'A History of the World in 100 Animals' by Simon Barnes
Although tiny, the oriental rat flea brought big changes to the world in a short span of years (1346-53). It carried the pathogen known as the Black Death, which swept across Asia to Europe’s Atlantic shore. Seventy-five million humans died, or was it 200 million? No one could keep count.
Much of A History of the World in 100 Animals strikes a happier tone as it surveys the 99 other species that have had the greatest influence on humanity both materially and imaginatively. The lion, for example, became a universal symbol of courage even as its ranks were drastically reduced by hunters desperate to prove their own bravery. Aside from those irascible bulls, cattle were easily domesticated, giving us labor (oxen) as well as beef and dairy. But the cattle industry is shooting up the cows with antibiotic, ushering in a world where pathogens evolve to resist antibiotics. And the unprecedented number of cattle are adding methane to our endangered atmosphere.
British wildlife writer Simon Barnes penned 100 Animals with one eye on science and the other on humanities. It’s not a dry zoology textbook. The historical anecdotes and speculations are fascinating. For instance, the chapter on cats surmises that they first insinuated themselves into human life by providing cheap rodent removal and were then adopted as pets because they do something no other creature can do: they purr. As for buffalos, Native Americans hunted them by driving them off of cliffs, but it was left to white Americans to slaughter the beasts to the verge of extinction.
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Barnes writes vividly of the blue whale, a creature almost unfathomable in size with a “heart as big as a small car, a tongue as heavy as an elephant.” Despite their immensity, they travel long distances propelled “with sweeps of that great tail.” The blubber extracted by whale hunters was turned into fuel for lamps that burned brighter than candles. “In that way, whales changed human possibilities” by lighting the hours after sundown.
A History of the World in 100 Animals is fun to read and meant to be dipped into at random. Yes, sharks never keep still and must always be in motion even when asleep. No, piranhas don’t gather together to hunt and eat unwary swimmers, albeit they possess teeth and have occasionally killed people when “highly stressed and intensely hungry.”
The book’s point is to stress the interdependency of all life on Earth. One objection is the author’s insistence on “the heresy of human uniqueness.” Well, every species is unique and humans are unique for—among other things—our ability to write and read a book, not to mention illustrating it beautifully with full color reproductions of relevant images by Rubens, William Blake and Gustav Doré. And one more thing: while many other species have the ability to kill, none aside from us has the ability to destroy all life on our world.
