It's Hard To Describe The Complexity Of Our Disconnect From Nature; This Piece Comes Close
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In north Wales, mountain goats from the Great Orme munching potted petunias off Llandudno windowsills supplied much-needed online entertainment. But the crashing of barriers between wild and domestic spaces has an ominous side. Displacement is a symptom of ecosystems under stress. The capybara roaming through the upscale gardens of houses in Nordelta on the outskirts of Buenos Aires would not be there had not the suburb been built by draining extensive areas of the Luján River delta, robbing the metre-long rodents of their natural habitat. The relentless growth of Mumbai – a million new residents a year – has pushed its eastern and western suburbs into areas normally reserved for leopards, specifically the 100 sq km of the Sanjay Gandhi wildlife sanctuary. Deprived of prey, the big cats have strayed beyond the preserve. At least 50 of them have taken up residence within the city, sustaining themselves from the enormous population of feral dogs, occasionally sampling an amuse-bouche of a dachshund or a Siamese cat.
The causes and consequences of this ecological disruption are complicated. On the one hand, it’s not good for the leopards to become Mumbai street creatures; on the other, they are doing the bloated metropolis a favour by culling the feral dog packs, which often include rabid animals. But then again, there would not be so many of those wild dogs were it not for the introduction, a decade ago, of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug commonly used for livestock in the 1990s, which ended up driving the third player in this urban drama – white-rumped vultures – to near extinction as a result of scavenging drugged cattle. A south Asian vulture population of 40 million in the 1980s now numbers around 19,000 40 years later. This is more than a catastrophic species loss, bad enough though that is. The dramatic depletion of vultures has unpicked the ecological threads that have tied human and animal culture together in India for centuries. The reverent freedom given to sacred cows by Hinduism, so that they might wander the streets until their bodies lie down in peaceful death, depended on the working assumption that carcasses would be cleaned by scavenging vulture flocks. Without the vultures, decomposing cattle have attracted rats and feral dogs, whose numbers have increased exponentially as the birds have disappeared. A collateral result is the steeply rising incidence of rabid attacks on humans, many of them fatal.
Mutuality between humans and animals has been dangerously disrupted. Temple monkeys, long conditioned to exist symbiotically with humans, and largely dependent on pilgrims and tourists for their food, turned combative as a result of the abrupt withdrawal of their customary diet. The Thai temple city of Lopburi has seen gangs of macaques, in their thousands, engage in violent street battles over scraps of discarded food, while residents barricaded themselves in their houses against the rampaging primates. There is good reason for their fear. Macaques are reservoir carriers of herpes B – McHV1 – often lethal for humans.
Disruption-born contagions are happening in domestic as well as exotic places. A serious malady generated by ecological displacement arrived almost 50 years ago and parked itself on the vegetation of the American dream: the suburban lawn. During my first year in New York state in 1994, it found me, and was no fun at all: three months of piercing headaches, spells of dizziness, and sharp, arthritic muscle pain, before an antibiotic got the better of it. The infecting agent of Lyme disease (named after Old Lyme, Connecticut, where it was first diagnosed and analysed) is a corkscrew-shaped spirochaete found in white-footed mice and sometimes in other small mammals like chipmunks. Not only do those mice survive the excavation and shredding of the woodland habitat for house construction, they positively thrive on the alteration, overwintering in the suburban estates that have displaced their native habitat.
The rodents function as reservoirs for the dormant but immanent spirochaete. Enter black-legged ticks, needing blood meals at each change in their life cycle, from larva to nymph to adult. A feed on the mice absorbs the spirochaete, which is then transferred to white-tailed deer, upon which the ticks lodge in huge numbers, especially on the ears and around the nose. The deer have themselves multiplied abundantly on the borderland between old forests and the herbicide-saturated, brilliantly lurid carpet lawns of “colonial” McMansions. Suburbanites are accustomed to watching white-tailed deer emerge from their woodland cover to graze their shrubs or settle on lawn pasture. During the pandemic, fear of urban contagiousness led to departures from cities by those who could afford to do so. But clearcutting for suburban construction to meet the quickened demand has brought new residents ever closer to those ubiquitous reservoirs of disease – white-footed mice. Even as house-dwellers awaited their next delivery of online-ordered groceries, black-legged ticks hung on the blades of those hyperfertilised lawns, primed for their next blood meal.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/13/simon-schama-foreign-bodies-book-extract-broken-relationship-humans-animals
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