I remember listening to David Attenborough talking about filming nature and wild animals. He was discussing being honest and how ‘certain’ (Walt Disney) film makers had portrayed animals as they never were for the sake of the story or camera or appealing to audiences preconceptions. So famously in the Disney nature films the lemmings leaping into the water are a species that never do that, they were forceably driven in by film crew and the weird dance of scorpions which was created in the cutting room.
Whilst some of the consequent films – the horrific dying of dozens of horses in an Australian drought – are hard to take and we wonder why the crews didn’t do anything as they were there, there is a stark honesty in letting the camera tell the real story. This is something rarely done in film and never in Hollywood. But that reality is not something we care to remember when dealing with nature elsewhere.
Our religious texts tell us animals are there for our benefit (that same old human ego) and what the Catholics are allowed to ‘ethically’ do to animals because they believe they have no ‘souls would make anyone sick to read. At the other end of the scale worshiping animals because you think they are your ancestors is equally imbalanced.
Letting animals be animals and still loving our shared existence seems to be beyond most people. It is a great curse of human thinking.