ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

Monster of God by David Quammen, Hutchinson/Random House, £25, ISBN 0091799570 Reviewed by Nicholas Saunders

WHERE do monsters live? And where do they come from? For millions of years, the world’s great predators hunted and ate our early hominid ancestors. Yet, by the time of Homo sapiens, the power of mind and the opposable thumb had created strategies and weapons that enabled Palaeolithic hunters to replace felines, bears, and crocodiles at the top of the food chain. As they did so, the same cognitive abilities transformed living beasts into art.

Aeons of animal dominance have left an indelible mark on our imaginations. Today, as we are pushing nature’s most perfect predators into the abyss of extinction, we are still haunted by them – perhaps guiltily so. Tragically, some species may soon only be memories, and paradoxically we will have destroyed a vital part of what made us the killers we are.

In Monster of God, David Quammen takes us on a quest for four magnificent predators caught in the net of human technology, prejudice, myth and greed. He travels widely, and listens to accounts of Asian lions in India’s Gir forest, saltwater crocodiles in northern Australia, Siberian tigers, and brown bears in Romania. Each has a story which Quammen eloquently tells, weaving his own experiences with science, nature, politics and native philosophy. But it is the great cats that hold centre stage – from sabre-tooth tigers to jaguars denied their natural range by the Panama Canal.

Quammen’s grasp of complex issues is impressive. We learn of trophic cascades’ – disruptions to ecosystems caused by the removal of a key species, usually the top predator. Take the Alaskan sea otter. Over hunting them led to an explosion in numbers of its sea urchin prey which in turn then ate and devastated the region’s kelp forests.

This is a richly detailed, articulate, and fascinating book. The insights it gives worryingly suggest that the ultimate monster is surely the one who acts like God, but isn’t.