15 July 2022. Rewilding / Reading

Managing or mismanaging the Forest of Dean’s wild boar // The rights of the reader

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1: Managing or mismanaging the Forest of Dean’s wild boar population

The online Inkcap Journal does a great job of writing about UK ecology issues, and a recent issue looks at the question of managing the Forest of Dean’s population of wild boar.

Everyone agrees that they are good for the local ecology, and probably that there have been too many of them recently. Forestry England has since culled a lot. But the target figure for how big the population ought to be seems to have been pulled out of the air.

The journalist, Chantal Lyons, was prompted by an email from a local naturalist and wild-life guide, worried that he wasn’t seeing that many boar around.

(Wild boar in the Forest of Dean. Photo:©Natural England/Isabel Alonso. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In some ways, this is a recent problem. Wild boar re-established themselves in England in 1999 after a gap of about 700 years. They were largely left alone until 2008, when the Forestry Commission (now Forestry England) started to cull them. In 2014, there were thought to be around 800. By 2018, this might have grown to 1,600. It’s definitely fewer now. Lyons talked to Kevin Stannard, who runs Forestry England in the West of England.

He likes wild boar, he tells her:

"I love them, don’t get me wrong," he said straight away. "I think the wild boar are like any part of our native flora and fauna. They just fit."

But:

"We have too many boar. There is no doubt that, at low densities, boar provide very valuable ecological services in disturbing static ecosystems. The problem is that, with a high density of them, the repeated disturbance of the same piece of ground prevents species from establishing. So if we can get the number down to our target of 400, then we should get the ecological benefits, and fewer negative interactions with people."

It’s worth running through the benefits of wild boar as a provider of ecosystem services, where its positive effects are on a par with beavers.

By rooting the ground, they alter soil biochemistry, challenge the hegemony of bracken and grasses, and create new opportunities for scrub and wildflowers and bare-ground-loving invertebrates. Their droppings are adored by dung beetles, and can be packed with mycorrhizal fungal spores, some of which germinate better after passage through a large mammalian gut. The wallows they sculpt into the land foster aquatic life, and offer drinking and bathing water to all.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the population should be allowed to grow indefinitely. Without human intervention this would happen, since we haven’t (yet) reintroduced their predators, such as wolf and lynx.

But as Lyons discovers, no-one knows whether this target figure of 400 boar is the right one for the local ecology, because, basically, it’s been made up. As Stannard explains:

"There has always been a target of 800 deer here, back to the year 1668. So 400 boar is simply half that number. It’s part historical, it’s part convenience, and it’s partly us going, 'Well, when we think we had 400, we didn’t have a major problem.’"

By ‘problem’, he means a lot fewer reports of boars and people interacting badly. And although Forestry England do survey the boar population with thermal imaging, it’s hit and miss. There are some parts of the Forest that they can’t get to because they are privately owned, and boar are reclusive and don’t tend to hang around to be imaged. Some may be missed; some may be double counted.

Whatever the score, Lyons worries that—as previously in Dorset and Devon—we may lose the boar population in the Forest of Dean. She thinks this is unlikely from culling, but one effect of the culling is to reduce the genetic diversity of the population—and in turn to reduce their immunity to diseases like African Swine Fever.

Forestry England’s approach may not be the best way to manage the population. In Galloway, in Scotland, the boar population are hunted by local members of the shooting community, which finds them an elusive quarry, keeps the population in check—to the point that they are barely noticed by local people—and seems to maintain a balance between humans and boar.

Of course, one of the reasons that Lyons is interested in this is that it’s an active case study in re-wilding—and one that doesn’t seem to augur well.

It’s been said that the hitherto “failure” to control boar in the Dean is one of the major obstacles to considering any official reintroduction of them to the UK. What happens here will help to set the course of rewilding in this country for decades to come. There is nothing else like a boar among our existing wildlife; if we shy away from them now, we hobble the prospects of large-scale restoration of the ecosystems to which they belong.

In other words: if we are managing the boar population against a metric that is about newspaper reports of adverse incidents between boar and humans, maybe we are measuring the wrong thing.

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2: The rights of the reader

The Rights of the Reader, by Daniel Pennac, was published in French 30 years ago and in English—at least in the edition I have—about a decade later, translated by Sarah Adams.

Without further ado, these are the ten “rights of the reader’:

1. The right not to read.

2. The right to skip.

3. The right not to finish a book.

4. The right to read it again.

5. The right to read anything.

6. The right to mistake a book for real life.

7. The right to read anywhere.

8. The right to dip in.

9. The right to read out loud.

10. The right to be quiet.

It is a charming book, and the English edition was published by Walker Books, with drawings by Quentin Blake, in a format that seemed designed for young adults.

(Illustrations by © Quentin Blake, 2006. Walker Books).

The thing moves along—it’s not a long book—although the main thing I took away from the first two sections, given that this was written before the web browser was launched commercially, and in-home internet use was miniscule, was that there’s always something around to prompt a moral panic about young people not reading:

Downstairs, round the TV, the argument about the corrupting power of television is gaining momentum.

"I just can't believe how stupid and vulgar and violent programmes are today. You can't turn the television on without seeing...

"It's not just the programmes, it's the medium itselt. It's passive. It makes the viewer lazy.

"Yes, you switch it on, sit down...

"You channel-hop.

"You can't focus on anything.

Pennac was a novelist and a writer, and had also been a teacher in an inner-city Paris school, and the first two sections are really just a fluent warm-up for the final two sections, ‘The gift of reading’ and ‘The rights of the reader’, which are a tour de force. (You could reissue these final 70 pages, which include the ‘rights of the reader’ as a pamphlet in their own right.)

He must have been fun as a teacher, although would these days be fired by pretty much every school in England and Wales, given the narrow prescription of the national curriculum.

He describes the kids he’s teaching—in carefully chosen quotation marks—as “failures”, because that’s how they describe themselves to him.

The students here are failures.

At this school.

Facing this teacher... This is the human wreckage left behind by the academic tide. And here's how they describe themselves:...

I've always been useless at maths ... I'm not interested in languages ... I can't concentrate ... I'm no good at writing ... books have too many long words in them (sic! Yes, sic!) ... I don't understand physics ... I always fail spelling tests ... history would be OK except I can't remember dates ... I don't think I work hard enough nothing makes any sense ... I've missed a lot of classes. I like the idea of drawing, but I've got no talent ... it was too difficult ... I've got a bad memory .. I never learnt the basics .. I don't have any ideas ... I can't find the right words.

They're finished.

That's how they see themselves.

Finished before they've even started.

They hate reading too. And Pennac’s strategy is to, well, just start reading a book to them, in class. Suskind’s Perfume, in this particular case. And then he lets the story work its own magic. The section that follows is uplifting, even life-affirming. It’s like every story of people who thought that education had passed them by who discover that it hasn’t.

And this sense that reading is both a gift and a right to which everyone should be entitled informs the list of ‘The rights of the reader’.

Because these are about freeing the reader from the tyranny of “the book”, and of the expectations that other people bring to your reading. ‘The right to skip’ for example, is about reading War and Peace, but not feeling the need to spend any time on the sections on Russian agriculture. ‘The right not to finish a book’?

There are thirty-six thousand reasons for not finishing a book: you've been there before, the story doesn't grab you, you don't see eye to eye with the author, the style gets up your nose, the absence of a distinctive voice to keep you reading... It's pointless listing the thirty five thousand nine hundred and ninety-five others, including toothache, a bullying boss or a broken heart that's knocked you sideways.

So the book falls from your hands?

Well, let it fall.

Or ‘the right to read anything’, which is about taste. As it happens Pennac does think there are good books and bad books—but he also thinks that over time, for any particular reader, the good books will drive out the bad. (I once asked my mother why she’d let me read my way through endless Enid Blyton novels as a child, and she said that she knew I’d get bored of them and move onto books that were more interesting.)

There’s more to be said here, and reading has a material history that Pennac doesn’t really touch on. We’re talking about the right to read because people across Europe fought for the right to free public education in the 19th century. In that sense, reading is a radical and democratic act.

But I should leave you with his tenth right, ‘the right to be quiet’, which captures the way in which the affordances of reading connect us to a world that becomes ours through the act of reading:

We human beings build houses because were alive, but we write books because we’re mortal. We live in groups, because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny, but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive, while illuminating how tragically absurd life is. So our reasons for reading are as strange as our reasons for living. And no one has the right to call that intimacy to account.

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Other things

I published a short piece reflecting on Lone Scherfig’s 2016 film Their Finest on my Around the Edges blog, on films about film. An extract:

Film is always a manipulative medium, and never more than when characters have the kind of  redemptive moments  shared by John Sullivan [in Sullivan’s Travels] and Catrin Cole [in Their Finest]. As Cole’s co-writer, Buckley (Sam Clafin), says during the production process:

Why do you think that people like films? It’s because stories are structured; have a shape, a purpose, a meaning; and when things go bad they’re still a part of a plan; there’s a point to them. Unlike life.

j2t#345

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