when they get into a sheep pen: they slaughter simply because they can
and, in the case of humans, until a profit can no longer be turned. For the
sea otter, this moment occurred between 1790 and 1830; for the
American bison, it happened between 1850 and 1880; for the Atlantic
cod, it lasted for centuries, ending only in 1990. These mass slaughters
have their analogue in the financial markets to which they are often tied,
and they end the same way every time. The Canadian poet Eric Miller
summed up the mind-set driving these binges better than just about
anyone:
A cornucopia!^10
Bliss of killing without ever seeming to subtract
from the tasty sum of infinity!But infinity is a man-made construct that has no relevance in the
natural world. In nature, everything is finite, especially carnivores. The
order Carnivora (meat-eating mammals) represents approximately 10
percent of all mammal species, but only 2 percent of the total mammalian
biomass. Apex predators like big cats represent a tiny fraction of this
already small percentage and, between 1860 and 1960, big game hunters
made it smaller still. In December of 1911, the freshly crowned King
George V went on an elephant-borne shikar to Nepal, during which he
and his retinue killed thirty-nine tigers in ten days. But they were
amateurs compared to Colonel Geoffrey Nightingale, who, prior to his
sudden death while attempting to spear a panther from horseback, shot
more than three hundred tigers in India’s former Hyderabad state. The
Maharaja of Udaipur claimed to have shot “at least” a thousand tigers by
- In a letter to the biologist George Schaller, the Maharaja of Surguja
wrote: “My total bag of Tigers is 1150 (one thousand one hundred fifty
only).”^11