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(Legally, the answer appears to be 'yes.') Admittedly the cat doesn't like the idea, but who's going to attract boys with a cat? The cat simply isn't pulling its weight boy-wise, and hasn't been for a long time. And, like most boys, I'm fond of rodents. I have never understood the cult of David Attenborough. He made me hate nature as a child, by exposing its callous cruelty in hideously explicit high-definition high-budget blood-soaked BBC documentaries. Why should I care about the fucking ocelot when it has so little consideration for the baby peccary? Kill the lot of them, I say. Better yet, hunt them all and eat them. That'll learn the bastards who's top of the food chain. I suspect that many of David Attenborough's admirers have never actually troubled to watch the gruesome fare he peddles. The Attenborough dilemma makes me think of Jane Goodall, another upper-class English type who tried to make the world care about the fate of chimpanzees by researching and publishing widely about their social behaviour at Gombe in Tanzania. Unfortuantely, what Goodall revealed was shocking: in human terms, chimps practice warfare, murder, cannibalism, infanticide, even (pending a judgment of the ICJ) genocide. Do I care about the survival of chimps? Well, I think we should keep a few in zoos for tea-parties and for the PG Tips ads. But no, I'm basically happy with the idea of exterminating the chimps and turning over their erstwhile territories to palm-oil plantations and evangelical mega-churches. Thanks, Jane! We might have had some qualms about this without your sterling science. Likewise, David Attenborough has shown us in living colour why we should be contemptuous towards the natural world; why we should be unsentimental towards animals and treat them in the same way that they would treat us. (Even my cat needs to be watched with coolly critical eye. I suspect he'd skin me alive given half a chance, and if I should predecease him I know he wouldn't wait for my body to grow cold.) But I don't think David Attenborough quite realises any of this. Like poor old Jane Goodall, he thinks that knowledge is innocent and he is only spreading earnest concern for the preservation of the good old natural world with his hideous lion-on-buffalo zoo-pornology. He thinks that he's showing that humans are just part of the natural world, with no concern for the effects of this appalling revelation on the society he exposes to such carnage. David Attenborough may not have created Thatcherism and its neoliberal offspring (though his first major BBC series, Life on Earth screened in the same year that The Bitch was elected), but he has provided it with the perfect analogue in the natural world. If there is in reality nothing but bloody competition, but large animals eating smaller or slower animals, why should anything else be tolerated in the world beyond our TV sets? According to Wikipedia, he claims to be a "boring left-wing liberal," which suggests to me how little he understands what he himself is saying. Attenborough is a fool, and he should have died a lonely death and been eaten by snow leopards decades ago. Preferably on camera. That at least would be top-quality dinner-time viewing. [@nonymouse] [Guardster] [Proxify] [Anonymisierungsdienst] |