Book Review: Monster of God by David Quammen

Monster of God is a lesson in humility. Scratch that, two lessons in humility. As suggested by the title, the main subject of the book are "monsters of god" that for Quammen play the role of Leviathan:

"[The passage in the Book of Job that describes the Leviathan] is a portrait of God's handmaiden predator, a creature that exists to remind humans - poor Job himself, and the rest of us - that we stand no higher than third on the food chain of power and glory." p.10

This Leviathan creature served to remind poor Job that none can stand before God himself and ask for pity and/or preference in a cruel world absent one's own initiative, strength and wisdom; "The role of the Leviathan was to keep people humble." And so it is with large predators brandishing sharp teeth, long claws and an uncanny ability to remind Homo sapiens that, in Quammen's deliciously simple phrase, "we're just another flavor of meat".

These predators Quammen groups under the term "alpha predators", preferring to artificially categorize a group of species that we would normally call "man-eaters" with the special exception that these species also occupy a mythical role in the world's literature, cults, and religions; he focuses his indefatigable intellect on Panthera tigris altaica (Russia's Far Eastern Tigers); Ursus arctos (Romania's Brown Bears); Crocodylus porosus (Australia's Salt-water crocs); Panthera leo persica (the Asiatic Lion).

In each instance, he travels to the predator's habitat and interviews anything that is bipedal, and that has an affinity for a thing called language -- meaning, he talks to everybody: store clerks, government officials, scholars, scientists, park officials, a taxidermist, hunters, tribal elders, farmers, herders, writers, trackers, translators -- everyone you would think a science journalist would encounter on a research trip but whom you wouldn't expect to hear from in undigested form. This doesn't mean that these sections are overwhelming or boring, however. Rather, they provide a nice break and insert a measure of pace from the actual discussion of how people hunted alpha predators, effects of alpha predators on endemic and mostly indigenous cultures, the unsustainable nature of human population growth (natch:), whether these cultures revere the predators or view them as pests, these cultures' dealings with government, the science of these conservation strategies (I particularly liked his rather ominous discussion that these predators serve as "keystone species" for their respective ecosystems), the resulting conservation strategies, the history of these conservation strategies, political causes and side effects of these conservation strategies.

The most vivid of these narratives were: a crocodile hunt and attack in Northern Australia, tiger tracking in Far East Russia and, my favorite, of the event that would later become known as "Massacre of Bistrita", perpetrated by Romania's once despot Nicolae Ceausescu:

"The plan was to split the beaters into three groups, for three separate drives, and then marshal them all into a giant sweep of the forest for a climactic fourth. Crisan describes how the day unfolded, with Ceausescu blasting at bears, killing bears, wounding bears as they fled toward his position in one high seat and then another. After the first drive, in which he killed three medium-sized animals and injured two but missed two others that ran back into the forest, Ceausescu complained petulantly about the arrangements. God forbid that two bears out of seven should escape ... Next year, he commanded, there should be a fence along here, dammit, to channel the animals inexorably toward the high seat. Yes yes, the district director promised, next year there would be a fence." p.240

That day, Ceausescu killed twenty-four large bears. In the twenty-five years of his reign, he shot about four-hundred of them.

But here, Quammen doesn't shrink from the hard facts learned from Romania's gaming system with its bears and Australia's (and India's) croc nursury programme; in a phrase: "in order to conserve these alpha predators, we need to kill them". Kill them, that is, in a managed (i.e. "kill quotas"), and hence sustainable way for as long as people are willing to pay for hunting them (for skins or whatnot). This is certainly not Quammen's penultimate conclusion, but it is one of the lessons that conservationists have been struggling with for decades, which Quammen nonetheless highlights with great breadth, depth and sheer energy. Many times I got lost in all the detours he makes before finding the main track again: at one point he talks about African lions, before jumping to Asian lions with no other segue than the word "lion".

But there is a main track, if it is usually buried in detail, and that is what he calls "The Muskrat Conundrum":

"Is it inevitable that the costs exacted by alpha predators be borne disproportionately by poor people -- in particular, by tradition-bound groups such as the Maldhiris of Gir [who live in lion habitat], the Udege of southeastern Russia [who live in tiger habitat], the shepherds of highland Romania [bears], aboriginal people living in Arnhem Land Reserve in Australia [crocs], all nearly powerless and voiceless within larger national contexts -- while the spiritual and aesthetic benefits of those magnificent beasts are enjoyed from afar?"

So if you thought that "killing them to conserve them" was harsh and utilitarian, then perhaps, according to Quammen, you need a second share of the humility that comes when you realize that to most of those who live with these predators, they are merely big animals, and at worst, pests; these people suffer the daily threat of death by predation.

"[O]ne shouldn't declaim glibly about the value of alpha predators without acknowledging also their costs; and that one can't weigh the costs apart from the crucial matter of who pays those costs."

And again, in a conversation with a Russian hunter:

"And the tiger? I ask. Does it posses a special sort of power or aura? Is it sacred in some sense? Is it the spirit of the forest? Is it godly?

'It's an animal,' Ruslan says."

Still, Quammen finds it hard not to revere these animals, although he does so with the sheer sweep of his research -- a middle chapter dedicated to cataloguing the appearance of alpha predators in the mythology of every conceivable indigenous culture, the literature of numerous societies and religions, and finally, in one of the most remarkable archaeological finds ever, in the Chauvet Cave in southeastern France.

In what is now known as the "Lion Panel", modern humans displayed an artistic skill that rival the best illustrators today, even while they were just arriving in Europe from Africa 35,000 years ago [making the Chauvet cave the oldest piece of art]: