"The foreseeable outcome is that... alpha predators will have ceased to exist - except behind chain-link fencing, high-strength glass, and steel bars... people will find it hard to conceive that those animals were once proud, dangerous, unpredictable, widespread, and kingly, prowling free among the same forests, rivers, estuaries, and oceans used by humanity. Adults, except for a few recalcitrant souls, will take their absence for granted. Children will be startled and excited to learn, if anyone tells them, that once there were lions at large in the very world."
There are celebrities at every zoo, the animals that everyone wants to see. People want to see elephants and monkeys, they want to see giraffes and zebras. Perhaps more than any other group of animals, however, they want to see the predators... especially the big ones. Big cats, bears, crocodilians, sharks... these are the creatures that fascinate our visitors, leaning against the railings of the moats or pressed up against the viewing windows. Sometimes, you hear someone muse what would happen if the glass wasn't there.
Celebrated nature write David Quammen answers that question in Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. Quammen takes the reader on a travel around the world, entering the domains of four alpha predators - the Indian lion, the saltwater crocodile of Australian, the brown bear of Romania's Carpathian Mountains, and the Amur tiger. Exploring the biology and history of each species and interviewing the people who share the landscape with them, he sets out to answer the question - what does it mean to be prey?
There are a lot of books that start off in the direction that Quammen goes in, only to devolve into a series of bloody anecdotes of people being killed by big predators. Yes, this book includes a smattering of those. More importantly, however, it takes a look at our relations with the natural world from the opposite direction that we normally do - not as humans dominating the world and subjugating the wilderness, but humans as another flavor of meat, another link in the food chain. For the vast majority of our species history on this planet, we have been regularly preyed upon by big cats, bears, and other large carnivores - in some parts of the world, we still are. How did this impact us as as a species, what impacts does it have on us today? Quammen's search for an answer transcends biology - he explores the role of super-predators throughout mythology, religion, and popular culture, relating it to a wide array of creatures, from The Bible's Leviathan to Beowulf's Grendel to the titular monster of the science-fiction series, Alien.
Quammen gives equal - probably more - attention to the people who share their lives with large predators, be they the Maldahari of India's Gir forest, tending their herds in the presence of lions or Romanian foresters, reminiscing about the Communist-era, when Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu slaughtered untold bears (many raised by these same foresters) to bolster his image with his people. It is the local people, Quammen reasons, that have to live with predators and pay the price of sharing space with them - competition for prey, loss of livestock, sometimes loss of lives. Typically, it is the poorest, most isolated, least influential members of society who are most likely to be negatively impacted by these animals. Is it fair, he asks, for the rest of the world to ask for so great a sacrifice, and receive nothing in return?
Major predators aren't just popular zoo animals; in their own ways, they are protectors of the wild, even of those species which they kill and eat. As iconic animals, equally admired and feared, their conservation serves as a rallying cry for conservationists - "Save the tiger!" has a better ring to it, and is more likely to draw support, than "Save the Siberian musk deer!" The importance of large carnivores in regulating their environment has long been understood, giving us an ecological incentive to protect them. For some species - Quammen focuses on the skin trade for saltwater crocodiles - their is an economic incentive as well. Perhaps most importantly, Quammen offers an equally compelling, though far more nebulous argument for saving wild large carnivores - these animals, and their occasional depredations on us, helped shape humanity as a species. They made us who we are. If we lose them, we lose an important part of our past and our identity.
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