Exotic animals had
always been prized possessions, and it was commonplace to promote
the artificial preservation of ornamental or unfamiliar creatures
or the cherishing of exotic animals, particularly birds, for
amusement and display. More novel, however, was the growth of
inhibitions about eliminating any wild animal, whether ornamental
or not.
'We dispute in [the] schools,' wrote John Bulwer
in 1653, 'whether, if it were possible for man to do so, it were
lawful for him to destroy any one species of God's creatures,
though it were but the species of toads and spiders, because this
were taking away one link of God's chain, one note of his
harmony.'
The continuation of
every species was surely part of the divine plan.
The modern idea of
the balance of nature thus had a theological basis before it gained
a scientific one. It was belief in the perfection of God's design
which preceded and underpinned the concept of the ecological chain,
any link of which it would be dangerous to remove. The argument for
design contained a strong conservationist implication, for it
taught that even the most apparently noxious species served some
indispensable human purpose. In the eighteenth century most
scientists and theologians accordingly maintained that all created
species had a necessary part to play in the economy of
nature. At the same time some of them had become
increasingly aware that man's persecution really could eliminate
individual species, a possibility which earlier generations had
always denied.
A mixture of
theology and utility thus lay behind this kind of secular pantheism
associated with an increasing feeling that wild creatures ought,
within limits, to be preserved. When the movement to protect wild
birds gathered force in the nineteenth century it would lay much
emphasis on the indispensable functions (eating grubs and keeping
down insects and other vermin) performed even by those species
thought most pernicious. Jays, magpies, bullfinches and ants were
all useful in their different ways and it was therefore wrong to
kill them. As the Somersetshire adage had it, 'If it were not
for the Robin-Riddick and the Cutty-Wren, a spider would overcome a
man.' In keeping with this view Lord Erskine wrote in his poem of
1818, The Farmer's Vision:
Instant this solemn
oath I took
No hand shall rise
against a rook.
When sea-birds
gained legislative protection in 1869 it was argued that they were
necessary to guide sailors and to show the fishermen where the
herrings were.
But from the
seventeenth century onwards less utilitarian arguments for the
preservation of wild species had also been advanced. Sir Matthew
Hale urged mercy and compassion towards all wild creatures, in view
of 'the admirable powers of life and sense ... in the birds and
beasts ... All the men in the world could not give the like being
to anything, nor restore that life and sense which is once taken
from them.' John Locke thought it wrong to waste any food which
would sustain a wild creature, even the birds of the air; and in
the eighteenth century it became a mark of human sensibility to
throw crumbs to wild birds in winter.
The bird-fanciers
continued to catch and sell every kind of wild species, but this
activity encountered increasing opposition. It was a platitude
among seventeenth-century writers that every cage-bird would prefer
the hardships of freedom to captivity, however mild; and in the
Hanoverian period the cruelty of trapping wild birds, clipping
their wings, slitting their tongues and confining them in cages
became a common theme of poetic lament. By 1735 it was necessary
for the author of The Bird-Fancier's Recreation to refute
the 'common objection, which some austere men (pretending to more
humanity than the rest of their neighbours) make against the
confining of songbirds in cages'. Two years later a 'lover of
birds' protested against the practice of blinding chaffinches in
preparation for captivity. By the end of the century moralists and
aesthetes alike agreed that the song of a bird in a cage could give
no pleasure.
Wild birds were a
symbol of the Englishman's freedom and even aviaries were
objectionable. As Lord John Russell told the Commons in the
1820s:
'It was not from the bars of a prison that the
notes of English liberty could ever be heard; to have anything of
grace and sweetness they must have something of... wildness in
their composition.'
Similar attacks were
made on bird-nesting and on shooting wild birds for sport. 'Blessed
be the name of the Lord Jesus against the destruction of small
birds,' exclaimed Christopher Smart.
