A bear with a shot head

Last week a middle-aged Italian man, Andrea Leombruni, found himself face to face with a bear who was visiting his chicken coop for a light snack.

Frightened out of his wits, as any sensible man would be, Andrea fired his shotgun and dropped the scowling beast where it stood. Little did the hapless Italian realise that the animal was one of about 60 protected Marsican bears left in the region.

The police had to do what they do, investigate, while animal rights groups had to do what they do, make death threats. These were aimed not only at Andrea but also at his 85-year-old mother, who couldn’t understand what she had done wrong, other than giving birth to a murderer.

Having spent a few sleepless nights listening to madmen ranting at the other end of the line, Andrea had to be given police protection. Meanwhile, a local prosecutor hired a ballistics expert to determine whether the angle of firing verified Andrea’s account.

In a related development, which may not look related at first glance but really is, the RSPCA conducted a poll that showed that 60 per cent of Britons turn away from eating meat in favour of vegetarian food.

Now any poll conducted by an organisation that has a vested political interest in the findings must be taken with a grain of salt and, ideally, a shot of tequila. However, even assuming that 60 per cent is wishful thinking, and the real proportion is half that, the poll is most worrying. As worrying, as a matter of fact, as the existence of large numbers of people ready to kill a human being for putting down an animal.

The two news items both illustrate the depth of the spiritual abyss into which modern people are falling at an ever-accelerating speed. In the process, they vindicate Chesterton’s adage that I can’t overquote: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Replace ‘believe’ with ‘worship’ and the aphorism applies to my subject today. For people don’t just calculate the odds they are facing in the rough-and-tumble of quotidian life. People also have a craving for ideals, for something so much higher than they themselves are that they are unlikely ever to encounter it in this life.

They hate to perceive themselves as just selfish, hedonistic creatures who crawl on the flinty ground without ever looking up towards a supreme, or at least superior, good. The need for an ideal to worship is as fundamental as that for food to eat and water (or tequila, if such is your wont) to drink.

For two millennia the Western world had such an ideal, so people didn’t have to brood over it, nor to look for alternatives. Acquiring that ideal to worship represented real progress; I am tempted to say the only meaningful one in history.

Yet in due course people lost the desire and ability to worship that ideal. It was, again according to Chesterton, “found difficult and left untried”. Since the original need hadn’t disappeared, that crisis of faith left a vacuum, something that, as we know, nature abhors and people try to fill.

They filled that particular vacuum by reverting to the darkest days of paganism, with its worship of nature in general and animals in particular. The first coming of such worship as a mass phenomenon happened roughly towards the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial one. It was called Romanticism.

Glorification of nature was its essential aspect, partly caused by a reaction to the mechanical, scientific view of life fostered by the Industrial Revolution. That tectonic shift not only inspired Romanticism but also made it possible by creating a new and growing class of urban intelligentsia far removed from nature.

People staying close to it, farmers and peasants, didn’t worship nature. Nature destroyed their crops with extreme heat or drowned them with torrential rains. Nature sent wild animals their way who slaughtered their poultry, livestock and sometimes children. Nature forced them to break their backs by working dawn to sunset just to keep body and soul together.

Those country folk probably would have hated gaspy, poetic panegyrics to nature had they had time to read them. But they didn’t: the soil needed ploughing, the cows needed milking, the thatched roof needed repairing.

Had someone told them that the simple act of eating meat or killing wild animals had far-reaching moral, and possibly legal, implications, they would have thought they were talking to a lunatic. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and the lunatics are here en masse, running the asylum.

As far as killing that Marsican bear is concerned, those animal fanatics probably fear the species might become extinct. In other words, that chicken-loving creature might suffer the fate of over 99 per cent of all species that have ever inhabited the world.

You believe in evolution, chaps, don’t you? Darwin is at least a prophet if not quite God? Well then, that’s evolution at work. That favourite book of yours ought to have been titled The Disappearance, rather than Origin, of Species. Numerous species have been vanishing from the face of the earth for longer than man has been around – and no one ever shed too many tears about it.

Yet now the old pagan sensibilities have come back in force, and animals have somehow regained the sacred status they used to enjoy during mankind’s infancy. New pagans are happy to kill a man who killed a bear, from which one can infer that an ursine life is more valuable than a human one.

Not many people seem to mind the 215,000 babies aborted in Britain every year. The idea of knocking off old people, with or without their permission, appeals to greater and greater numbers. But those cuddly teddies (who’ll tear a man apart limb from limb faster than you can say ‘animal rights’) are sacrosanct. Take their life and you’ll pay with yours.

That lot would be dancing around a pole with a bull’s head atop, except that bovine creatures are also supposed to enjoy rights. One of them is right to life, with modern juvenile pagans aghast at the thought of animals suffering an ignominious death to put burgers on our diet.

This reminds me of St Francis, who preached to animals (he called them Brother Wolf or Sister Doe) as if they were human. That was suspect in the eyes of the Church, and Francis was lucky to escape censure. But the salient fact is that even Francis wasn’t a vegetarian. He begged for his food, and, when offered a piece of meat, blessed and thanked the donor.

Actually, Jesus Christ wasn’t a vegetarian either, but today’s lot profess moral standards in excess of the divine and saintly ones. It’s good to know their moral house is in such a spic-and-span order that they can afford setting their sights so high.

One has to wonder why the 20^th century, the first wholly atheistic one in history, delivered more violent deaths than all the previous centuries of recorded history combined. Perhaps modern moral standards are as selective as they are high.