Just how weird these times are is underscored by the fact that, when I took treats out to the three Border Leicester sheep I am looking after this morning, I actually asked them to: ‘Sit!’
I am nearly 62, and ‘Sit’ is what I generally say to animals who are doing something I would rather they didn’t. The sheep were jostling me around and nuzzling me in what we used to call the private parts. God knows what they are called today.
So, in an effort to take control, I shouted ‘Sit!’ at them. I don’t know why. It sort of just slipped out.
And, to my astonishment, one of them did. Right there, by the fence, on her arse, she sat. And having sat, she stared at me in a way that insinuated that I had started something, and it was now up to me to finish it. Besides, she is so fat on grass and old yarrow that the gravitational effort needed to get herself back up again was just something that she hadn’t thought through. She is probably still out there sitting on her backside.
The fact that nature is so surprising has finally stopped surprising me now. I have spent three four years, 200 books, endless scientific papers and a great chunk of fieldwork trying to get to grips with it, and each day is more fascinating than the last. Just today, I leaned that a red kite needs something like a buzzard to make the initial incision in a big bit of carrion because its bill just isn’t tough enough.
But I’m lucky. I was brought up in a little village and went to a secondary school that, I kid you not, had its own pack of beagles. I have had every chance to understand the natural world around me and, although I never once availed myself of those beagles, I am slowly getting better at it.
The vast majority of people don’t. When the Junior Oxford Dictionary replaces blackberry and crocus with broadband and chartroom, you can dimly understand that natural history is one of those things that successive education secretaries feel is just a nice-to-have, a feast of primroses and otters in an otherwise busy world.
They are, of course, talking bollocks. We will only start to save the biodiversity of our world, and the ourselves, when we take the trouble to teach our children about it. It starts at home, but has to be supported by what happens at school. Our children will only be inspired by it if we tell them what ‘it’ actually is.
My colleague at the charity, Curlew Action, Mary Colwell, has been running a tireless campaign to get a Natural History GCSE put into the syllabus for years, and we are almost there, in the territory of ‘just one more push’. They are debating it in Parliament tomorrow, so, if you want to do your tiny bit to change the world, please write a letter to your MP NOW, and demand it.
You will be doing every bit as much for the planet as you would if you bought an electric car, or shoved a compostable toilet in your shed.
(Obviously, if you are in Torridge and West Devon, I accept that Sir Geoffrey Cox may be a bit too busy, but there another 649 constituencies)
Just think of all those beagles.
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