He concludes that there are no convincing arguments, in any school of
thought, to show that animals are different enough from us to justify our
exploitation of them. Yet seeing a creature as a whole is a difficult moral
exercise for us in a culture whose attitudes rest, says Clarke, on a mistake. It
demands a degree of intellectual rigour that most of us seem unwilling to
commit. His vision is “cosmic democracy” set in a god-centred Universe.

If we are to begin to construct moral laws, our first concern must be for
those closest to us, he argues. Animals with whom we have chosen to share our
lives have the first claim. But it is not long before we must come to see them,
ourselves and all others as part of the fabric of the great web of life.
Individualists, mentalists and nonegalitarians have all failed, in Clarke’s
view, simply to have the patience to consider the true political implications of
reasonable holism.

Not only do ecosystems have intrinsic value, but our solidarity with the
other creatures struggling alongside us on Earth can be increased only by
looking at the interconnected biosphere. Decent treatment of animals would
better rest on this principle than on the abstract notion of self-ownership that
animal rights theorists propose. If it did, perhaps libertarians, zoophiles and
deep environmentalists could cease to be at each other’s throats.

Twenty years of clinical experience had taught Kaplan that a “vision fitness
prescription” that leaves about 16 per cent blur improves eyesight over time,
whereas a 20/20 corrective prescription usually makes it worse. He found the
weaker prescription worked particularly well when coupled with holistic therapy.
Eyesight improvement provided the perfect biofeedback to measure the
effectiveness of the programme.

Patients who came to Kaplan to be treated for eye problems often turned out
to be more interested in deeper issues in their lives. Changes in home or career
often accompanied improvements.

Clinical results with documentation go far beyond the anecdotal. A
double-blind trial conducted at Oregon’s Pacific University College of Optometry
found an average of 30 per cent improvement in measured eyesight in a group of
44 people taking part in the programme.

Kaplan’s own research suggests that structural alterations in the eye occur
up to nine months after the perceptual changes, and is the subject of clinical
trials by more than 30 North American optometrists. If confirmed, these findings
could overturn vision therapies that treat the eyes as little more than simple
cameras. In behavioural optometry, eye deformation is seen not as the root cause
of visual defects but as the end result of misperceptions from the brain and
mind.

But the communication gap between doctors and their patients has not quite
been bridged. Many of the facts that patients need to know to question their
doctor usefully are buried in scientific journals, couched in language that is
incomprehensible to the average person. Although, for example, there is a
self-help group for almost every known genetic disorder, books explaining the
basic mechanisms behind genetic inheritance are few and far between.

In his book Genetics and You (Human Press, $9.50, ISBN 0 89603 330
9), medical geneticist John Jackson attempts to fill that gap. At the moment,
one in five child patients in the US suffers from a disorder which is partly
genetic, while over 20 per cent of birth defects are inherited. Jackson offers
practical guidance on the risks of inheriting disorders that run in the
family, and sets out the choices that are available to prospective
parents.

In Turning Point (Oxford University Press, ÂŁ14.99/$19.95, ISBN
0 19 508773 9), biologist Sue Furman has combed the scientific literature for
information about the menopause and translated it into plain English. Armed
with this book, women will be able to ask about the pros and cons of
therapies such as HRT – the only known way to prevent osteoporosis, a disease
which currently kills 50 000 women each year.

Margie Profet’s book Protecting Your Baby to Be (Addison-Wesley,
$20, ISBN 0 201 40768 X), which won her the 1993 MacArthur Prize
Fellowship, is aimed at a different group of women. Profet, a cell biologist
at the University of California’s Environmental Health Sciences Center at
Berkeley, takes a Darwinian approach to the female body. For example, she
describes the sickness that often accompanies pregnancy not as an illness but
as an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect the developing fetus from
ingested and inhaled toxins. Whereas doctors once dismissed the illness as an
attitude problem, she argues for its vital and protective function.

The body’s protective system also plays a part in degenerative diseases,
according to Jeannette Ewin. Or rather, defects in the mechanisms that protect
our genes may be to blame. Since one of those mechanisms involves the
essential fatty acids which act as gatekeepers to the body’s cells, what you
eat could influence your susceptibility to such diseases. In The Fats We Need
to Eat (Thorsons, ÂŁ6.99/$12, ISBN 0 7225 3166 4), Ewin explains
the science behind healthy eating.

You are what you eat is also the message in John Mansfield’s seminal work,
Arthritis, Allergy, Nutrition and the Environment (Thorsons,
ÂŁ6.99/ÂŁ12, ISBN 0 7225 1903 6), in which he describes all major
forms of arthritis as related to allergic reactions to foods and other
substances. He even offers a self-help elimination diet to help sufferers who
cannot afford an allergy clinic.

Mansfield presents a model for medical practice in which each individual is
seen as responding uniquely to a vast array of environmental influences.
Health and disease are redefined as the opposite extremes of a continuum.
Although the medical profession is still unsympathetic to this view, a growing
number of patients who have become disillusioned with conventional treatments
are turning instead to the more holistic philosophy embodied by treatments
such as acupuncture, homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine.

In case you thought this was a novel approach, Liu Yanchi puts you straight
in The Essential Book of Chinese Medicine (Columbia University Press,
$16.50 Volume One, ISBN 0 231 10357 3 and $18.50 Volume Two,
ISBN 0 231 10359 X). Traditionally, the Chinese have treated any localised
illness as a reflection of the patient’s overall spititual and physical
condition. We may indeed learn something from a healthcare system which
regards illness as a failure on the part of the physician and the quality of
service on offer.

Buddhism and Ecology edited by Martine Batchelor and Kerry Brown, Cassel/WWF,
pp 114, ÂŁ5.99 pbk

Is there a fundamental conflict between promoting animal rights and
the environmental movements? Or is there a possibility of a marriage of
interests, as Peter Singer suggests in the forward to Animal Welfare and
the Environment? The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
held a conference in Oxford last year to celebrate its 150th anniversary
and chose as its theme the relationship between these two movements.

The proceedings of the conference represent the views of animal welfare
and environmental campaigners, philosophers, scientists and politicians.
They discussed whether a conflict exists between protecting the interests
of individual animals (or people) and protecting the environment as a whole.
Should we cull animals to preserve an ecosystem, or remove exotics to restore
its native state? What about the rights of indigenous peoples to preserve
their cultures, killing animals by traditional methods which are perhaps
less humane than those now available? None of these are easy questions.

Richard Ryder, the editor, says: ‘Often environmental policy becomes
a matter of choice between conflicting advantages.’ Many of the contributors
grasp the fundamental point that problems cannot be solved simply by looking
at the issues. Jonathon Porritt discusses the values underlying the two
movements, and suggests that the environmental movement has expunged the
finer feelings that prompted action in the first place because it has been
forced to argue its case in scientific and political forums. The movement
has ‘quite enthusiastically lapsed into a chronic dualism where the whole
emotional side of the human psyche has been supressed’. So it has fallen
back on instrumental utilitarianism, arguing for the protection of the natural
world not for its own sake, but because of its value to humans.

Animal-welfare campaigners faced a similar challenge a few years ago,
which forms the basis for Tom Regan’s tightly reasoned case for animal rights.
Animals, says Regan, have intrinsic value, and any use of them that fails
to recognise that is a fundamental injustice. But the world does not, in
fact, operate according to the laws of logic and reason, let alone morality.
As philosopher Mary Midgley says: ‘There is no single moral principal which
is sole and supreme and can never conflict with any other.’ You have to
recognise and understand opposing positions and, when facing a choice of
evils, judge each case on its merits. For Midgley, concern for individuals
and concern for the whole cannot and should not be rivals. These two concerns
belong together, and ‘the attempt to choose between them is an unreal project’.
This is simply common sense in Midgely’s brand of philosophy.

Midgely suggests that the individual and the whole are united at a deep
level that can be explained only in spiritual terms. This is the subject
of Buddhism and Ecology, a volume in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s series
‘World Religions and Ecology’, which searches for solutions to pressing
environmental problems based on ‘true understanding’. For a Buddhist, true
understanding is not arrived at by scientific research or through the reasoning
of moral phiosophy, though these may play a part. It is what we are left
with when our delusions are stripped away, for example, by meditation. So
the search for solutions to the global crisis begins with each of us. To
transform the world we must first discover our own enlightened selves, which
is merely a series of deep responses to the question: how am I to live in
this world?

This kind of Buddhism is entirely practical, as illustrated by the lives
of those contributors who describe how they apply their practice in meeting
the global crisis. Ajahn Pongsak works for the self-determination of Thai
villagers and restoration of the ecological balance of their river valleys.
It has earned him national and international awards, as well as police raids
and death threats from local heroin growers. He points out that his duty
as a Buddhist monk must include work in the world. But it is work he began
only after 30 years of meditating in the forest. So he understood the root
causes of environmental destruction there, which wasted foreign aid and
which support from the World Bank totally failed to address. Neither, it
seems, does the Thai government understand the causes of environmental
degradation when it argues against relocating the tribesmen farming the
mountain tops, where they are destroying the watershed.

Compassion, says the Ajahn, is but a thousandth part of Buddhism. To
solve problems, you have to couple that compassion with true wisdom. All
the contributors in this book are agreed that wisdom and true morality come
from an understanding of the proper harmony and correct balance of nature.
At this deeper level of understanding, the question posed by the RSPCA is
also answered. There is no fundamental conflict between respect for the
individual and respect for the whole, between compassionate animal welfare
and concern for the environment. The real conflict lies within each of us
and it is exacerbated in societies that hold the right to individual self-fulfilment
as paramount. To the Buddhist, the self is not independent, it must be subservient
to the wider community of which it is a part. Otherwise, asks Peter Timmerman,
practising Buddhist and Research Associate of the Institute for Environmental
Studies at the University of Toronto, ‘How can we survive on a planet of
ten billion points of infinite greed?’ That is a question that Western science
and philosophy have not yet come close to answering.

Judith Hampson is a consultant on animal welfare, environmental and
ethnic issues.

Drawing on his experience of service on all five international commissions
on the future of the world from Brundtland in 1987 to last month’s Earth
Summit, Shridath Ramphal proposes strategies for ‘enlightened change’, suggesting
that the industrialised rich countries forge a partnership with the developing
poor countries that acknowledges our need for mutual sustenance. He believes
that global survival depends upon the emergence of an international environmental
ethic.

Ramphal recognises that the world’s worst polluter is poverty, and that
it will take a commitment across the world to eradicate it. He suggests
that rich countries bring their activities within sustainable limits, relinquish
Third World debt, remove barriers to trade in manufactured goods and make
access to technology equitable. In response, the South cooperates on conventions
to preserve biodiversity and protect the climate from harmful changes.

Ramphal estimates that Agenda 21 will cost about $125 billion in aid
a year, roughly equal to annual debt repayments from the Third World. He
points out that we do not lack the means to implement these goals, only
the political will.

A redirection of resources would be required. For example, a quarter
of the world’s scientists and technologists work on weapons R&D. Diversion
of five days’ worth of global military spending would pay for the annual
cost of the UN plan against desertification in the Third World. The gradual
reduction of the projected $9 trillion of global military spending during
the next 10 years could yield $1300 billion.

The will to take these steps towards a common future, however, says
Ramphal, requires a revolution in human consciousness. We need to recognise
that we are part of a mutually interdependent global community, and belong
first to our planet and secondly to our own countries.

The global summit at Rio was the best chance we have had to choose the
path of enlightened change. Ramphal ends with a passionate plea to the leaders
at the Earth summit that they approach the new reordering of the world with
the same determination that was shown when the UN was established in 1946.

Judith Hampson is a freelance writer.

KNOW what the caged bird feels,’ wrote Paul Lawrence Dunbar, son of
two runaway slaves, in a poem called Sympathy which opens this Dreaded Comparison
of human and animal slavery. It is a comparison which we shirk, one we do
not wish even to consider. We will shirk it especially, suggests Alice Walker
(author of The Color Purple) in her preface, if we are the descendants of
slaves, or of slave owners, or of both. Yet this book is all the more powerful
for the testimony of slaves and descendants of slaves who have voiced their
empathy strongly with the rest of oppressed creation, stating that only
those seduced by the propaganda of the oppressor are offended by comparison
to a fellow sufferer. Cruelty, like compassion, is indivisible.

However indirect our connections with slavery, we all live in a society
that profited by it. It is this complicity that we seek to avoid just as
we try to duck responsibility for the sufferings inflicted by our society
upon sentient creatures for the production of our food, for the protection
of our health, for our entertainment. Marjorie Spiegel discomforts us by
bringing home our involvement in both human and animal slavery and by making
a strong case, backed by considerable scholarship, for a meaningful comparison
between the two.

We define racism as a belief in superiority, based upon differences,
of some cultures over others, and a system of government and society that
enforces a right of the superior race to exploit and rule the rest. Some
people define ‘speciesism’ as a belief in superiority, based upon differences,
of one species over others, and a system of government and society which
enforces a right of this superior species to exploit and rule the rest.

Defenders of speciesism are quick to point to a supposedly unbridgeable
gulf between humans and animals that somehow justifies our cruel andcallous
treatment of the latter while making such treatmentof humans unthinkable
in acivilised society. The spurious justifications for this treatment were
once, incidentally, applied similarly to the keeping of slaves. Slave owners
said black people were irrational, that they suffered less when separated
from people they loved because their feelings were primitive and unrefined.
Many supposed black people to be less sensible of pain than a civilised
white person. Like animals, they did not qualify for respect.

The thesis is not that the oppressions experienced by black people and
animals have taken identical forms, the cases are very different, but the
claim is that they have some things in common. They share the same relationship
between the oppressor and oppressed. The roots of that relationship dig
deep into our psyches and our culture.

For pioneering settlers, discovering nature to be dark and threatening,
it became almost a sanctimonious act to subdue the wilderness, and the animals
and savages that inhabited it. Thus we created ‘civilisation’. The book
catalogues the results of that process of civilisation, drawing comparison
between what happened to black slaves not so long ago and what happens to
animals now: the brandings and auctions, the hideous means of transport
that many did not survive, the tearing of offspring from their mothers,
the beatings, tetherings and overworking.

Spiegel exposes the claim that one form of oppression is worse than
another, or that some should be attended to as priority while others may
be ignored as self-serving nonsense. Oppression will continue to exist so
long as some humans feel that they have to defend their rights by putting
someone else beneath them.

One man whose recognition of this tenet was far ahead of the consensus
of the Victorian society into which he was born was Henry Salt (1851-1939).
His ‘Creed of Kinship’, which for him came to replace conventional religion,
was based upon a principle of universal justice, a belief that one day humanity
will triumph, creating a civilisation which embodies brotherhood between
all men, between all nations and between humans and the lower animals.

The Savour of Salt gives us the flavour of this remarkable man. Visionary,
writer, humanitarian reformer and poet he produced a susbtantial collection
of books and papers, campaigning vigorously throughout his life against
all forms of cruelty and oppression. Notable among his many achievements
were his formation of the Humanitarian League (1891-1919) which published
two journals and engaged in lively public controversy on matters ranging
from flogging in the Royal Navy to vivisection, and his book Animal’s Rights
(1892), which remained in obscurity until its republication in 1980. Its
arguments are forerunners to today’s debate.

The modern debate about animal rights is indeed so far-reaching that
its study is fast becoming a recognised academic discipline. Charles Magel’s
scholarly Animal Rights is a timely guide to sources of information on the
subject. The work, dedicated to Henry Salt, briefly traces the history of
the movement from its earliest roots in antiquity, through the 1970s when
it got its manifesto of animal liberation through the suppression of speciesism,
to the present day when its arguments are having a profound effect on debate
about the treatment of animals in many fields and on their protection in
law.

This is the first work to organise animal rights literature systematically.
No conventional sources are available, the nearest the US Library of Congress
comes to the topic is ‘Animals, treatment of’. The guide is selective and
deals only with English language publications yet it is so organised that
the reader can easily follow any aspect, such as the relation of arguments
about animal rights to the use of animals in research, or even the thread
of a fine point of argument as it is woven through the intricacies of philosophical
debate in several journals.

The first part of the book is organised under subject headings – philosophy,
science and medicine, education, the law, religion and vegetarianism. The
second part is an annotated bibliography, arranged chronologically, which
reviews 335 published works. The book also contains a list of selected organisations,
covering most countries.

Judith Hampson is a consultant in animal welfare, based in Gloucestershire.

THIS is a much-needed book and Margaret Cooper, a lawyer married to
a veterinary surgeon, is eminently equipped to have written it. Her aim
was not to produce a standard text on the vast and complex plethora of legislation
relating to animals but rather a guide that she hopes will help those who
are not lawyers to understand the basic concept of the law relating to animals.

Cooper also provides an introduction for lawyers who are themselves
lay persons in the fields of animal welfare and animal science. She enables
them to look freshly at the law from the point of view of those working
with animals.

Despite the possibly dry and forbidding subject matter, the book is
extremely readable. Cooper makes no attempt to cover all the laws concerning
animals but discusses areas of topical interest, not merely from the viewpoint
of what the law says about them, but how that law is interpreted and how
it works in practice. The discussion benefits from the author’s understanding
of the extensive legal and philosophical debate that has underpinned the
growth of national and international legislation in the 1970s, particularly
in the welfare and conservation of animals.

This approach brings the subject to life without overwhelming the reader
with detail. Yet Cooper sets out the main points concisely, under clear
headings, so that readers can understand the essence of each topic.

The book begins with tables of the statutes and statutory instruments
in Britain, other countries’ legislations and international laws. Each of
the chapters concludes with a list of references and recommended reading
sources. There are also useful tables of abbreviations and addresses.

Cooper selected a series of topics to examine in detail; responsibility
to animals, legislation relating to cruelty and welfare, protection of animals
used for scientific purposes, control of disease in animals, health and
safety and conservation. A final chapter considers briefly some of these
topics as they are covered by foreign and international law.

The chapter dealing with responsibilities and rights relating to ownership
of animals makes clear the distinctions drawn in law between wild and domesticated
creatures, raising curious and interesting points such as the fact that
the Department of Trade and Industry is responsible for the disposal of
royal fish and that stranded marine mammals may need to be physically protected
from souvenir hunters. A beached whale is treated by law not as a sentient
creature but as if it were a boat, and is reported to the Receiver of Wrecks,
often through the coastguard. In 1912, in the case of Steel versus Rogers,
it was held that such a creature is not a ‘captive animal’ and it was not,
therefore, an offence to cut pieces from a whale while it was alive.

The discrepancies between protection of wild and domestic animals and
the topic of sale and purchase of animals raise fundamental issues about
the treatment in law of animals as property and the lack of any real legal
rights afforded them by virtue of their own natures. Cooper fails to discuss
this issue.

On welfare, she deals with legal definitions of cruelty that still focus
to a large degree on what might be defined as ‘necessary’. The section on
farm animals outlines procedures that are forbidden, such as depriving cockerels
of their voices, acts and codes relating to transport and slaughter and
provision for advice to the Ministry of Agriculture by the Farm Animal Welfare
Council. She outlines the system of licensing animals kept for commercial
purposes.

Cooper’s lengthy chapter on animals used for scientific purposes in
Britain is one of the best and most comprehensive summaries of the 1986
legislation and its administration that I have seen. Rather than setting
out the provisions of the act in detail the chapter explains the intention
of the act and how it is fulfilled through a complex administrative machinery.
So the main provisions of the statute law are discussed in terms of the
Home Office Guidance Notes that explain how those provisions are effected.
An understanding of this administrative practice is essential to comprehending
this piece of legislation. She also describes the operation of the personal
and project licensing system comprehensively.

Two useful features of this chapter are tables outlining the main provisions
of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, offences and penalties under
it, a summary of other legislation interacting with it and legislation requiring
the performance of animal experiments. A long appendix describing the history
and provisions of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876) enables the reader to
make comparisons and to understand how the new legislation has installed
these new controls.

The information on animal health and the treatment of sick animals will
be of particular interest to veterinarians and other professionals dealing
with animals. Cooper covers the notification of diseases, import and export
of animals, the Veterinary Surgeons Act (1966) and other legislation interrelating
with it, Medicines and Misuse of Drugs Act, and firearms control. Her advice
on health and safety at work will be relevant to people working with animals
in all fields.

Under the heading of conservation, she considers the Wildlife and Countryside
Act (1981) in detail, as well as the destruction of pests and national and
international trade in animals.

An Introduction to Animal Law is a useful and very readable reference
book which will be of interest and value to anyone working with animals
or with legislation to protect them.

It will be of particular interest to those working in the biological
and veterinary professions as the author collected much of the material
in the course of years of speaking and writing on the subject of animals
for such people.

In the wake of protests over several years from animal welfare groups
and other organisations, which say that the test is cruel and unnecessary,
the commission has now decided to take the first steps towards phasing out
the LD50 test. For the purpose of classifying dangerous chemicals, it has
agreed to accept data from a different source, the so-called ‘fixed dose’
procedure.

It has also said that it hopes all member countries of the OECD will
accept this alternative type of testing. The fixed dose technique, originally
developed by the British Toxicology Society, requires only a small number
of animals. Analysts can finish the evaluation without animals having to
die as an end point. The method has recently been fully validated in a comprehensive
international study, partly funded by the European Commission.

Toxicologists who employ the fixed dose technique examine how a set
dose of a chemical affects a small group of animals. The dose is based on
what is already known about the physical and chemical properties of the
substance they wish to evaluate.

The commission’s decision to start phasing out the LD50 test is part
of a broader initiative to encourage regulators to rationalise and unify
global guidelines for toxicity tests. The aim of the commission is to create
a framework whereby regulatory bodies throughout the world all accept the
same data for classifying chemicals.

The commission is offering to help to pay for work to prepare such international
guidelines. It intends to invite all member states of the OECD to participate
in the evaluation.

In Europe itself, the commission will shortly incorporate the new provisions
in the annexes to its directive on the classification of dangerous substances.
It will also encourage members of the OECD that do not belong to the European
Community to take similar action.

Under the terms of an earlier directive to protect animals intended
for scientific purposes, the commission is already obliged to encourage
scientists to develop alternative ways of testing for toxicity.

The alternatives must kill fewer animals and/or involve procedures that
cause the animals less pain, but provide scientific data that are equally
as valid as those arising from animal tests. The commission must also report
on the possibilities for modifying guidelines which are now enshrined in
Community law.

Animal welfare groups that have been campaigning against the LD50 test
for many years generally welcomed the proposals. Briony Cobby, the head
of the research animals department at the Royal Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals, and Steve McIvor, the campaign officer of the British
Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, both said this week that the initiative
by the commission is an important step. They hoped that other OECD countries
– the US and Japan in particular – would soon follow with similar schemes.

Cobby added that the commission’s decision to accept the results of
the fixed dose procedure was welcome not merely because it requires substantially
fewer animals, but also because results do not depend on animals dying.
‘We are not just in a numbers game here, it’s animal suffering that matters,’
she said.

Both the RSPCA and the BUAV accept that it will be impossible to phase
out toxicity testing on live animals completely in the near future, but
both organisations say that they hope ultimately for the complete replacement
of animals by non-animal testing methods.

The commission’s decision to accept the results of alternative tests
– but not for the time being to reject results obtained from the LD50 test
– also met with approval from representatives of the chemicals industry,
the sector most affected.

Phillip Lewis, in charge of occupational health at Britain’s Chemical
Industries Association, said that the proposals had profound practical implications
for the industry. However, he said, ‘it seems a very sensible approach’.

On the Contrary by Miroslav Holub, Blookaxe Books, pp124, Pounds sterling
5.95

The Fly by Miroslav Holub, Bloodaxe Books, pp102, Pounds sterling 5.95

A unique anthology of poetry, Song of Creation is devoted entirely to
animals and their humane treatment. It contains more than 100 poems, and
is powerful testimony to the concern for animals that has captured the imagination
of great writers throughout Western history.

As the editors, Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan, point out, those who champion
the cause of exploited animals are often derided for being emotional, yet
it is the acknowledgement and expression of our feelings that most enriches
our lives. Our emotional response surely matters as much as our cognition.

Poetry is the language of our highest feeling, expressing the deepest
human sentiments that might otherwise find no expression. It is also the
means by which we might reclaim our roots, our deeper connection with animals
and nature, that we lose in modern urban living. Poetry tells us that a
human being experiences a range of positive feelings towards animals: sympathy,
tenderness, respect, wonder and love.

Innocence and the incapacity to plead their own case are attributes
of animals which move us, like Ella Wheeler Wilcox, to become a ‘voice of
the voiceless’:

I am my brother’s keeper And I will fight his fight, And speak the word
for beast and bird (Kinship)

Yet systemised cruelty to animals is sanctioned by our modern society.
William Cowper’s:

Detested sport, that owes its pleasure to another’s pain (The Garden)

is still evident. So is the treachery that Thomas Hardy asserted must
lurk in the hearts of those who would feed and nurture baby birds only to
‘bereave and bleed’ them later, for pleasure (The Puzzled Game-Birds). We
can treat animals in these ways only when we see them as less than what
they are: as a means purely to serve our own ends, such as Hardy’s Bags
of Meat whose trust is also betrayed, this time in the auction ring. Nowhere
do we see this diminishing of animals more powerfully illustrated than in
our imprisonment of wild creatures. We see it in John Galsworthy’s little
serval cat:

From bar to bar she’d turn and turn And in her eyes a fire would burn
(From her Zoology we learn!) Never get out! (A Little Serval Cat)

or in Edith Sitwell’s . . . Baited bear, The blind and weeping bear
whom the keepers beat on his helpless flesh (Still Falls the Rain)

In what ways have we diminished ourselves by reducing noble creatures
to such spectacles, whether it be for the base motive of baiting the bear
or the more honourable one of learning zoology?

D. H. Lawrence had no such constraints around this perception of the
magnificence of one mountain lion, although it had already been shot. He
describes her beauty and uniqueness:

Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears; And stripes in the
brilliant frost of her face, . . . Yet what gap in the world, the missing
white frost- face of that slim yellow mountain lion.( Mountain Lion)

The lion mattered for itself, not for man. When animals matter only
in terms of their use to us, be it for food, clothing, entertainment or
tools for research, a prerequisite for our exploitation of them is that
we see them as something less than they are.

The point is powerfully made in Tray, Browning’s poem about the dog
who risks his life twice, once to rescue a drowning child and the second
time to retrieve her doll from the river bed. The act elicits this response
in an onlooker:

. . . Why he dived, His brain would show us, I should say.

John, go and catch – or, if needs be, purchase that animal for me! By
vivisection, at expense of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, How brain secretes
dog’s soul, we’ll see!

An essential key to our own natures must surely lie in the duality that
drives us on the one hand to marvel at the natural world in its perfect
wholeness and, on the other, to take it apart in order to reveal its mechanisms.
Both approaches are driven by human passion.

Someone who understands both passions is Miroslav Holub, Czechoslovakia’s
leading immunologist, who has been described by Ted Hughes as ‘one of the
half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere’.

In his science, Holub must strive to construct testable theories and
to devise repeatable experiments while in his poetry he seeks to express
that which has never been said and cannot be repeated. His poems are incisive,
questioning. Sometimes they answer their own questions with sardonic wit.
Fish and birds, notes Holub, have a built-in sense of time and orientation:

Humanity, however, lacking such instincts resorts to scientific research.
(Brief Reflection on Accuracy)

and he observes that the very process of recording data in scientific
research is:

the real joke which makes you forget for a while that really you yourself
are in the test-tube (Brief Reflection on Test Tubes)

The unique power of Holub’s poetry is created by his juxtaposition of
plain scientific fact with philosophy:

Behind the eyes are the optic tracts and the occipital lobes of the
brain, where individual areas correspond to individual areas of the retina.

Behind excessively large eyes lies nothing Behind excessively small
eyes sits the Apocalypse. (Brief Reflection on Eyes)

The foreword to Holub’s remarkable book, On the Contrary notes that
he applies the same method, observation, and the same attitude of mind,
doubt, both to his science and to his poetry. As a poet, however, he is
more free than the scientist to draw imaginative conclusions from sober
data. In The Dead he describes two men dying from the same disease. One
rallied valliantly after his third operation and died the same night, the
other dragged on ‘through eight insipid years’:

Both here and there the angel of death quite simply stamped his hobnailed
boot on the medulla oblongata.

I know they died the same way But I don’t believe that they are dead
the same way.

Science and poetry can give us radically different interpretations of
the universe. But it is the same universe. Perhaps the disciplines have
much to learn from each other.

Judith Hampson is a science writer, based in Gloucestershire.