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Lovegrove analizza gli ultimi trecento anni della lunga storia di distruzione della fauna locale in Gran Bretagna, mettendo in risalto il carattere ciclico di questa carneficina e ponendola in relazione ai cambiamenti nell’utilizzo del territorio e della tecnologia. Punte di massima si ebbero infatti nel XIX secolo, con il diffondersi della caccia sportiva e delle armi automatiche, e con la possibilità, offerta dall’estendersi della rete ferroviaria, di raggiungere territori precedentemente fuori dalla portata dei cacciatori.
Fu invece la Prima guerra mondiale a fermare temporaneamente questa strage. Le successive leggi restrittive a protezione delle specie a rischio hanno definitivamente invertito questa tendenza, anche se non mancano ripetute infrazioni.
The Guardian - 26 maggio 2007
Britain has a longer history of systematic wildlife persecution than any other nation in Europe. [...] In Silent Fields, Roger Lovegrove focuses on the more recent past, however. Using church records, he painstakingly chronicles the past 300 years of killing.
The Elizabethan Vermin Acts established a bounty scheme, administered by church wardens, that rewarded anyone bringing in the head of a designated pest. The destruction started half-heartedly, but it rose in a steady crescendo through the 17th and 18th centuries to peak in an orgy of killing at the height of the 19th-century manias for game preservation, egg collecting and taxidermy.
That this carnage is chronicled in parish records is apt, for the bloodletting was justified on the basis that God had given man “dominion over the creatures”. Thus as the squirearchy enclosed communal fields and “wastes” and set its sights on a new range of “vermin”, the established church backed them all the way. Its theology and bounties sanctioned the wanton destruction of hedgehogs, badgers, otters, sparrows, bullfinches, kites, kingfishers, woodpeckers and even dippers.
Lovegrove uses his background as director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Wales to show that the onslaught came in waves, each driven by changing land use. The earliest farmers targeted big animals that threatened livestock and crops. Later, as open fields were enclosed, the drive was to control “nuisances”. [...] The heaviest period of persecution in the 19th century, however, was driven by the growth of game shooting. Until then firearms were slow to load and relatively inaccurate. Reliable breach-loaders transformed the sport, allowing the mass destruction of driven birds and long-range shots at deer. This led to intensive rearing of game and persecution of any predator that could be remotely perceived as a threat [...].
Worse, at the same time railways were opening up even our wildest places. Barely had the Highlands been cleared to make way for sheep than huge tracts were turned over to grouse moor and deer forest. Intense persecution inevitably followed, and our rarest animals were not safe even in the most remote corners of the country. On one Perthshire estate alone, 9,849 weasels and stoats, 4,042 feral cats, 2,517 “hawks”, 2,517 crows, 1,239 foxes, 576 ravens, 56 pine martens, 37 eagles, 26 otters and eight polecats were culled in the decade leading up to 1900.
Despite his painstaking scouring of the records, Lovegrove leaves some questions tantalisingly unanswered. For example, the badger would seem a glaring candidate for extermination. They have relatively small territories, easily located traditional setts and were prized for “baiting” with dogs. Despite this they are now one of our most numerous predators (only just outnumbered by weasels and stoats). In contrast, the elusive pine marten was effectively eliminated from England and Wales, the polecat reduced to a pocket in the Cambrian Mountains and the ultra-shy wild cat driven back into Caithness.
Ironically it was another bloodbath, the first world war, that came to their rescue just in time. The carnage in Flanders wiped out a generation of sportsmen and keepers, and persecution never returned on the same scale. Slowly the former victims have spread from their fastnesses. Birds are generally doing well, with ospreys and harriers returning naturally. Similarly, polecats and otters have crept east to recolonise the Midlands, while pine martens are faring well in Scotland (but are now hampered in their move south by the densely populated central belt). Wild cats face a more uncertain future, however, threatened with genetic extinction by interbreeding with domestic pets.
Even so, not everything in the garden is rosy. Despite strict protection, raptors are still persecuted by a few gamekeepers, while both pigeon fanciers and egg collectors take their toll. Legal persecution continues too, with the culling of crows, magpies, stoats, foxes and grey squirrels - even, ironically, by the RSPB - and local authorities poison millions of rats each year. That said, the killing is but a shadow of the past and faces general condemnation. So much so, indeed, that most people are uncomfortable with even the word “pest” (let alone the heavily loaded “vermin”), and several species have been reintroduced by guilt-ridden humans. [...] Now there is talk of bringing beavers and even wolves back to our shores. This would rectify an older wrong but, as Lovegrove shows, our fauna’s fortunes are inescapably tied to land use, and there may no longer be room for either.
Roger Lovegrove, Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s Wildlife, pp. 416, Oxford, £25. |
