We all have our rituals.
One of my strangest is an enforced daily reading that I push myself through of the latest pronouncements of one Clement Beaune, France’s Minister for Europe, and President Macron’s chosen attack-poodle on the subject of the United Kingdom. You may or may not have heard of him but, if not, I heartily recommend it. However much you dislike us from time to time yourself, let me assure you that it couldn’t be as much as M Beaune. He hates us even more than de Gaulle did, which gives context, even if only for historians. As a relatively young man, he expends so much energy on publicly disliking us that it is strange that he has time to do his own job, whatever that actually consists of. His latest argument is that France is far ahead of the UK in the matter of vaccines, which kind of gives you a flavour of the debate. If you wanted one tiny indicator that there actually might be life on the other side of the miserable Brexit process, Clement provides it.
Now, this next disclosure won’t necessarily do my friendships much good, but I suffer from a rare psychological condition that imprints some people on my mind as the animal that some random sequence of my brain pulses thinks they might go on to be. Think Reginald Perrin and the mother-in-law as hippopotamus, only much less rudely, and you get the idea. Trevor, for example, is a rabbit, and Duncan a black bear.
For some reason, Clement Beaune is a muntjac, or barking deer.
There are around 45,000 muntjacs in the UK, which is not bad progress for a breed that came almost entirely from a break-out from Woburn Park a few decades ago. They are only slightly bigger than Boris (my dog, fool, not the Prime Minister), at about 0.5 metres tall and around 16 kg in weight. You’re more likely to hear their bark than see their shape, which is just as well, as they were pretty much right at the back of the queue when nature was handing out cuteness.
You might think that something the size of my Boris snuffling around in your local woods is not a problem, just a delightful addition to the local biodiversity. Unfortunately, you would be sorely wrong.
Just like Donald Trump gets his kicks from moving his golf ball to surprising places when no one is looking, the muntjac gets hers from nibbling out the smallest shoots and buds of every damn tree in the forest. ‘Armies of these satanic, sapling wrecking pig hamsters,’ as Benedict Macdonald puts it in his recent book Rebirding, ‘are destroying our nation’s next generation of trees.’ And add them to the 2,000,000 other deer currently wandering around the place, and you swiftly get the picture that we won’t actually have any new tree growth to speak of down the line. And no new trees means no new cuckoos, nightingales, willow warblers and all the other wildlife that needs woody scrubland to thrive, which just means yet a deeper decline in biodiversity. Sad.
But there is a ready made solution, and one that would work from tomorrow. Eat more venison. (Obviously, if you are vegetarian or vegan, ignore this, but it is your biodiversity, too, so please bear with us.)
Go to your butcher, your supermarket, your local pub when it re-opens and demand venison, and then go on demanding it. And, having demanded it, cook it and eat it. And, having eaten it, buy more of it. Delicious, healthy, full of Omega 3, natural and, most important, freely available. Some of this blog may be tongue in cheek, but do not underestimate the extent to which deer in general, and the muntjac in particular, are messing up our biodiversity. They may be lovely and graceful and dignified, but there are about 400% more of them at the moment than the country can take.
If you want to move the mouse, as they say, move the cheese.
And think positively. it would probably give Clement Beaune one more reason to hate us.
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