Not faking

I stopped by the second-hand bookshop to kill some time while waiting for my bus. As usual I headed for the natural history section, always being tempted to add to my already over-stocked shelves on the subject. These two volumes, published in the early years of the 20th century,  didn't come home with me - I prefer more up-to-date information - but I leafed through them because they were published just about the time that a furious debate was raging across the Atlantic on the subject of natural history writing.

Until I saw this blip a few days ago I had never heard of the 'nature fakers controversy'. It sprang out of the late 19th century American new passion for the wilderness and and its denizens, the growth of the conservation movement and the fashion for outdoor recreation. There was a surge of popular writing focussing on animals in their natural habitats but emphasizing their human-like virtues -  wisdom, courage, nobility, sagaciousness and so on. Often the animals were given personal names and were credited with reasoning powers, foresight and acts of self-sacrifice.

In 1903 a naturalist, John Burroughs, spoke out against what he saw as excessive sentimentality and anthropomorphism in the depiction of wild life by some of the most popular authors. He regarded it as misleading and even fraudulent. In his essay Real and Sham Natural History he took issue with  instances cited of  animals educating their young or bandaging their own wounds. The writers he fingered  refuted the accusations in the strongest possible terms and their readers sprang to their defence. Literary critics and naturalists lined up on either side of the debate. Even the president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, rather unwisely waded in, supporting Burroughs and inveighing against 'the yellow journalists of the woods' who traduced the wilderness with their romantic notions. (Roosevelt was a keen hunter.) Jack London, author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang objected that his dog heroes were "not directed by abstract reasoning, but by instinct, sensation, and emotion...  I awoke, one day, to find myself bundled neck and crop into the camp of the nature-fakers."

The controversy died down quite quickly but it's worth revisiting to remind ourselves that while the fascination with anthropomorphic animal behaviour is alive and well in cyberspace  ("Can I haz cheesburger?" etc.),  recent research has shown that some animals are capable of feats of 'reasoning' that seem to challenge logic, for example crows filmed making wire hooks with which to extract food from tubes. And the study of zoopharmocognosy has revealed that a wide range of animals do self-medicate  (to rid themselves of parasite for example if no actually to perform surgery).

The two books I've illustrated, though contemporary with the debate, are by respected naturalists (Richard Kearton and J. Arthur Thompson) who didn't fall into the category of nature fakers.
I'm grateful to blipper Lathyrus for this fascinating piece of natural-history history. I'm certainly going to be following it up - there's a book on the subject that I simply must get my hands on.