The walrus

Dear Editor, “The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things” The opening line of a nonsense poem by Louis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame. It came to mind when I saw the images of that unfortunate creature that washed up on the rocks at Valentia Island, so far from his native habitat.

I thought of how the walrus was hunted to near extinction in past centuries for its tusks and bone. Man’s unthinking rapacity has also impacted on its conservation status via climate change. The greatest threat to its survival now is the depletion of sea ice which it needs as a platform to feed and rest.

But the forlorn walrus off the Kerry coast also reminds me of other man-made threats to wildlife and animals in general. I think of those repulsive pictures that appear almost daily on Facebook of trophy hunters posing with the carcases of majestic animals they’ve slain, in many cases endangered ones like elephants, tigers, lions, giraffes and gorillas. They grin at the camera as their butchered victims seem to look at us through those sad, innocent eyes.

I think of bulls tortured to death in Spain by swashbuckling matadors and dogs boiled alive in parts of Asia, of chickens or veal calves confined in tiny spaces on factory farms.

I think too of Ireland’s wildlife heritage and of the fact that an estimated 85% of habitats deemed to be of international importance have ‘unfavourable’ conservation status and that whole populations of wildlife and the eco-systems that support them have disappeared over the past fifty years.

A third of our bee specie face possible extinction, our rivers are polluted, landowners continue to light illegal gorse fires that decimate huge swathes of already vulnerable habitat, and we still await a government with the guts to end the scandals of hare coursing and fox hunting.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service is committed to protecting wildlife and biodiversity but receives a mere fraction of the State funding allocated to the bloodstock industry. Gambling on dogs and horses that run around in circles is deemed a greater priority.

The walrus, fair play to him, came a long way before alighting on the rocks at Valentia. But we as a species don’t seem to have come a long way since the days when our ancestors roamed the earth wearing animal skins or nothing at all. Or maybe the cave men and women had more sense than 21st century ‘civilisation’?

Louis Carroll, were he composing in 2021, might have something to say about climate change, though what we’ve done to our planet is so beyond belief that no nonsense poem could do justice to it.

You just couldn’t make it up!

Sincerely, John Fitzgerald,

Callan, Co Kilkenny.