Matt and Cow Lady
PBS has an interesting show, via the BBC, about elephants migrating to a reserve for a few weeks. One plot line is about a 45-year-old bull and his struggle to find a female in estrus.
Cameraman Bob Poole follows, Matt, one of the largest, oldest tuskers in Kenya to see how a big bull in his prime goes about finding a mate and deals with the challenges from young bulls. Can he find a mate before the elephants begin to disperse in just 3 weeks’ time?
He can, of course, because if he hadn’t been able to, they wouldn’t have chosen him for the episode, but it’s still interesting to watch. When one cow finally does come into estrus seven young bulls follow her around before “Matt” arrives on the scene. Will he get her away from them? Will he triumph over this enterprising younger bull who has just mounted her? He will! He will charge roaring at young bull and shove him off just in time! And the winner is!
So he does mount her and there’s a surprisingly sweet post-coital interlude in which the rest of the herd (cows and calves) crowd around and “Matt” sticks around too and they all seem pleased as punch.
But the voiceover narration is odd at this point, because the male narrator goes on and on about how “Matt” will have his genes carried on in the next generation and what a good thing that is.
There’s not a word about the female’s genes, nor is she given a name.
It’s partly just the storytelling convention: the people who made the show decided to make a narrative out of “Matt” and his quest, while the cow has not been part of the story until the last minute. There’s a second (hideously sad) narrative about a herd of orphans (orphaned by poaching) whose too-young matriarch is the named central figure…as is her male calf. But this is supposed to be a nature program, even with the storytelling conventions for the mass audience. It seems both silly and uneducational to leave viewers with the impression that Matt alone is sending his genes to a new generation. Matt got his share of the job done in about ten seconds; the cow will be doing hers for 22 months and then for many years unless she is killed by poachers, which she probably will be.
Get ready for the toddler’s question: “did you ever see an elephant… Before they were all gone..?”
Coming soon, from a toddler near you.
OR: “did you ever see an X…………………….. Before they were all gone..?” (Insert name of species in space provided.)
I know. The show said poaching has soared recently. God damn it.
Farming can only ever expand at the expense of wildlife; the farmer is in the business of ecological simplification: a few species with many individual representatives of each, as against many species with fewer individual reps of each. But never many species with many individuals, and for well understood reasons.
Nature works to increase complexity and diversity, and the farmer/rancher/whatever is forever pushing back the other way.
Modern farming has been defined as ‘the process whereby land is used to turn petroleum into food’. Which is also food for thought, IMHO.
“Were you there when the oil ran out, Grandpa..?” Last question asked by the toddler..?
That’s the kind, gentle version. Since the climate apocolypse now seems to be happening much faster than the conservative models that climatologists had predicted (and that were still too radical for business-as-usual types to accept), and will come to pass within current lifetimes rather than later in the century when those culpable were supposed to be safely dead, a more likely response is going to be “You stupid fuckers traded (Insert name of species in space provided) for weed whackers, leaf blowers… (insert name of fossil fuel consuming technologies of “convenience” here)?” Because we surely did.
Our envy of the cave-dwellers’ eyewitnessing living Pleistocene megafauna and painting their likeness for us to see all these millenia later will be nothing in comparison to what our heirs will feel when they see our own records of what we detroyed in our thoughtless waste. Assuming there are such heirs who possess the requisite technology to view them. Sometimes I hate humans. This is one of those times.
I hope the rats and cockroaches have more sense than we did.
YNnB:
I am actually in primary production here in NW New South Wales. Our wild animals here are all benign, as the megafauna were all wiped out by the Aborigines who roamed the country as hunter-gatherers before European settlement post -1788.
The extinct diprotodon was a sort of giant wombat, around the size of a modern hippopotamus, and wombats are omnivores. At a guess, it would not be advisable to encounter one while out in the paddocks or bushwalking. Megalania was a huge goanna-like reptile that would probably have been delighted if offered a kimodo dragon for breakfast: no, make that for a light snack at morning tea time. Its lunch menu could have included the odd saltwater crocodile, in season of course.The Aborigines apparently wiped that one out, too. Which is just as well, IMHO, as I would say that it could demolish any modern house all by itself to get at the goodies inside.
Somewhere up in the night sky there is probably a planet with intelligent Homo erectus like species on it whose members are doing their best to evolve into something like Homo sapiens, but are being driven bonkers because they keep getting eaten by the planet’s dinosaurs, which unfortunately have not yet been extinguished down to the last specimen by comet impact.
“What’s that kicking down the front door? Don’t tell me it’s that damned Tyrannosaurus back! Damn, blast and bother! And I lent my bazooka to a neighbour down the road for him to try out on those marauding pterodactyls.”
Never likely to be said by me, thank God.