The ubiquitous city pigeon
The valued wood pigeon


Red squirrels (left) are outnumbered by greys (right) 1:66

By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

SEEING THROUGH A BIOLOGICAL LENS

We can learn wisdom from examples in the animal kingdom




I have noticed that the British National Party (BNP) and the other nationalist organisations have been urging the public to come to the view that any form of multicultural society is a weak entity with internal disharmonies and is difficult to defend.

I expect all nationalist set ups are a bit like that. In India the more extreme members of the BJP party, once the party of government, propagandised against Muslims living alongside Hindus with slogans such as “Hindu Power = National Power”. In Bangladesh there is no lack of people who want to make life difficult for minorities, most usually tribal persons, Hindus and Buddhists.

All that can be safely put down to xenophobia with ethnocentricism thrown in for good measure. The long perspective of time, however, militates against that because it is well known that the gigantic process of merging several races and cultures can and does get managed. The history of the early British Isles is a brilliant example of that.

What does concern me, and probably others, is that the proponents of this particular kind of message do attempt to give a scientific foundation to their argument. They want the whole matter to be seen with a biological lens, as it were.

There are two ways of responding to that. The first is to use the usual gutter response of an ad hominem (literally “towards the man”) personal attack, in other words, criticise the maker of the statement personally instead of addressing his argument. This often works well when the rebuttal comes from a strong and secure majority group. We are not a majority in this country and so that way of replying is both unwise and unsafe.

The second response is to tackle the argument and endeavour to work out if a fair and factual rebuttal is possible and, if so, how that can be achieved. That is the line I am taking.

To give the opposition a fair hearing I am conceding that they give as examples the driving out of the red Indians from North America, the position of the European communities in formerly apartheid South Africa and the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule.

The “law” that these influential people want to establish is that when two sub-species or breeds of the same general species live so closely mutually that they are sharing living room and local resources, one drives out the other. The dispossession of what later became England of the Britons by the newly arrived Anglo-Saxons 1,500 years ago or so is one of their arguments. Sometimes, the BNP gives that as an example on their website.

However, they go further. They found their position in the rock of the animal kingdom and the scientific analyses of inter-subspecies behaviour. It is only fair to go down into the animal kingdom with them, therefore, if our position is not to degenerate into mere name-calling and label throwing.

I think I can shed some light on this biological argument by giving examples of actual animal behaviour in my own part of North London.

First, it has to be recognised that wood pigeons and city pigeons (rock doves) do live in close proximity with each other and do not display signs of trying to kill each other off or driving the opposition party away, but they do not mix with each other.

Closely related they may well be but they do not interbreed and they circulate in separate groups. The city pigeons specialise in living in city centres while the wood pigeons prefer woodlands and forests. In the suburbs they do share the same turfs but, while not dispossessing each other, do not socialise at all.

This may well be both a strength and a weakness in the nationalistic argument.

The strength is that the two sub-species maintain a kind of strict apartheid and that maintains a certain level of peace between them. They do not fight for food, living space or females.

The weakness is that, while sharing the same territory, they are not involved in warfare and neither sub-specie is a threat to the other.

One poignant point is that while wood pigeons always maintained independence from Man and are universally liked and valued by humans as desirable woodland denizens, city pigeons are widely believed to be descendants of cliff dwelling birds who agreed to adapt to the role of messenger birds for Man before technology made them redundant but are disliked and regarded as vermin by the majority of humans.

The moral seems to be, to me, that if one maintains a dignified separation from a very dominant entity – Man – one is more highly regarded than the individual who makes himself a doormat and gets used, abused and finally dropped. It is a criminal offence to harm a wood pigeon outside certain parameters despite their total non-utility in the service of Man while, as vermin, anything can be done to their city cousins despite many generations of civilian and dangerous military service by their ancestors.

Were we too nice and obliging to the first Europeans to make landfall in our parts of the world and would we be better off now if out forefathers had been harder with them?

The other example is what is happening in this country to the population of red squirrels as a result of the 19th Century introduction of grey squirrels ("tree rats") from North America. While the greys do not actually fight with the reds it is noticeable that whenever greys appear in a locality the reds disappear.

This seems to be due to the competition between the two of them for the same resources and the fact that the greys carry the deadly squirrel pox. Also, the reds are smaller, weaker and less vigorous.

At this time there are only about 30,000 reds squirrels in the UK while there are thought to be over two millions greys.

It is significant, I think, that the red squirrels receive a great deal of sympathy because of their plight and are valued and protected where they still live in Scotland, Cumbria and the Isle of Wight while, like city pigeons, the grey squirrels are categorised as vermin and enjoy no legal protection.

Furthermore the very vigour of the greys counts against them. They are considered to damage woodland by attacking trees and persons who feed birds like myself have to purchase and use specially strong squirrel-proof bird feeders which are inconvenient to use and expensive. As a result, according to a BBC report of 22 January this year the authorities are contemplating ordering a massive cull of the greys.

So, it seems that the descendents of useful messenger pigeons are categorised as vermin although they do not do much explicit damage as in the case of grey squirrels which do. At the same time both wood pigeons and red squirrels who have never served Man are treasured and guarded.

Thus far, therefore, the biological lens advocated by the nationalists shows a mixed message from the animal kingdom.

In human terms we have the example of the red Indians and the European settlers fighting tooth and nail for land and resources until the last band of free Indians surrendered to the American army in the 19th Century after which they seemed to get along better. Many Americans now say proudly at cocktail parties, as a conversation piece, that they have tiny amounts of red Indian blood.

The converse is the case of India where religious, racial and class divisions persisted for millennia and weakened the security of the nation to the extent that foreign adventurers took over with little fighting. The atrocious train bomb blasts in Mumbai recently show what happens when clashing interests between non-interbreeding groups erupt.

In Mexico we have the Mestizo race which is a mixture of Spanish and native stocks resulting in relative racial harmony but accompanied by truly third world levels of achievement while in Australia the native aborigines were treated extremely badly by European settlers and were and still are socially segregated while the country, as a whole, maintains high socio-economic and cultural standards.

Nationalists are fond of quoting the example of Japan which makes a point of maintaining a mono-cultural and mono-racial identity and enjoys one of the world’s highest levels of performance and standard of living. It has to be borne in mind that the actual Japanese race itself is thought to be a mixture of ancient Russian, Chinese and Pacific islanders who all met up and interbred on the Japanese islands thousands of years ago.

One anonymous Islamic leaflet entitled: British or Muslim? Islam vs. Nationalism says: “The real reality of the majority of problems and conflict in the world is actually because of nationalism which makes people see other people’s sufferings and problems as separate from their own …

“Nationalism divides man from man and separates him from thinking about the needs of his fellows. Thus it is inhumane and prohibited for Muslims to believe in: it is narrated that the Prophet (saw) said: “He is not one of us (i.e. a Muslim) who calls for Asabiyyah (tribalism or nationalism) or who fights for Asabiyyah or who dies for Asabiyyah.”

My only conclusion is that perhaps at the end of the day competition and cooperation are both inescapable parts of the human condition and that the best-coordinated side wins the fight.

THE END

This article was published in the 20 July, 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror newspaper, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read all over the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic