THE UNIQUENESS OF THE INDIVIDUAL 



We can be quite sure that mammals undergo a process of 

 Annate'' senescence. But why are we so sure? The answer is 

 vital to my later argument. It is because we keep mammals as 

 pets, in zoos, and in domestication. If we had to rely upon 

 information derived from truly wild animals, we should be very 

 much indeed less certain, and it is arguable that we mit^ht 

 never know at all. For, as Dr Chitty tells me, wild mammals of 

 any perceptible degree of senility turn up in traps so seldom 

 that we should always be inclined to think up reasons for their 

 enfeeblement that were not necessarily connected with their 

 age — the wasting due to infection, maybe, or to an injury that 

 stopped them getting food. Animals do not in fact live long 

 enough in the wild to disclose the senile changes that can be 

 made apparent by their domestication. Many wild birds, as 

 Dr Lack has shown, are the victims of so savage an exaction of 

 mortality that, beyond a few months of youth, their likelihood 

 of dying is actually independent of their age! It is of vital 

 importance to remember that senility is in a real and important 

 sense an artifact of domestication; that is, something revealed 

 and made manifest only by the most unnatural experiment of 

 prolonging an animaPs life by sheltering it from the hazards of 

 its ordinary existence. Here is a story with a pertinent moral. 

 An eminent naturalist was once taken tiger-hunting by a 

 courteous Indian potentate; he got his tiger and saw at once 

 that it was very, very old. Here then perhaps, he thought, is 

 something that he had long vainly looked for — a truly wild 

 animal that was very old and very decrepit, and no doubt very 

 cunning and very wise as well. On closer inspection, he found 

 that the tiger had gold fillings in its molars; the potentate, 

 courteous as I said, had simply ''laid it on\ So when you hear 

 speak of the 'natural death"* of animals, remember that no 

 death is less '■natural"' than that which is commonly so called. 



If there are doubts about mammals and birds, which rep- 

 resent the higher classes of vertebrates, how many more must 



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