Keggie Carew’s Beastly is a book so important that everyone should read it. Not just because its great fun. It’s also a vibrant reminder of our animality. But it taught me something else, quite profound. I don’t know if it was the book directly or the combination of experiences I had over Christmas and New Year 2023. But it’s helped me to explain something I’ve been grappling with for a few years.
That is: why don’t we empathise with animals, or respect and care for them? Why, when it’s so obvious that we share so much humanity, particularly with animals, do we treat them with disdain, neglect and irreverence? In relation to Carew’s brilliant and inspiring book, this is what I explore in ths post.
But to start my Review of Beastly by Keggie Carew, there is perhaps no better quote to begin with than this:
‘What’s an animal? [Charles Foster] asks. It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What’s a human? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes … All around us are the billions of individual selves acting out their dramas in their individual worlds, connecting to bigger and bigger worlds, to the higgledy-piggledy live jigsaw.’
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
Carew is foremost an artist and author which is what makes this book most powerful for me. The ‘higgledy-piggledy live jigsaw’ to which Carew refers cannot be seen for what it is, piece-by-piece, only as a whole.
The art of complexity
I am foremost a scientist – or perhaps, as I begin to understand – more of a natural philosopher. But Carew comes to her understanding as an artist. As animal-lovers we meet in the middle. What I call animality Carew has dubbed ‘beastly.’ What it is to be human, or animal, is one and the same.
But Carew explains things in a way I can only dream of doing. This is why combining art and science is exceptionally important. Scientists need artists to help us think more freely and rediscover the soul of inventiveness.
‘People from diverse backgrounds and experiences, such as artists, musicians, comedians and indeed anyone of us who sees the world through our own lens, ask fundamental and difficult questions that society hasn’t tried to answer yet, like, ‘Why are animals important?’
Wildlife in the Balance
I’ve had many revelations as an author. One of these is the realisation that no single writer, book or scientific paper, can ever tell a whole story. The reviews I do here are for writing I deem essential reading. Because to understand why animals matter is to protect all our futures. For this you have to absorb a bewildering range of perspectives, where many concepts will always be beyond scientific explanation.
Beastly is one of those books.
A vital story about why animals are important
I am in awe of Carew’s writing ability. Beastly is adorned with colour and texture. Carew takes the reader on a delightful journey. She plots the narrative starting with the history of some of the most extraordinary modern-age discoveries of wildlife (such as the bee’s waggle dance). Many such revelations came from people who started with an underlying appreciation of their own similarity to wildlife.
In Wildlife in the Balance I make no bones of the fact that the story of our animality isn’t new.
‘The concepts I discuss, which I came to through observing nature and animals, are comfortingly similar to the folklore, stories and traditional understanding of the world’s oldest cultures.’
Simon Mustoe, Wildlife in the Balance
Reading Beastly, you’ll understand this even better.
At the start of the book, Carew talks about scientists who were strongly connected to animal life. They simply enquired about what they could not understand. Such as the question: why do animals matter at all? How do they feel? What are they saying? This innocent enthusiasm by which early naturalists compared such discoveries with their own humanity is increasingly frowned upon in science today.
Modern science breaks things down into parts and then rebuilds a ‘model’ of how things work, in its own image. But that image is premised on its own inherently primitive understanding of the complexity of nature
When I started work as a consultant ecologist my boss told me that my enthusiasm to protect wildlife was one of my greatest assets. These days I’m told my ‘passion’ is an obstacle to being employed to advise. This change has happened over 20 years or so. I think, because of an increasing disconnect we all have from nature.
To know wildlife is to love it. For those who are disconnected and whose decisions affect the lives of animals and humans alike, passion for nature has increasingly become used as a mark of disrespect. These days apparently, to be accepted among people wise in the ways of society, we are have to become irreverent to wildlife.
When science diverged from nature
In the very recent past scientific publications decided that conferring human characteristics onto animals was ungodly. We are still largely led by a modern Christian view of man’s superiority. To ‘anthropomorphise’ animals and suggest they might share culture, feelings, emotions and empathy is to destroy all credibility in one’s research.
The consequence to animals was a head-on collision into the widering wall that separated the human-non-human boundary. What gave it traction was our egos. How agog we were to hear about the great divide between special us and inferior them.
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
Unfortunately, as Carew shows us, this has also denied us learning. We have lost the chance of exploring possibilities that fall outside of a current way of thinking. This blinkered view of life has had consequences for how we treat wildlife and each other.
Lost common sense
For instance, the immense complexity of Indigenous connection to nature is inherently metaphorical. How else can you explain how to behave (and survive)? Thousands of years of ‘rolling conversation with the land from which [you] come’ can only last through paintings, dance, music and story-telling.
This fact makes some people terribly confused.
‘… we’re supposed to show ‘profound respect’ for the ‘indigenous knowledge’ of Aboriginal people, some of whom are now in the Federal Court trying to stop a $5.6bn offshore gas project by claiming an undersea pipeline will upset a man-turned crocodile they claim has live in that patch of ocean since the Dreamtime’
Andrew Bolt, The Herald Sun
Bolt wants proof and logic. The hatred comes from not being willing to accept, or understand, timeless complexity.
First nations learnt to ‘think like mountains’. They confer personhood on wildlife and places. This is how the Gunditjmara people of Australia describe the Budj Bim volcano, as a domed head, spewing teeth. It transformed their world and allowed them to create the most successful aquaculture system ever built.
‘That humans have not learnt to think like a mountain is why ‘we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea’.
Quote by Aldo Leopold, from Beastly by Keggie Carew.
In research, as in politics and media, we commonly regard any philosophy about protecting nature to be ungodly, ‘primitive’ and unscientific, unless there is a study to prove it.
‘The burden of proof turns out to be the creature’s burden, because we cannot use our common sense, or our shared mammalian experience.’
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
I was most affected by this statement about Dr Jane Goodall, obviously meaning no disrespect to her. But I guess this sums up how far the modern scientific method has driven a wedge between science and our own identity as animals. There may be no-one on Earth more capable of empathising with the beasts. Yet to retain credibility for her science meant Goodall abandoning any notion of what an animal might feel like until it could be proved.
[Goodall] already knew, from a whole childhood of close observation, that her dog, Rusty, was quite capable of rational thought, had a vivid and unique personality, and experienced an array of complex feelings. Anyone with a dog as a pet, she sagely pointed out, knows this. However, scientific orthodoxy was hostile; Rusty could leap around the garden doing somersaults all he liked, but he could not be happy without hard evidence.
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
But what’s the alternative?
A failed experiment for humanity
Being far too complex to describe, natural science aims to rationalise nature. Modern science breaks things down into parts and then rebuilds a ‘model’ of how things work, in its own image. But that image is premised on its own inherently primitive understanding of the complexity of nature, and our connection to it. It has become a failed experiment for all humanity.
When we first met online, Carew read my book and exclaimed:
“I am a generalist and synthesiser, trying to get the message out and across to the general reader, so I write in a way that I understand it myself. But oh my god, so many cross-overs, as you will see …”
There are so many parallels between our books. I too have been taken aback by the lack of support for the simple idea that animals matter at all.
The most successful societies observed wildlife closely and lived with it. They engendered respect, care and reverence for wildlife
My book is full of scientific references that flow from animals’ ability to build stable, habitable structures. Of the existence of patterns that begin at the molecular level, with thermodynamicsThermodynamics are at the heart of our understanding of ecosystems and not an altogether difficult concept to grasp but one that isn't widely taught to ecologists. Basically, all life on Earth, is derived from the Sun's heat. This renewable energy source constantly bombards ecosystems with energy but they would overheat, if it wasn't for the absorptive capacity of food webs. More, and end up as culture. This is my way of explaining the ‘higgledy-piggledy live jigsaw.’ When you know ‘how’ to look, it’s possible to find the science that underpins this story and realise that animals are humanity’s best hope.
Yet this same notion has been heavily criticised by one scientist as ‘half-baked voodoo’. Carew can write, as an artist, about exactly the same things.
When anyone step across the scientific threshold, all hell breaks loose!
Dammed if you do, damned if you don’t
When you break down complex systems the results more-often-than-not depict the opposite of how things really work. Or, looking another way, when you describe complex systems, the overall picture cannot be accurately conveyed as it’s too diverse to prove that any part of it functions a particular way, in isolation.
Bolt (who I referenced above) is a right-wing commentator. He regards indigenous science as a threat to our modern way of life. But I reckon if he really cared he’d be devoting his entire life to the conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More of wild animals and ancient culture. Because that is how we truly learn to protect all our livelihoods. In doing so, he’d realise the relevance of the man-turned crocodile. Giving personhood to animals, even places, is a perfectly natural thing to do. It even makes economic sense according to Ralph Chami, the assistant director of the International Monetary Fund.
‘Humans are considered the beings who must look to the teachers all around them. Had the human people learnt from the council of animals not to interfere with the sacred purpose of another being, the eagle would look down on a different world and salmon would be crowding up the rivers.’
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
Carew describes the enormous impact of beavers on shaping the whole of the North American continent. There is a quote from an elderly Indian woman, Lala Ross, born in 1830, who:
‘S’pose you take all beaver, she told him, bimeby [by and by] all water go too. And if water go, no trout, no fur, no grass, not’ing stop? Then she said, ‘Why you no go that creek and give it back the beavers? S’pose once again the creek full of beavers, maybe trout come back.’
We’ve forgotten how to behave
It’s no use having knowledge if you’re badly behaved. You know the child who plays truant, abuses other kids, or steals from the sweetshop? The parents believe it’s because they are too intelligent? How much human potential is wasted because of bad behaviour?
This is why surviving cultures develop behavioural bonds set out as ‘laws’. These aren’t just the written statute but a wide range of written and unwritten customs that are taught to children before they can become adults.
In almost all indigenous cultures animals are considered spirits of ancestors. This notion derives from the type of empathy Carew describes in Beastly. The most successful societies observed wildlife closely and lived with it. They engendered respect, care and reverence for wildlife, so that everyday decision-making, even on killing and eating animals, was done as though one was protecting ones own family.
In the latter chapters of Beastly Carew takes a magnifying glass to our awful treatment of animals. How, we might ask, does general animal welfare relate to wildlife conservation as a whole?
This is why.
Science is only part of the solution
We know nothing about why beavers behave the way they do. As Carew explains, we can’t enter the mind of an animal (or animal society) to know how they feel or why.
‘… if a lion could talk, we would not understand him. No least for all the lion things we could never appreciate: stink, taste, digestion, attraction to lionesses.’
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
We might as well be talking about a ‘man-turned crocodile’ for all the help science gives us in understanding animals.
Such inimitable complexity defies explanation, which leads to what statisticians call Type II errorsUnderlying almost all conclusions in scientific studies is a presumption that something is 95% likely to occur. But that threshold could just as easily be 50:50, or less. By setting the bar so high, researchers can be quite certain that their results stand. But what if the threshold isn't met and an idea is rejected? What if that presumption is More. That is, when you reject an idea that was actually correct.
Last week a Twitter user noted that the polar vortex was wobbling wildly, adding ‘the climate system is broken’. A hundred climate scientists piled on, ridiculing the author, pointing to a paper that showed how half of the variation in the vortex’s future climate was explained simply by statistical modellingThe process, either mathematically or in the human brain, of creating an internal version of something that we can refer to, to better understand how it functions and our place within. Scientific modelling is where we take the best knowledge we have and build a version of what will happen, if we assume certain parameters. For example, we might model More errors.
Sure, he couldn’t categorically say it was broken. But the author wasn’t actually commenting on the future. He was showing what’s happening right now.
The scientists were rejecting his hypothesis that the polar vortex is broken in future despite being shown that it is in actual fact broken today. These are the same scientists trying to get the world to take climate change more seriously. It’s the same as Goodall rejecting the idea that dogs might be happy.
I suddenly realised (thank you Keggie) that Type II errors can only be avoided if you simultaneously hold fast to a belief system!
For conservation science to work means also accepting that there are things that relate us to animals that are bigger than us. It means believing animals are more intrinsically important than science can ever prove. It means teaching scientists to be a lot more humble.
What more significant value can an animal have, than to be the embodiment of your parents, looking over you, to make sure you don’t misbehave?
Fantasy can be scientific
Both ‘beasts’, mythical or real, have shaped the land on which western civilisation was built in ways we will never imagine. Some beasts, like a man-turned crocodile, or a volcano-man spewing teeth, might be metaphorical but that embraces an enormous array of notions about the importance of land and wildlife to all our lives.
Carew references German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1958 saying:
‘What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’.
By simply questioning the validity of any animal to survive – and behave according to its nature – we undermine our own scientific integrity. We always ask the wrong question. We ask:
‘How we can we do research on them, so we can know how to manage them?’
In this way, we have simply taken hideous lab experiments into the fresh air, which, as Carew suggests, treat animals like machines (or in my words, like ‘the icing on the cake’).
Instead we should be asking ourselves, what can we do to protect all beasts, so that we may have abundant food and water?
The law of diminishing returns
Carew’s frustration is clear on meeting a lawyer who flaty refuses to acknowledge the dangers of man-made pollutants and their impact on man and beast. ‘You need evidence before you make rash statements’ … Carew was scolded.
This attitude is a convenient falsehood of modern ‘civilisation’ employed by the majority of ‘diplomats’, who use Type II errors in science to avoid uncomfortable truths and get employment. Once in a while a lawyer like Rob Bilott might come along, who was dramatised by Mark Ruffalo in the film Dark Waters. It took twenty years of his work before chemical giant DuPont was finally forced to admit that Teflon was killing us.
Likewise, it’s widely acknowledged among indigenous folks like Lala Ross that beavers are essential to water, fish and forests. But beavers were almost totally wiped out and we’ve since built homes on the floodplains and industry around broken landscapes. Yet rewilding enthusiasts are met with barriers to reinstating this lost biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More and culture back into the empty landscape, in the absence of scientific proof it works. What even is there to study, in order to prove this?
How much is enough data?
How much data is enough data? To know what we need to be doing. How much of this data affects outcomes? And how much is just tracking decline? How much is locked in a treadmill of funding research to tell us each year that the numbers are going down, and down – and that we need more data? As Crumley points out, We can take a string of far-reaching initiatives to the landscape of Scotland, and almost all of them involve nothing more difficult than that we should stop doing certain things, give nature its head and let wildlife manage wildlife?’
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
Science needs to be directed at restoring faith in nature. We need a new belief system that animals are humanity’s best hope. As until that happens, all we seem to be doing is making discoveries of things we learnt in the past – by watching the animals around us – and have simply forgotten how to believe in nature and wildlife today.
A final word from Keggie Carew
And finally, a quote from the finishing pages of the book that sums things up beautifully.
‘Emptiness is painful. Attachment to place is something we all feel. It is not about owning the land. It is about loving it, paying close attention, knowing who lives there. Local landscapes mean most to us, wildlife on our doorsteps imbued with personal affection, intertwining our own life with the natural world, which is where it belongs.’
Keggie Carew’s Beastly
This book is good for the soul. I strongly recommend everyone reads it!
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