LIVES IN SOLITUDE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 16

LIVES IN SOLITUDE

by

SUNDOWNER

SEPTEMBER 17

T had not occurred to me, until I read it recently in an article on bees by Dr. Colin Butler, that, with a few notable exceptions, insects are solitary. The exceptions are, of course, bees themselves, ants, and wasps, and the few other insects that live their lives in colonies. All other insects live alone, with no desire for company (except during their brief mating period), and no

capacity for it. And in a large number of cases mating is dying

— Dy murder, as in the case of spiders, though these are not insects, or by simple biological exhaustion. It is an arresting thought-perhaps not depressing, but certainly soberingthat the most numerous of the creatures that share our world with us can’t even communicate with one another. It would indeed be a terrifying thought if they had anything to communicate; but they have no more interest in one another than grains of sand have for other grains when the wind blows them together. I find it difficult to grasp this fact of complete solitariness in living creatures however small. I accept it for the reason given by Dr. Butler-that no system of

communication exists, or can _ exist,. among myriads of creatures that we must call living, and because they live, must regard as fellow mortals. But my mind yields with a struggle, and my imagination fails altogether. Even when they swarm, as in the case of flies round a corpse or mosquitoes round a warm living body enclosed in a net, the individuals have no interest in the other individuals circling and buzzing about them, but only in-the meal they all’ equally seek. If all men and women in the world were struck blind and deaf and dumb it would still be a peopled world if our other senses remained; but the insect world is a world of individuals unconscious of, and unconcerned with, all other individuals except during courtship. That is something to think about when the white butterflies are here. BS * =

SEPTEMBER 18

WAS in my twenties before I saw a ewe lambed; in my sixties before I lambed one myself, Now schoolboys do it before breakfast. At seven this morning I saw two brothers-one I should think twelve, the other fourteen-walk-ing quietly without a dog through their

father’s ewes. They were keeping a chain or two apart, and watching as the ewes

moved back past them. Half way across the paddock

one pointed to the left and moved. off that way, accelerating a little, but not running. The other slowed down, easing the sheep still in front of him towards his brother and the fence, until in a few minutes there was a small mob moving along the boundary to the corner made by a cross fence, still without panic of rushing. Here the brothers closed in, let about half the mob escape in driblets right and left, then rushed one ewe and with some trouble held her and threw her What followed I could not see in detail, and could not describe in detail if I had seen it. But I could see the ewe on her side, one boy on his knees, and in three or four minutes-perhaps a little longer-a rapid and simultaneous retreat by the two boys for 30 or 40 yards. There they stood watching for a few minutes, and when the ewe still did not get up, they started back towards her, but slowly and cautiously. This brought her to her feet; and as she ran in one direction they ran in the other direction, still watching over. their shoulders. Then the ewe stopped, looked back, and returned to the spot where they had held her. There I could sée her cleaning the

lamb the boys ‘had delivered, and the boys, now satisfied, moving off again on their round. All that was missing was a bishop on one side of me and a psychologist on the other to interpret what I had seen, What I thought I saw was a deterioration in the health of sheep in 60 years, but a great advance in the education, health, and wholesomeness of boys.

SEPTEMBER 21

a }{ERE is a paragraph on which I would, if I could, cast some doubt. I found in A Diary with Letters by

Thomas Jones, C.H., published about a year. ago by the Ox-

fayd Press and lent to me by a collector of good books, Ernest Adams: I have now heard the excellent record made by Lloyd George at Broadcasting House on 15 February, 1934, of his speech at Aberystwyth Eisteddfod on 17 August, 1916. His pace in this fepeat performance was 87 words per minute. Churchill measured in 1909 on the Budget was 111, and in 1940 on the collapse of France 111. Asquith in 1909 on the Budget was 78, King George V in his Christmas Day message in 1932, 79; Ramsay MacDonald in an election speech in 1929, 115; Attlee in 1947, 134; Roosevelt’s Fireside Talks around 100; Wynford Vaughan Thomas’s descriptive commentary, 1944, 165; Middleton, 1944, "In Your Garden," 182. It would be impudence to question a Welshman-I think, and hope, still liv-ing-who has been advisor to four English Prime Ministers, Deputy-Secretary of their Cabinets, the discreet friend for 20 years of everybody of importance in ‘Whitehall, a professor of Economics in Ireland, a selector of professors in Scotland, England, and Wales, and the Guardian of more political secrets than anyone else now living. What he says on this matter must be true. But if anyone finds it an easy truth I hope he will try speaking continuously for half an hour at 78 words a minute. There have been two, and I think only two, orators in the House of Commons during the last 50 years, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, and I find it astonishing that the first spoke so much more slowly than the second. I find it almost incredible that he could hold himself down to 87 words a minute:and still keep a firm grip on an audience. But that is oratory: not a torrent of words, which may or may not be wise words; not noise, or dramatic variations in noise; not bfilliance, or fluency, ot humour, or wit. None of those things alone, and none of them very much, Oratory is magnetism, pefsonality, words that warm and draw and hold the listener and never let him go. Eloquence (continued on next page)

(C) Punch

is only a part of it, and the rate at which the words come important but not vital. But I should like to have heard Lloyd George delivering less than 1142 words a second, and Asquith less than 14. — ~ om , ~

SEPTEMBER 24

* aad HAD written the preceding note before a letter came from a Nelson correspondent suggesting that most of the complaints from which sheep and lambs suffer-dopiness, paralysis, pulpy kidney, staggers, and even footrot-are the direct or indirect result of bad feeding. By bad feeding my correspondent means improper feeding, especially the

average farmer’s failure to supply proteins in suffi-

cient quantity. Sheep, he says, are "highly proteinaceous animals." They need protein for wool, h6éofs, horns

and kin, as well'as for their "meaty tissue’; and since a ewe "will tear down her own structure, if necessary, to provide for her offspring,’ one of the consequences of a protein deficiency in her diet is disintegration of her hoofs and the entry of germs to rot her feet. In support of his argument my correspondent is able to point to his own success in converting "a derelict farm in a derelict district" to a high producing farm\of remarkably healthy sheep and cattle. But nothing in nature is quite as simple as he seems to make it, and if it were the Creator would have a few elementary lessons to learn. Although there are areas in New Zealand in which sheep refused to thrive uritil chemists dressed the soil with trace elements, the general position must be that where grass grows grass-eating animals may safely graze. If man restricts the range of animals by erecting fences, and reduces their exercise by robbing them of the power, as well as of the necessity, to roam, he will lower their vitality, but not fast enough to bring their life-span below his own requirements. The sheep I myself possess are those their more efficient owners no longer think it profitable to keep. With me they extend their lives by one more breeding season, and when they leave me they don’t necessarily go away to die. Though I have been tempted sometimes to follow their fortunes past Addington, I have never had the hardihood to find out who makes or loses money on them after they pass out of my hands, and how soon they go to feed the hungry in other parts of the world. But if I were bold enough to follow them all the way to the slaughterman I would, Iam sure, discover that 50 per cent escape the first year and 20 per cent a second year after their breeder has turned his back on them. It is certain that with better feeding the survivors would be more numerous, but I can’t persuade myself that better feeding means just an increase in protein. (To be continued)