Richard Collins: Human cruelty to wildlife still persists
For Marrakesh, Jemaa Cobra Plays In Square A The Music At His El Charmer Snake Morocco Fnaa
On June 20 1631, pirates from North Africa’s Barbary Coast attacked the West Cork village of Baltimore. Led by a Dutchman, they carried off at least 107 people, mainly English settlers. The male victims became galley-slaves, while the women were sold into harems. Only two of those abducted ever returned to Baltimore.
‘Berber’ comes from the Latin ‘barbarus’, meaning a foreigner whose ‘bar-bar’ utterances were deemed to be gibberish.
The Romans had been kidnapping such people long before Berbers got in on the act. Large creatures, such as lions bears and elephants, were also captured. They were imported from North Africa to be slaughtered, with appalling cruelty, in bloodthirsty public spectacles.
The wildlife of Morocco, land of the Berbers, became impoverished by the insatiable demand for animals. It remains so to this day. In medieval times, ‘animal diplomacy’, parent of today’s ‘panda diplomacy’, became popular with the sultans, who gifted exotic animals to heads of state. Then firearms arrived on the scene to deliver the ‘coup de grace’. The Barbary lion, once thought to be the world’s largest cat, managed to cling on in the forests of the Atlas Mountains. The last wild one was shot in 1942.
I visited Morocco with three of my grandchildren last week — 20 years since I was last there. The robin is the great winter singer in Ireland. In Berber land, the common bulbul, no relation of the robin, provides the winter soundtrack. Its loud ‘doctor-quick doctor-quick-be-quick‘ song is ubiquitous. Storks wheel overhead. Morocco is a major service station on the M1 of African-European bird migration.
But, alas, the dark side persists. Cobras, their mouths stitched closed, or their poison receptacles removed, still perform for tourists on the great square at Marrakesh.
A remnant of ancient amphitheatre cruelty?
Snakes are in fact deaf; it’s the movements of the charmer’s flute which triggers them into action. Sad-looking Barbary macaques, dragged about on leashes, are still being offered as photographic models for money. These are a species which, somehow, got to Gibraltar, making them Europe’s only wild primate.
But piracy is not just practised by humans. Some birds specialise in it, even in Ireland.
Skuas are raptor-like seabirds belonging to the paramilitary wing of the gull family. One of them, the great skua, began breeding here recently. Fishermen used call it the ‘shite-hawk’; it seems to feed on the contents of bowels expelled by other seabirds during aerial tussles. But the falling discharges don’t come from bowels, but from bills. Puffins petrels and terns, returning to their nests, laden with food for their chicks, are bullied into disgorging their catch which the skuas swoop down and seize in mid-air. Frigate birds do likewise.
Some birds may be pirates but none engage in actual slavery.
There are ant species, however, which do. Crude Baltimore-style assaults are not staged. Instead, the pirate ants steal eggs from victims’ nests and carry them off. Hatched in captivity, the larvae assume that the slavers’ colony is their own. Like avian parents duped by a cuckoo, they work tirelessly for their captives.
But there can, literally, be a sting in the victim’s tail. Spartacus-style slave rebellions occur occasionally where the slaves revolt and overwhelm their tyrannical masters.