Red in tooth and claw: nature versus nature in the animal kingdom

A carpet python swallowing a numbat in the Dryandra Forest: one rare species devouring another. (photo by Sean van Alphen).

I will never forget an evening many years ago when I was working for the Department of Conservation and Land Management and was on the podium at a public meeting. I can’t now remember what the meeting was about, other than that it was something to do with wildlife conservation, and I was either defending the department or promoting it. There were presentations by two or three of our wildlife research scientists who talked up the great work they were doing, and some discussion of endangered species and recovery plans.

After the presentations, I asked the audience if there were any questions, and a little old lady rose to her feet.

Her question was a passionate request that we (the department) do something to rid her local wildlife reserve of tortoises - she was referring to the native Long-necked Tortoises found in many south-west swamps. The tortoises, she said, were plundering the nests of the reserve’s ducks, eating the eggs and the newly-hatched ducklings. It was “absolute carnage” down there in the swamp, she said, and she demanded we take immediate action to rid the reserve of these piratical reptiles.

For a moment I was nonplussed as to how to respond. Both tortoises and ducks are indigenous native species that naturally inhabit the same wetlands in south-western WA and had done so since time immemorial. Luckily my colleague Andrew Burbidge was sitting next to me and he rose to the occasion: Having briefly summarised the ecological situation, and pointing out that this species of tortoise was itself threatened [End Note 1] he politely added “What you need to remember, Madam, is that nature is red in tooth and claw.”

I knew the phrase, and liked the way it summed up the situation – yes, native animals prey on each other, and their usual weapons are their teeth and claws … and who are we to interfere? But I was intrigued by the phrase “red in tooth and claw”, thinking it must be biblical, and was moved later to check on its origin. It turns out to be a quotation from the poem In Memoriam written by Alfred Tennyson in 1850, the verse being:

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.

Its tricky poetry, but in the end, I worked out that Tennyson was making a point about the apparent conflict between love of God and each-other as the basis of the Christian religion on the one hand, and the (to his eyes) callous cruelty of nature on the other. Even more intriguingly, I discovered on further reading, the poem and this very sentiment became part of the debate about the origin of species that erupted after 1859 when Charles Darwin published his theories about evolution and survival of the fittest. That one animal could survive and prosper at the expense of another (for example by killing and eating it, with enough killing and eating perhaps leading to the extinction of a species) was regarded by many as not being in line with God’s trusted Christian beliefs.

Nature v nature

There is nothing new about nature versus nature. Observing it in action in the worlds of mammals, fish, birds, even insects is a common and almost everyday experience.

Predation in the insect world: a wasp, having killed a spider, is dragging it up a shed wall to its nest (photo by John Clarke)

Only the other day I sat on the veranda of my cottage at Gwambygine and watched through binoculars a pair of Rainbow Bee-eaters at work. It was a happy hunting ground for them. They sat on a branch overlooking a grassy meadow, and every few minutes would swoop down, grab something in the grass and swoop back up to the branch, the agility of their flight enhanced by the wonderful flash of rainbow colours as they dived and banked. I am not sure if they were eating bees, but whatever the insects were, they were taking serious punishment from the beaks of the bee-eaters.

I came across many instances of ‘nature v nature’ in my work as a forester.  Years ago, I was running a survey line through an area of jarrah forest, and I came across a big old tree with a wedge-tailed eagle’s nest high up in the branches of the crown. It must have been there for years, because the ground at the foot of the tree was white with droppings and scattered thickly with the bones of small (presumably native) animals. I saw no action at the nest, but I imagined the scene of the mother eagle arriving back to the cries of hungry eaglets, a plump little woylie or a baby brush wallaby in her talons, and later the clean-picked bones being jettisoned to the refuse heap below.

I also recall a hair-raising story told to me by that great Kimberley forester Chris Done of the time he witnessed the taking of a small wallaby by a saltwater crocodile. The wallaby had stooped to drink from a pool and the saltie erupted, snatched it and pulled it under, later no doubt to consume it with relish. Luckily, Chris thought, the wallaby never knew what hit it.

Like Chris Done, my good friend Tony Start also has a thousand stories of the bush, several of which are illustrative of the point. For example, he told me once:

I was walking through the palms at Millstream one day, when I heard a sudden loud ‘Thump!’ just behind me. I swung around in alarm to find an olive python which had been strangling a fruit bat in the crown of a palm tree above, lost its balance and crashed to the ground with the bat still within its coils. The python looked OK, but I would not say the same for the fruit bat.

Grove of Millstream Palms (Livistona alfredii) in the Millstream-Chichester National Park, home of fruit bats and pythons

An aside: Tony Start is one of the finest naturalists and best bushmen I have ever known (and remember, I knew Harry Butler), and most of the times I spent with him in the bush were outstandingly enjoyable. There was one exception, however. With that dear chap, the greatly-missed Wally Edgecombe, we had spent the day on an inspection of the Chichester Ranges National Park, deep in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.  It was mid-summer, and those were the days before air conditioners in government vehicles; the temperature in the rocky hills and spinifex plains would have been nudging 50 degrees. Eventually, as evening approached, we made camp, and to my surprise, Tony and Wal began building an enormous campfire. They knew what they were doing. As the sun set, the temperature plunged, and by dinner time we were all warming ourselves at the fire. I awoke at daybreak the next morning to the sound of Tony putting on the billy and the cracking and snapping of the ice on my swag. Clearly the temperature had dropped below freezing overnight. Later I thought of it as the coldest night I ever spent in the bush, and it had been in the wake of the hottest day.

Although plenty of it goes on, Australia is not famous for nature versus nature confrontations, at least not the spectacular ones beloved of TV documentary-makers, in countries with big cats, wolf packs, Grizzly bears and other aggressive carnivorous quadrupeds. There was a time a few years ago when you could not turn on the TV without encountering a documentary showing lions getting stuck into a herd of wildebeests, or a leopard pulling down an antelope.

We do have native carnivorous predators, however, and I can recall a fascinating demonstration I once witnessed of one at work. This was on Barrow Island, that remarkable nature reserve off the Pilbara coast that is (or at least once was) also a working oil field.

On an inspection of the oil company’s environmental management, I was shown a large boodie warren – it was about 10 m across and had several exits and entryways through which the boodies emerged on their nightly excursions [2].

A boodie – a small (about the size of a rock melon) hopping marsupial (photo from AWC)

Living right on top of the warren was an enormous perentie lizard. When it stood up, it was about the size of a small dog. This perentie had the game sewn up – he hardly ever stood up, indeed he hardly moved, just knocked off a passing boodie every day or so, which he would eat live and whole, later slowly digesting it as he basked in the sun. It was the reptile equivalent of living in a supermarket. Elsewhere on Barrow Island perenties played havoc with turtle eggs and hatchlings, reminding me of the case of the Long-necked tortoise and the ducks in the metropolitan nature reserve all those years ago, but even on Barrow Island, things balanced out. The perentie was a fast and capable killer, but the turtles were clever, numerous and mostly lived at sea, and they were easily able to maintain their populations.

A small perentie on Barrow Island (photo by Andrew Burbidge)

 Tooth and claw in India

Some of the stories from foresters published at the time of the British Raj in my favourite journal The Indian Forester touch on these issues, at least indirectly, and they are more dramatic than anything in Australian literature. These are the graphic accounts of battles for survival between jungle animals competing amongst themselves for dominance in the herd, for a particular resource or simply fighting because they are threatened by each-other.

Stories in the 1890 and 1900 editions of the journal are typical. The first is from a correspondent signing himself “Hoplinks”, and while told with conspicuous sang-froid (as was the fashion for stories likes this from the early foresters in British India) the story cannot disguise the cold-blooded realities of jungle life [I have slightly edited it to streamline the narrative]:

It was about half-past six on a cold raw morning in January [writes Hoplinks], when, on turning out of bed, I heard a noise in the jungle not far from the Forest Resthouse, reminding me strongly of the episode in a pig’s life just before it enters the butcher’s shop as pork. Feeling curious as to the cause of the pig’s evident discomposure, I quickly had the elephant got ready.

In about 20 minutes we started off for the spot, guided simply by the unabated squealing. We soon found ourselves nearing the place, which was in a very thick piece of jungle (the long grass was above the elephant). We now caught sight of several pigs, one large sow in particular, gazing intently in a certain direction, from whence the cries appeared to proceed. We made for this spot and the pigs reluctantly dispersed. As they did so, I just caught a glimpse of an animal bounding away in the grass, but not a sufficiently long one to be able to recognize its nature. In the grass, on the spot which it had just left, we now perceived the unhappy songster, a huge boar with large tusks, lying on his side in a slight depression, into which his life blood was rapidly flowing. He could do no more than moan his thanks to us, so we left him to look after his antagonist.

After a fruitless search of about a quarter of an hour we returned to the boar, just in time to see him trying to hobble away. Thinking that if I allowed him to escape, I should lose my last chance of getting a sight of his enemy, I [shot him], and, after running about 50 yards, he fell down dead. I then climbed up into a tree some way off, having previously sent away my elephant, and watched. In about two hours’ time I heard a quiet heavy tread and thought I caught sight of some beast near the boar. I waited another hour, and then being hungry, and having had no breakfast, got down from the tree and had another look at the boar. There I found the unmistakable pugs of [a tiger, which Hoplinks subsequently shot] ….

… the boar had terrible wounds under the neck and about the left shoulder, which had been half severed from the trunk [by the tiger].

My first thought on reading this story was to wonder why Hoplinks did not simply leave it to the tiger and the pig to bring the matter to its conclusion. On the other hand, I reminded myself that at that time the forests of India were teeming with tigers and that they were regarded as undesirable neighbours to villages and Forest Resthouses. That the tiger was so easily able to defend itself from a boar with “formidable tusks” says a lot about the fighting qualities of the tiger, as pigs are themselves savage fighters, effective both with tusks and teeth. I once watched a “domestic” boar violently attack and then eat the corpse of a dead sheep which had been thrown into its yard: it was one of the most sickening things I have ever seen.

The second story also involves a pig, this time in battle with a panther. The writer was L.K. Martin, the Divisional Forest Officer at Akola. In my view he was a very lucky man to survive this episode and record it for posterity. Martin is walking through a grassy forest when he hears a loud and plaintive screeching. He recalls:

 At first, I thought it was probably a nest of young vultures up in the semal tree, but as the cry continued, I took my rifle and proceeded to investigate. The cry grew louder and louder as I neared the patch of grass and I could now distinctly hear heavy breathing and the occasional wuf, wuf, of a panther. But what he was up to I could not see.

A desperate struggle was undoubtedly going on in the dense grass within 40 yards of where I stood, but although I tried hard, I could see absolutely nothing, so I proceeded to cautiously creep into the grass and gradually worked my way up to within 25 yards of the struggle. I could still see nothing but could now distinguish the squeal of a pig in trouble, then his angry grunt, followed immediately by the wuf, wuf, of a panther who was apparently getting some nasty bumps.

The struggling animals gradually shifted ground, and I could eventually just see through the grass, alternately, a spotted skin, then a black one, and occasionally the tail of the panther waved in the air. I waited patiently, and when I thought I could see most of the [panther], I fired. Imagine my surprise and disgust when the next second a panther bounded over the grass and stood facing me within 30 feet, his mouth, neck and chest covered with blood and having a dazed appearance about him.

I immediately slipped in another cartridge and, as he stood facing me, I took a deliberate pot at his chest. I was, however, doomed to disappointment. To my horror the cartridge snapped and the loud click appeared to wake the panther from his reverie. For, that instant, he turned and disappeared like a flash over the grass.

I now returned to see what had happened with my shot as I had not up to that time seen the pig distinctly. I found a two-thirds grown boar lying stone dead, shot through the head. So that although I had fired at a spotted skin, they were tumbling about so much that the moment I fired [the pig’s] head must have come in line.

The poor beast had made a grand fight for his life; he was terribly torn and bitten; but judging from the tufts of the panther’s hair that lay about he had given [the leopard] a very busy time. His tusks were only just appearing, he was therefore at a great disadvantage, but he had used his teeth well, and pigs can bite as I know from experience in running them down with dogs.

Again, I found myself wondering why Martin did not just leave them to it …  but also thinking how lucky he was. From what I have read, the panther (which is a black leopard) can attack in the blink of an eye, and they have enormous killing power, especially against a human whose rifle has just mis-fired.

Elephants v tigers

My favourite book about jungle animals is Elephant Bill by J.H. “Bill” Williams. In it he gives a graphic account of the way a mother elephant defends her calf from attacks by tigers. The tiger knows that in a head-to-head battle, the elephant nearly always wins, so its strategy is to leap onto the mother elephant’s back and start to claw and bite her. The aim is not to kill the mother, but to enrage and stampede her, thus leaving the calf vulnerable, and it is to the calf that the tiger then turns its attention. However, mother elephants are generally equal to this strategy and are able to tear the tiger off their backs with their trunk and dash it to the ground, whereupon they trample it with their huge feet or gore it with their tusks. Mothers with small calves are also usually accompanied by sister elephants or “aunts” who will come to her assistance when a tiger attacks and who use their trunks like flails to knock a tiger flying. Tigers are brave and powerful carnivores, well-armed with tooth and claw, but they rarely succeed in taking an elephant calf from a herd.

Like elephants, buffalo are also able to defend themselves against tigers. Mother buffalo go on the offensive and will attack and drive off or kill a tiger which is trying to take her calf. The mother’s sisters join in, the attack on the tiger carried out with great and well-coordinated violence, and in the sort of cold fury that only a mother, defending her young, understands.

Rudyard Kipling draws on this lore in one of his stories in The Jungle Book, where Mowgli organises a buffalo stampede in order to destroy his enemy, the marauding tiger Shere Khan. The buffalo...

.... knew what the business was before them – the terrible charge of the buffalo herd, against which no tiger can hope to stand ... Shere Khan knew if the worst came to the worst, it was better to meet the bulls than the cows with their calves.... [3]

Mowgli and the buffalo dealing with Shere Khan: woodcut from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book also contains Kipling’s famous story about the snake-killing mongoose Rikki-tikki-tavi. In two epic battles, the little mongoose kills both the male and female cobra that inhabit his master’s garden and also destroys all the eggs in the cobra’s nest. Kipling unashamedly portrays the mongoose as courageous and the snakes as evil. I can remember reading this story as a schoolboy about 70 years ago and finding no moral issue with it. At that time everyone killed snakes – it was regarded as a civic duty. I did so myself when I first started working in the bush. Many foresters in those days carried a “snake killer” in their vehicle. This was an old bicycle chain on a short wooden handle, used like a whip and very effective. But times and values changed; these days I am happy to let snakes do their thing ... provided they do not threaten me or my loved ones. In a wilderness area in Idaho a few years ago I came across a rattlesnake devouring a small mammal of some sort, perhaps a large rat. The rodent was still alive during the process of being ingested and perhaps could have been rescued. I left them to it, and why not? [4]

One correspondent to The Indian Forester found an episode on this subject amusing. In a letter to the Editor published in 1919, A.G. Edie recounts this story under the heading Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire:

A few years ago I witnessed an incident so strange that, if my wife had not been with me at the time, nobody would have believed my yarn. Fortunately, she has a great reputation for veracity, and, thanks to this, nobody has, so far as I know, questioned the truth of the story. I have indeed more than once heard it repeated with many embellishments by people who did not know that I was the originator of it; but what actually happened was this:

Whilst walking near the bungalow one evening, we saw a monkey (a big langur) sitting on a log near the path. His back was towards us. I said to my wife “Watch me scare that chap,” and made a sound as like a panther’s roar as I could. The monkey swore at once, looked round, and ran up the nearest tree, straight into the jaws of a real panther sitting in a fork fifteen feet up. The panther caught the monkey by the throat, jumped with it to the ground and then made off into the jungle …

It’s an amusing story, but only so long as you were not the monkey.

Leopards are very efficient killers, being quick, fearless, powerful, able to climb trees and swim, armed with ferocious teeth and with claws on all four feet. I have seen a video of the South American jaguar (another of the leopard family) leap into a river, take a crocodile in its jaws, and heave it up the bank, where it dispatched and ate it, and another where it plunged onto the back of a swimming crocodile from a tree, and then fought it underwater [5].

The jaguar of South America – a powerful and magnificent hunter/predator, equipped with both tooth and claw

Kangaroos v dingos

Most of the Australian carnivores are small, the size of a domestic cat or a rabbit, or smaller. They are nevertheless fierce, and you need to be careful when handling them. I still smile when I remember the move a few years ago to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby, thus celebrating an indigenous animal.

A bilby (photo courtesy of Australian Wildlife Conservancy)

The bilby is a charming little fellow, with blue fur and rabbit-like ears, but he can be nasty, has a vicious bite and is a long way from being the cuddly little chap that small children might play with at Easter time. I recall a wildlife scientist friend telling me once that he only handled bilbies when wearing heavy duty rigger’s gloves.

The small Australian carnivorous marsupials are able to compete amongst each other without anyone coming out on top on a permanent basis, but none of them ever developed an effective defence against the feral cat or European fox. These introduced predators are simply too accomplished in the business of hunting and killing. They have devastated Australian wildlife.

The largest of the Australian native carnivores is the dingo and traditionally one of the dingo’s main prey is the kangaroo.  

A beautiful dingo, lean, muscular and alert

However, kangaroos have an effective defence against attacks by dingos or domestic hunting dogs. It takes two forms: flight or fight. Kangaroos are fast and nimble in the bush, can leap, duck and weave at high speed, hurdle logs and bound up onto rocks. In this way they can often elude a hunting dingo or dog pack … but not always. Dingos were many times observed catching hold of a roo’s hind leg, and never releasing their grip until the roo fell. But often if cornered or exhausted the roo would turn and fight, especially the big male boomers.  He puts his back to a tree and then stands up on his hind legs - at which point he can be over 2m in height and very threatening. When the dingo attacks, the roo lashes out with a hind leg, while balanced on the other leg and his tail. These hind legs are powerful and well-armed with a single, long, razor-sharp claw, and the roo knows how to use it.  A typical outcome is a disembowelled dingo, its chest “unseam’d from the nave to the chaps” as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth [7].  

I witnessed all this once, well not quite all, thankfully. I was walking in the bush way east of Mundaring Weir when my companion, the good dog Ruby, flushed a large roo and started to chase it, barking hysterically. The roo decided to fight, backed to a wandoo tree and stood up. Ruby was not really intent on grappling, but she was putting on a good show of anger and aggression. Luckily, I was on the scene and called her off – and the roo hopped away. I was glad about this, as I had not liked the expression of calm and ruthless determination on the roo’s face, and there is no doubt Ruby would have come off badly, if at all.  No tooth involved, but a bloodied claw would have done its work.

Kangaroos have also developed another effective strategy for dealing with an attacking dingo or dog. It leaps into a river or pool, and retreats to a spot where it can stand, but the dog has to swim (although in deeper water, roos are excellent swimmers). When the swimming dog comes within reach, the roo grapples it with its forelegs and pulls the dog underwater. The dog is either drowned or discouraged sufficiently to allow the roo to escape. Mature male kangaroos are immensely strong, and a swimming dog finds it almost impossible to break free from their embrace.

The famous Western Australian forester Dick Perry witnessed such a scene when in 1931 he was sent to study the south coast west of Windy Harbour, where great sand dunes were threatening to swamp valuable forests. Dick accompanied the cattleman Bill Brockman and his off-sider Charlie Burns, who were mustering Brockman’s lease in this area and could show him the country. Perry recounted [8] how:

… Bill had an outstation at Calcup and this was our first stop. The outstation consisted of an iron shed about 20 feet square containing bunks, a rough bush table and seats and large open fireplace at one end. There was a yard for our horses and a small yard for the cattle. The hut was adequate and comfortable. We would get a good fire going in the open fireplace every night and many were the discussions and debates the three of us had, sitting on boxes in front of it. Our tucker comprised bread (which we made in the camp oven), butter, some tins of meat and fruit, jam, oatmeal porridge, tea and sugar, potatoes, onions and a bag of flour. We relied on the dog to provide protein in the form of kangaroos. The tails we turned into soup and the meat we made into stews or grilled.

In the course of checking fences and mustering cattle Bill showed me the entire dune system and where the problems were. We traversed almost every yard of the country between Calcup Hill and Mt Silvertop at the north end of the huge Yeagerup Dune. The days were long and tiring for horse and rider but full of interest and rarely without incident. I learned to manage a swimming horse as we had to cross the Warren River many times. Finding a place where it was possible to get into and out of the river was the biggest problem.

Bill also gave me an exhibition of how to deal with a large male kangaroo that the dog had chased into the river. The water at that point was deep but the roo had his head well clear. We watched the dog trying to grab the roo’s head as it swam round and round but the kangaroo had the situation well under control and with a quick lunge forward it grabbed the dog and pushed it down under the water in an attempt to drown it. Suddenly the dog shot to the surface and swam out of reach to get its breath back for another attack. This happened several times. Finally, Bill decided that neither the dog nor the kangaroo would give up and he would have to do something about it. So with no hesitation he took off his clothes, unhooked a stirrup from his saddle and leaped into the river. He then swam out to the scene of the struggle and getting into a position behind the kangaroo while it gave its undivided attention to the dog, he killed it with a single blow of the stirrup. He then towed the roo back to the foot of the bank and after a struggle we managed to lift it to the top of the bank. There we cleaned out the body cavity and left it hanging in a tree. When we returned later in the day, we picked it up and took it back to camp. I had often heard stories of kangaroos drowning dogs but had never witnessed such a scene.

If this sounds brutal, two things need to be remembered: firstly, kangaroos were abundant along the south coast in those days – they enjoyed (as did the cattle) the cattlemen’s frequent burning and the fresh green herbage that resulted from it. Secondly, a good ‘kangaroo dog’ was a valuable property, especially for bushmen who relied upon them to supply their daily protein.

Kangaroo dogs, by the way, were once a fairly common animal in the Australian rural scene. They had been especially bred for kangaroo hunting by the early settlers, a cross between a greyhound and a whippet. They were a long-legged grey-brindle sort of dog, with a large head and powerful jaws, and they could gallop with the speed of a horse. But they were also surprisingly gentle and made a loving pet – my mate Terry Scorer had one called Boris when he was a schoolteacher at Pemberton. Boris followed Terry to school one day, and the kids had a wonderful time playing with him … until the Headmaster (regarded as a crusty old bugger by staff, students and townsfolk alike) arrived and put a stop to the fun and games.

My mate Bill Fitzgerald also grew up with kangaroo dogs on the family sheep station near Mt Magnet.

Dad had a prized kangaroo dog [Bill told me] called Rufus. Dad would ride out on horseback, accompanied by Rufus to get a roo to feed the station dogs. Rufus was not all that fast, but he had great stamina. He would chase a roo until it flagged, nip a hind leg tripping it up, and then go for the throat. Game over.

Posing with his rifle and kangaroo dogs after a day’s hunt (photo from Outback Family History website)

I had my own kangaroo dog when I was a lad [Bill went on], called Lassie. She had unusual colouring, being pure black, like a panther. On one occasion Lassie chased a roo into a clay pan filled by recent rain to a depth of over a metre. A fierce contest ensued, in which the roo was well on top and Lassie was not travelling too well, so I had to intervene. I shot to miss but it had the desired effect. The roo escaped, but Lassie survived.

I don’t think I have seen a kangaroo dog for thirty or forty years now – their usefulness declined when kangaroos became a protected species and were no longer hunted, so I suppose the species has died out. My neighbour at Manjimup in the late 1970s, 'Black' Jack McAlpine, had one of the last of them. Jack used to wait by the kerb with the dog at his side on a Sunday afternoon when the Mr Whippy van chimed its way around the suburbs, and he would buy the dog an ice-cream, then hold it for him to lick. My everlasting regret is that I did not take a photograph of this scene, made more touching by the fact that Black Jack was perhaps the biggest, toughest, and most intimidating man in the whole of the south-west.

The dingo story is itself interesting. Purist wildlife scientists do not regard it as an indigenous animal, but as a feral, brought into Australia by Aboriginal people, or arriving under its own steam via land bridges from the north, maybe 5,000 years ago. There is a close relative of the dingo, known as the New Guinea Singing Dog, still extant in PNG. Dingo immigrants prospered and spread all over Australia but did not reach Tasmania, as by then sea levels had risen and Tasmania was an island. This is almost certainly the explanation for the survival in Tasmania of the thylacine (or “Tasmanian Tiger”), a carnivorous marsupial, thought to have been extinguished on mainland Australia by predation by dingos. It’s a sound theory, and one that supports the “red in tooth and claw” story. Regrettably the thylacine is now extinct in Tasmania, having been hunted to death by early European settlers who regarded it as a sheep killer [6].

Pure-bred dingos are now rare, as mostly they have interbred with domestic dogs, the product being known as a “wild dog”. The Dingo x Alsatian cross is said by farmers and pastoralists to be one of the most ruthless killers of lambs, susceptible to a “killing frenzy”. The last pure dingo I ever saw, a truly beautiful animal, was lapping at a pool in a Kimberley creek where I had gone at dawn to wash and clean my teeth. I was downwind and managed to observe him without his noticing. During the night, while in my swag, I had heard him and his mates singing, howling and hoo-rooing to the moon. It was musical and thrilling, certainly not frightening.

Kookaburra v dugite

I lived for a while in a forestry house in the south-west that adjoined a patch of nice bush with tall jarrah trees. One day I watched (from a safe distance) for 15 minutes or so, a fight between a kookaburra and a dugite. The former is an aggressive avian hunter and the latter an extremely deadly snake. To my surprise, it was the kookaburra who won and his tactics were intriguing. With an arrow-like swoop he would plunge down from on high and take the snake by the back of its neck, just behind its head, fly up to a branch on the jarrah tree about 15m up, the snake all the time squirming and twisting and trying to strike or strangle the bird… and then the bird would simply let go. The snake fell with a heavy thump - but survived, at least for a while, and increasingly dazed. The kookaburra repeated the snatch-and-drop technique about five or six times before the snake expired, presumably its spine broken. The bird then picked up the snake (which was about 1m in length) and flew off with it, I know not where.

How do you judge a contest like this? I don’t like kookaburras much – they are not native to Western Australia and cause havoc to small native birds – and I would not have been sorry to see the dugite sink in his fangs. But by the same token, I don’t much like dugites, and I was happy to have one fewer close to the yard where my kids played. I decided simply to file the incident under ‘nature v nature’ and leave it at that.

Python versus chuditch

My friend Keith Morris is a wildlife scientist and became Western Australia’s guru on the conservation and recovery of the chudich, the delightful little spotted marsupial once widespread but decimated by introduced foxes and cats. Keith spent years on a captive breeding program and translocation of chudich to places where fox and cat baiting would give them a chance. Part of his research was to study the behaviour of captive-bred chudich after their release into the bush. This was achieved by fitting the animal with a radiocollar whose movements (and that of the chudich) could be electronically tracked and mapped.

Chudich (photo courtesy of Perth Zoo)

Keith told me once how:

I was radio-tracking one of my chudich in the Julimar Forest and was having some trouble locating him. Eventually I tracked the collar’s signal to the skirts of a large grass tree. Inside was a contentedly dozing carpet python, and inside the python was my chudich, still wearing his collar, which was still sending out a signal.  I put the python in a sack and took him back to the lab at Woodvale where David Pearson, our reptile expert, carried out a small operation which the collar and the python (but not the chudich) survived [9].

Wild animals v humans

Humans are ill-equipped (physically) to deal with predation by animals with big teeth and sharp claws, and mostly over history they came off second best in any contest. Only by deploying weapons that could strike at a distance (spears, arrows, bullets), or by employing other animals to look after their interests, or do their hunting for him (dogs, horses, falcons, elephants) did humans begin to get the upper hand. Mind you, I am talking here about terrestrial animals. In the marine environment the Saltwater Crocodile and the Great White Shark are still supremely effective predators of humans who try to share their environment, and they are extremely difficult to deter when they launch an attack.

The killing of wild animals by humans, it seems to me, is acceptable for protection of hearth and home, or for acquiring traditional food resources in a sustainable way. And I fully support the hunting and killing (in Australia) of introduced predators and pest species, especially feral cats, foxes, pigs, deer and goats. But I draw the line at hunting non-feral native species for sport or trophies. The idea that a hunter with a rifle sitting in a hide in a tree is a “sportsman” has not really survived into the 21^st century, and in many places (like Western Australia) all native terrestrial animals have long been protected by legislation. Mostly, I think, modern humans understand the law of the jungle and are happy to leave the animal kingdom to do its thing without our help or hindrance. The picture heading this story sums it up: a Carpet Python is devouring a numbat; both are classified as threatened species (young pythons are predated by feral cats and foxes) but no judgement can or should be made by interfering humans when a python eats a numbat. I was pleased to hear from the photographer who took this picture that he had left them to it.

All of this would have seemed unbelievable to the 19^th century Army and forestry officers in India and Africa as they went about their business, well-armed with hunting rifles and ever ready to shoot just about anything that moved. They had no compunction in making judgements and becoming involved, even in an affair between a wild pig and a leopard.

Humans v humans

The poet Tennyson, in my opinion, was wrong when he cast wild animals as cruel and callous, especially when compared to what he regarded as the loving, caring human animal. I have always agreed with Mark Twain [10] when he observed: "Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.". Twain went on to say that “animals kill purely out of necessity or instinct, whereas humans are the only creatures that torture and kill for entertainment, revenge, or ego.”

The fact is, as my brother (an anti-war campaigner) likes to point out, the civilisation of which modern humans take such pride is a thin veneer. In “man’s inhumanity to man” there is a depth of cruelty and callousness that the merest jungle animal would find unimaginable, perhaps even despicable, and with justification. All of this is fresh in my mind, as I have recently read the autobiography of the dissident Alexei Navalny [11], who had the gall to criticise President Putin and form an opposition party in Russia. For this he was falsely accused of trumped-up crimes, found guilty, imprisoned for life, starved, tortured and poisoned. Navalny’s courage and humour are breathtaking, but are eclipsed in the end by the cruelty and inhumanity of the Russian government and the corruption of the Russian justice system.

I also consider as inhumane and callous the university academics (safe in their air-conditioned cloisters) who oppose bushfire mitigation burning in Western Australian forests, knowing that this policy greatly increases the risk of death and injury to frontline forest firefighters.

Afterword

It is easy to become depressed and angry over man’s inhumanity to man, and to worry about fires, bombs and bullets (to say nothing of teeth and claws) and the purposes to which they are put. But then I remember my cousin Malcolm’s dog Mack, and I have to smile.

This was back in the post-War years of the 1940s when many suburban homes in Perth had a chook yard out the back. Mack was a large Border Collie/Kelpie and was an adventurous and agile dog. He also had something against chooks. He could get out at night, roam the suburbs and find his way unerringly into a chook yard, and once in, he would chase and kill the chooks one after the other. His technique was simple and effective but could never be described as cruel: the chook would be grabbed by the head, Mack would give a quick shrug, and the chook died instantly of a broken neck. Mack did not eat the chooks he killed, he seemed to do it for entertainment, although it is more likely he was driven by some ancient instinct. However, he seemed to know that he had done something wrong and needed forgiveness, as he always brought home a chook. Malcolm would pluck and clean the hen and later it would reappear as roast chicken on the dinner table. Mack always had (Malcolm told me) a feathery grin on his face when his nocturnal game was over, and he had trotted back home and deposited a plump White Orpington on the back doorstep. He was never apprehended and lived to the age of 15, enjoying his suburban reign of terror to the end.

I daresay the good Lord Tennyson would have been interested (but perhaps puzzled) by Mack.

End Notes

1.  The Oblong Tortoise, also known as the Long Necked or Snake-necked tortoise (Chelodina oblonga), is commonly found in freshwater swamps and wetlands in south-western WA. Populations in the urban areas of Perth, however, have lost much of their habitat over the years, and are considered to be “locally threatened”. They also killed by vehicles, and by dogs and foxes while nesting. Its distant relative the Short-necked tortoise, also known as the Western Swamp Tortoise (Pseudemydura umbrina), on the other hand, is the most endangered species of reptile in Australia, but populations are being restored, partly by a wonderful captive breeding program at Perth Zoo, but also by careful management of a reserve to which the young Zoo-bred tortoises are translocated.

2.      The boodie is a small wallaby-like marsupial, once widespread on the Australian continent, before being eaten out almost to extinction by feral cats and foxes. It has survived on some islands like Barrow, where it lives in deep underground warrens and is easily able to survive predation by native animals like the perentie. The good news is that Barrow Island boodies are being translocated to mainland areas where cats and foxes are controlled, and where they are able to recolonise old burrows.

3.      It was Kipling who wrote: "The female of the species is more deadly than the male" citing the fierce defence of their young by most animal mothers.

4.      It’s not all one-way traffic. Forest ecologist Per Christensen once told me that when he was a young man working in Kenya he one day came across a puff adder that was trying to eat a large green tree frog. The frog had inflated itself, was stuck and the snake could not swallow or eject it. Per said he left them to it, the inevitable end being the death of both animals, one of whom towards the end might have reflected on the wisdom of the old proverb about never biting off more than you can chew.

5.      There are several videos of this on the internet. This one is particularly fearsome:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1lbt1ml/jaguar_ambushes_crocodile_in_brazil/

6.      The Tasmanian Tiger is not a tiger but a wolf-like marsupial. It is believed to be extinct, although reports of sightings are still heard from time to time, including (unbelievably) around Nannup in south-western Australia.

7.      This priceless line was always one of the favourites of my grandfather Bill Chandler. He would recite it with a chortle, full of admiration both for Macbeth’s swordplay, and Shakespeare’s wordplay. The line comes from early in the play, describing how Macbeth finished the swordfight with the traitor Macdonwald, slitting him open from the navel to the jaw (from “the nave to the chops”). Kangaroos do it in the opposite direction, but I have never witnessed this particular unseaming.

8.      Excerpt from South Coast Sojourn by Dick Perry, in Leaves from the Forest (1987). Lamb Print, Perth, Western Australia

9.      I also recall the amusing occasion when a wildlife thief was apprehended, thanks to an astute bit of criminal detective work. The thief had captured a python in the Dryandra Forest and taken it home to his house in a Perth suburb, as a pet. However, the python had recently consumed a woylie which was part of a research project and was wearing a radiotracking collar. A Wildlife Officer was able to track the collar from the police aircraft, identify the culprit’s house, and was shortly afterwards knocking on his door.

10.   The quotations are from Mark Twain’s essay The Lowest Animal, but he also made the same point in his famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

11.   The book is Patriot (2025) by Alexei Navalny. It is at the same time the most inspiring and horrifying book I have ever read.