120THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYsense that because Australians and humanity in general have drasti-
cally altered the ecosystem, eradicating feral species might bring us to “a
nonviolent dreamtime” when nature is fixed. Murray is critiquing a vac-
uous understanding of ecology in which the natural world tends toward
a state of static harmony, which humans in our large-scale ignorance
have destroyed. In the poem the militaristic slaughter of feral popula-
tions is symptomatic of both our “merciless human rearrangement / of
the whole earth” and the insanity of our dream of a “green ending,”
whose stasis may be created by shooting animals from helicopters.
The poem also dramatizes the debate between animal rights and
environmentalist values; in Australia particularly, animal rights activ-
ists and environmentalists are frequently on opposite sides in policy
debates about feral animals, with the former resisting attempts to
destroy them, while environmentalists argue for the elimination or con-
trol of feral populations as a way of protecting habitats and indigenous
populations of species. The differences between the two sides are often
stark: animal rights activists value the lives of the individual animals and
defend their right to live, while environmentalists understand feral ani-
mals not as individuals but as populations threatening the habitats
and landscapes of other more deserving indigenous species (includ-
ing humans). While the poem largely frames the slaughter as “us against
species,” the image of the effect of a single bullet abolishing “an unknow-
able headlong world” powerfully presents the death of the individual
animal, not the species. The abolished world is the life, experience,
memory, and being of the single creature, a world unto itself both in its
completeness and its distance from our own. The animal’s world is “head-
long” in its flight from the helicopter, its entire life focused on this one
ineffectual escape.
What is the moral status of the individual animal? The question is
vexed and complex, in part because it is also vague. Does the life of an
individual animal matter to anyone other than itself? Does it have moral
status or rights? More precisely, to what degree are humans obliged to
consider the value of the individual lives of other animals? The answer
depends first on what kind of animal we are asking about. Even the most
ardent animal rights advocate feels differently about the life of an insect