An eclectic menagerie

The bowerbird of Australia and New Guinea is a master architect. Male bowerbirds create beautiful bowers — structures that they build with twigs and decorate with leaves, flowers,
shells, stones, pieces of plastic. The bowers are products of sedulous effort, and males are fussy about what decorative bijoux and objects they use and exactly where they place them. The bowers have no other purpose than to impress. Female bowerbirds inspect bowers made by several males and then select their mate based on the bower they like the best.

If art is a creative expression that influences another being, surely what the bowerbirds create is art. And yet, we consider art as something that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal world.

In The History of the World in 100 Animals, Simon Barnes repeatedly returns to what he calls the ‘heresy of human uniqueness’. Naturally, Darwin makes a frequent appearance, as does the fact that humans are not the culmination of a linear process of evolution, or to put it another way, monkeys are not failed humans.

In short chapters, each no more than five pages long, Barnes tackles the history and some basic biology of each of his chosen 100 animals. It is an eclectic list and we are not told on what basis he picked this set. Alongside expected entries like the silkworm, dog, horse, lion and tiger are some unexpected animals like the Colorado beetle, the dodo and the saola, a bovid that was discovered in the 1990s in Vietnam’s forests.

There is no discernible order to the arrangement of chapters which makes the book a bit of a lucky dip — you never know what is going to turn up next, but almost always, you are pleasantly surprised and engaged with the matter presented.

Of course, there is some fascinating trivia, such as why Lewis Carroll gave himself the nickname Dodo, or that a cockroach named Nadezhda was the first creature to conceive in space. But apart from digging up nuggets, Barnes also ruminates on different facets of the animal-human relationship, and in most cases, he manages to give us something to chew on.

For example, in the 1800s and early 1900s, gorillas were thought to be the archetypal ferocious beasts, what humans might be if they were shorn of all so-called human qualities.
Early depictions of gorillas in art, films and print showed savage brutes with only the merest smidgeon of tender humanity: Remember the gigantic King Kong roaring and swatting at aeroplanes from atop the Empire State building? It was only after the 1960s that researchers like George Schaller and Dian Fossey established that gorillas are actually rather gentle giants. Barnes quotes David Attenborough, “It seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise everything that is aggressive and violent — all that a gorilla is not and we are.” Such changes in the attitudes of people towards animals are a theme that Barnes revisits in myriad ways. One of the saddest is the lion, respected, feared and often venerated in cultures around the world. Today, humankind’s dominion over the titular king of the jungle is “travestied in the circus, where lion-tamers walked unafraid in a cage full of beasts and made them sit up on their bottoms and wave their paws in the air”.

Follies and foibles

Inevitably, some portions of the book make for uncomfortable reading as we read about how we wiped out the dodo by destroying its habitat, or decimated the American bison, for which, among other things, railway companies offered special tours where you could kill them from your train windows.

And as you read story upon story of animal after animal, the almost endless parade of human thoughtlessness strikes you. We humans pride ourselves on being more intelligent than other beasts, yet ironically, history and the world around us is littered with the consequences of our follies and foibles, our whims and inconsistencies. We will open our hearts and purses for individual animals — Britain’s Donkey Sanctuary, for example, has an annual income of about £40 million — even as we continue to destroy forests and grasslands, even as conservationists struggle to protect entire habitats and species.

Simon Barnes’s paean to animals is also certainly a call for their conservation, but he does it with a wry humour, a conversational tone, and the belief that understanding other species will help us help them…and ourselves.

As Daniel Quinn said in his classic 1992 novel, Ishmael, “With Man gone, will there be hope for Gorilla? With Gorilla gone, will there be hope for Man?”