three to five pages each — is to underline the evolving understanding that man is not central to the universe. “We are not alone,” Mr Barnes writes in the Foreword, “We are not alone in the universe. We are not alone on the planet. We are not alone in the wilderness. We are not alone in the farmed countryside. We are not alone in cities. …We are not even alone in the bath or shower: Demodex mites live on our facial skin. …. Our lives, our history and our thoughts are inextricably linked with our fellow animals.”
But that symbiosis appears to have become one-way. Of roughly 10 million species in the animal kingdom, Mr Barnes writes, “it can be argued that every one of those 10 million has affected humanity in some way or other, even if we don’t know about it. And it can also be argued that humanity has affected every single non-human species.”
Mr Barnes does not fully explain how he selected the 100 animals that feature in this book. Some, he says, are obvious, like cattle or the rat, which have always been with us. Some have been the subject of recent awareness, such as the gorilla and some, he says, “have less than obvious relationship with our species like earthworm and wolves” (though any Indian farmer would have educated him on the value of earthworms). The accounts also appear in no particular sequence — Snake, Chicken, Monkey, Archaeopteryx, Housefly…
Readers are unlikely to be irked by this charming randomness. Mr Barnes has spread his net wide and imaginatively for these potted histories — from the familiar dog, cat, tiger, crow and elephant to the extinct American bison, Dodo, Thylacine (a species of wolf ) to the exotic Vaquita (a rapidly vanishing whale), oyster and the head louse, mosquito and cockroach.
It is possible to disagree with his choices — 10 million offers many alternative possibilities — but enjoy the book for entertainingly educative stories replete with intriguing and thought-provoking facts (even the section on the pesky cockroach can surprise you).
Consider, for example, the bat, that much maligned creature that may or may not have been the carrier of the virus that has brought the world to its knees. In the early days of the pandemic, social media circulated creepy photos of Chinese people devouring bats, inviting readers to make the connection. Mr Barnes tells us that in China, bats are also symbols of happiness and good fortune. “A bat image on your silken garments is not sinister in the least: it is as joyous an image as a robin or kitten or swallow would be in the West.”
But the West, too, had an ambivalent approach to bats — from Dracula to Batman. Strikingly, Mr Barnes says, one fifth of all mammal species are bats, making them the largest order of mammals after rodents, and they include whoppers like the flying fox (who knew!).
Then there’s the shark, which entered human demonology with the 1975 book and movie Jaws. Mr Barnes points out that the balance of fear is skewed. Between 1958 and 2016, there have been 2,785 unprovoked attacks on sharks of which 439 were fatal. On the other hand, humans kill approximately 100 million sharks a year — including, at one time, for the British fish and chips and for China’s famed shark’s fin soup.
From gorillas that have a sense of humour to rats that exhibit the same kind of metacognition as humans and the link between wasps and the Renaissance (hint: Chinese technology was involved), to the tiger’s role in Indian culture and conservation, this is a book to be savoured in short spells. Sumptuously produced with stunning artwork ranging from the European to Asian, it is really a coffee-table tome that would do better service on the drawing room centre-table than those anodyne, expensive volumes on forts and palaces.