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Richard Girling - The Longest Story: How humans have loved, hated and misunderstood other species

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Richard Girling The Longest Story: How humans have loved, hated and misunderstood other species
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The Longest Story: How humans have loved, hated and misunderstood other species: summary, description and annotation

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Lucid, informed and persuasive Evening StandardThought-provoking Daily MailAn extraordinary book Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse WhispererThe history of humanitys relationship with other species is baffling.Without animals there would be no us. We are all fellow travellers on the same evolutionary journey. By charting the lovehate story of people and animals, from their first acquaintance in deep prehistory to the present and beyond, Richard Girling reveals how and where our attitudes towards animals began and how they have persisted, been warped and become magnified ever since.In dazzling prose, The Longest Story tells of the cumulative influence of theologians, writers, artists, warriors, philosophers, farmers, activists and scientists across the centuries, now locking us into debates on farming, extinction, animal rights, pets, experiments and religion.Essential reading Philip Lymbery, CEO of Compassion in World Farming and author of Farmageddon

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR Fiction Ielfstans Place Spriggs War Non-fiction - photo 1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

Ielfstans Place

Spriggs War

Non-fiction

The View from the Top: A Panoramic Guide to Reading Britains Most Beautiful Vistas

Rubbish!: Dirt on our Hands and Crisis Ahead

Sea Change: Britains Coastal Catastrophe

Greed: Why We Cant Help Ourselves

The Hunt for the Golden Mole: All Creatures Great and Small, and Why They Matter

The Man Who Ate the Zoo: Frank Buckland, Forgotten Hero of Natural History

For Caroline Contents Prologue Humans acquaintance with animals is as old as - photo 2

For Caroline

Contents
Prologue

Humans acquaintance with animals is as old as their acquaintance with each other. You would think after all this time that we would be clear in our minds about both the nature of other species and our relationships with them. Yet we are mired in confusion. To think about the attitudes of Homo sapiens to other species is to lose oneself in a tangle of logical and moral contradictions. How can it be that otherwise humane and caring people who love animals can turn a blind eye to persistent acts of cruelty perpetrated on their behalf? How could it be that a society which cherishes the dog, or thinks it does, could treat the lives of other, equally sentient creatures as industrial processes, or would convert the worlds most populous food animal, the chicken, into an honorary vegetable? Who could have believed, at any time before our own, that animal husbandry was a business best conducted indoors? What kind of people pray to baboons; make cuddly toys of man-eaters; invest their human personalities with supposedly animal characteristics; make human surrogates of frogs and guinea pigs; make fictional heroes of everything from elephants to hedgehogs while threatening the very existence of the living animals themselves? Why do so many people think that the best way to see a rare and beautiful animal is along the sights of a rifle?

For all of these, and more, there exist cogent and comprehensible explanations, but to understand them it is necessary to trace their origins deep into prehistory, and to follow their evolution over thousands of years. This is what I have set out to do: to relate the full, lovehate story of Human and Beast from first acquaintance to last. In the beginning, humans struggled to make a niche for themselves in a wilderness that favoured wolves and mammoths. In the end, wildlife is being forced out of unsurvivable man-made landscapes to forge new identities in towns and cities. It is the culmination of a process that began two or three hundred million years ago, when a branching of the phylogenetic tree first differentiated humans from apes. How that branching occurred, and the precise nature of the species it created, is a subject of controversy that still underpins arguments about sexism, racism, religious, political and economic dogma, as well as animal rights and the human propensity for violence.

Through most of historical time, from prehistory until the end of the Second World War, the book is written without benefit of hindsight. The narrative voice knows only what any reasonably educated person would have known at the time . The opinions and attitudes, too, are specific to each passing age. Thus we can see how and when the contradictions arose, and how, under the influence of theologians, writers, artists, farmers, hunters, warriors, empire-builders, philosophers, doctors, teachers, showmen and scientists, they have persisted, warped and magnified themselves ever since. Like evolution itself, it is a process that never ceases. Looking forward, we may anticipate a changed world in which the very nature of living organisms could be transformed by technologies more terrifying than the mythical powers of ancient gods.

Richard Girling

Norfolk, England, 2021

Part One
In the
Beginning

Hunters, Farmers, Worshippers, Warriors

Chapter One Sweet Reason We will walk together for an awfully long time Man - photo 3
Chapter One
Sweet Reason

We will walk together for an awfully long time. Man and beast. Them and us. Best friend, worst enemy. The hunter and the hunted.

In the beginning we are inseparable. We are them, they are us; all slime from the same swamp. It will take hundreds of millions of years for anyone to understand what is now happening: organisms dividing, crystallising into species, crawling towards the random moment that we will call the Creation. Relationships develop that are variously symbiotic, parasitic or murderous. Nothing stays the same. Everything is changing into something else, sprouting fins, wings, scales and fur to prepare each one for its niche. Legs appear. Small, weasel-like animals grow and stretch, and go on stretching until they can reach up into trees. They live in the forest, where their long arms and short legs are perfect for swinging through the branches and picking fruit. We are still with them, in them, alive but unborn. We travel with them when they move from the forest on to the plain, and stay with them as they begin to change their posture and their shape. Arms shorten, legs lengthen, necks stretch. Upright, on two feet, we walk until we are them no more.

For a while we lead parallel lives, us and all the others. We gather from the same plains and forests, eat the same fruit, run from the same predators. Time passes, lots of time, perhaps a millennium or two, and we have learned to make tools out of stone. It means we can kill things and eat meat. We grow stronger, more intelligent, and see our intelligence as a mark of our superiority over all other living things. It is how we are. It is how we are meant to be. Supreme.

More centuries go by, and now we are in the north, fighting the cold in central Europe. Hunting and gathering have a different rhythm here. We do not decide what we will eat: we take only what is offered. For it is not just the ice that has to be endured. Hunger, too, is an insatiable taker of life. There is no green abundance to be gathered. Even reindeer find it hard to stay alive when scraps of grass and lichen are all that winter provides. What saves us is our brains. Our heads have swollen with the growing weight of them, and we have learned to use them well. We think. We reason. We understand that actions have consequences. We know that if we steal from another person, then he will steal from us, and that he will kill us if he has to. We know also that if we give to that person, then he will give to us in return. More than this. We know that if we hunt together, we will have more to eat than if we hunt alone. Our tools and weapons are sharper now, which makes us better hunters, and the meat makes our bones and brains even stronger. We do not submit to fate. If the ice swallows our land, then we migrate like reindeer towards the sun.

Always, we hunt. We share our hunting grounds with wolves, and we can see how alike we are. Like us, they follow a leader and work in packs to kill animals bigger than themselves. Like us, they kill only what they need, share it among themselves and feed their young. But our brains are bigger than theirs. We understand them in ways they do not understand us. We know how important it is not to waste anything. We have found good uses for skins and horns and sinews as well as meat. Because we live in this way, because we have reasoned , we know there will always be enough animals left for us to hunt, and that their fur will keep us warm.

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