The polar bear was intent on premeditated murder. Its victim was an adult male walrus basking on an ice-pan sunning area which the Inuit call "uglit". Normally, the great white predator of the Arctic would be deterred by the sheer bulk of a walrus more - than twice the bear's weight - and the deadly tusks protruding from its lower jaw, but on this occasion the polar bear possessed the opportunity and the means.
Inuit who witnessed the incident, on the north coast of Baffin Island, were astonished to see the bear using its teeth and claws to fashion a large ball of ice. Walruses have poorly developed sight, relying on smell and hearing to detect danger, so the victim did not notice the bear's antics several hundred yards downwind. The bear was inching forward on its belly, pushing the ice ball in front of it. The Inuit observers recognised their own hunting technique of advancing behind white screens to within rifle range. Had their ancestors copied bears, or vice versa, they wondered. Their musings were cut short when, a few yards from its victim, the bear reared up to its full height and brought the ice block slamming down on the walrus's small skull.
There is something distinctly unsettling about such a degree of calculation. It is utterly out of kilter with the image we have of such noble, majestic creatures. It is of a different order from, say, the humble thrush using a pebble to crack a snail. Frankly, it is not cricket. Animals are supposed to kill their prey in a programmed way that is, as they do in David Attenborough's programmes.
Technically, it was not murder, although a section of our society would have been eager to convene a court. The victim, after all, was not human. But polar bears do kill humans, sometimes without provocation. The two species of predators are in competition for seals. Bears occasionally kill men, and men occasionally kill bears. But polar bears are an endangered species, aren't they? No. There are some 2,500 polar bears in the north Baffin area alone, where they outnumber the Inuit.
These facts are calculated to generate frustration bordering on anger. For we have constructed a set of rules and assumptions about the natural world that are dangerously erroneous. We in Britain are so distanced from wildlife that we are deluding ourselves about the nature of the world we live in. In losing that link, we lose the opportunity to understand ourselves. In some cases we have undermined the best guarantors of wilderness and its creatures. Worse, we are are engaging in a second Faustian bargain which proclaims nature redundant.
A revealing insight into our confused beliefs was provided when a Siberian tiger killed a keeper recently at John Aspinall's wildlife park near Canterbury. There was an immediate expectation that the cat would be put down, as if it was a pet which had become dangerous rather than the greatest of the land predators. Aspinall let the cat out of the bag when he stated that tigers "see us as honorary tigers". No more keepers for Balkash, the 500lb male tiger, he ruled, in punishment for "letting his species down".
This was straight out of Kipling's Jungle Book. The Law of the Jungle was quite specific in forbidding "every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting-grounds of his pack or tribe". Shere Khan, the tiger, broke this rule to hunt Mowgli, with the excuse that he had been lame in one foot since birth. Kipling wrote his delightful children's saga 100 years ago, when most British families dotted around the British Empire were in a position to distinguish fact from fable. It is not his fault that his humanlike bestiary was seized on by Disney to propagate its curious anthropomorphist message. Nor could Kipling guess that Shere Khan would become the classic stereotype for the mankiller.
Among the world's greatest concentration of tigers, in the 3,800 sq mile Sunderbans mangrove forest straddling Bangladesh and India, there seems to be little perception of man being an honorary tiger, or indeed any appreciation of the above nostrums. Between 1956 and 1983, tigers killed 1,554 people, despite an abundance of axis deer and wild boar, their natural prey. In nearly every case, the victim was the last in a line of woodcutters or others entering the forest. Casualties were almost totally eliminated by the practice of wearing a boldly painted mask on the back of the head.
The notion that some animals kill for any motive other than necessity is unacceptable to the mythology we have created. We have drawn the teeth from beasts that terrified our ancestors. A vigorous rehabilitation campaign asserts that wolves have been misrepresented. Yet most aboriginal hamlets in Canada's sub-arctic or arctic have accounts of wolf attacks on hunters. It is not uncommon to see wolves attacking caribou, apparently for the hell of it, chewing bits from them while they run and then breaking off to target another victim.
No more impressive somersault has been performed in the public mind than that of Orca, the killer whale. Today, crowds are captivated by whales' obliging antics and winning smiles. Most people have forgotten that in 1962, when killer whales were first considered for display in aquariums, the general reaction was horror. Orca was considered so rapacious that fisheries patrol boats were instructed to shoot whales on sight. Killer whales split boats in half and ripped nets. Their apparent idea of fun was and continues to be working in pairs to pulverise other whales.
This is not to characterise wild animals as bad, murderous or cruel, which are human values. They are simply wild and, notwithstanding intensive study, mysterious. They deserve our sense of awe and wonder, but they are not as cuddly, cute and predictable as we insist on depicting them. Lacking any serious predators in Britain, we envelop wild animals with the sentiments we accord to pets. Even our household animals are schizophrenic: most cats, under the cloying attentions of their owners, mentally revert to kittenhood until a bird triggers a violent personality swing to predator.
But what possible damage can be caused by our delusions about pets? Plenty. In the 1970s, a pressure crack opened up between two sets of fundamental attitudes to nature. On one side were the native hunters of northern Canada, acknowledged as supreme environmentalists who had not hunted one species to extinction. On the other was Western society, with a less illustrious record but now committed to an ordered world in which the lion lay down with the lamb. The consequences of that clash - alcoholism, welfare dependency and loss of identity - are still rippling through some Canadian settlements. Why should we care? Because they are the only successful custodians of wildlife in millions of square miles.
The detonator was a picture in 1977 of Brigitte Bardot cuddling a baby harp seal to draw attention to the seal pup hunt off the coast of Newfoundland. The image was irresistible. The clamour to salve our consciences was undeniable whatever the cost. We fell for a pair of appealing eyes. Someone forgot to mention that seals are predators in competition with man: according to one estimate, Canadian seals consume as much fish as the total catch available to humans in the North Atlantic. Urban populations and the media, following the lead given by the influential London-based press, lined up behind Greenpeace's call for a ban on seal skins. The Inuit found themselves in the dock beside the main culprits.
It was a dialogue of the deaf. No matter that Newfoundland was a long way from the Northwest Territories of Canada, where native peoples did not hunt seal pups. In vain, it was pointed out that seal skins were a by-product of the Inuit's staple diet and that the meagre revenue from skin sales barely covered the overheads of arctic travel. Adult seals would continue to be hunted in large numbers for subsistence. But the loss of income would exacerbate the problems of traditional hunters still adjusting from a nomadic lifestyle.
It was the same story when Greenpeace launched its anti-fur campaign in the 1980s. The main targets were weekend trappers in America, and subsequently fur ranchers. In Britain, remote from the action but skilled in class warfare, most opprobrium was directed against those who bought fur at Harrods. This time, the ecological blunderbuss caught Canada's Indians as well as the Inuit. The ultimatum they faced was as unreasoning as if we were asked to give up cars overnight. In 1986 Greenpeace abandoned its campaign, but the damage was done.
There were sound arguments on both sides, but some things could not be said. How could older Inuit hunters explain that their world is governed by two personages, Sila, who controls the weather, and Sedna, who gives or withholds animals from hunters? (You can hear the guffaws.) Or that, with one unseasonal flurry of rain, Sila can start a chain reaction which causes animal population crashes of such magnitude that the good work of environmentalists is wiped out overnight?
Most hunter-gatherer societies do not seek to escape the moral dilemma of killing animals. Our own attitudes are muddled. In part they reflect the Puritans' objection to bear-baiting: not that it gave pain to the bear, but that it gave pleasure to the spectators. But throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, scores of animals were tried for witchcraft in official courts, the last execution occurring in Switzerland in 1906.
Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for suggesting that humans were like other animals. A prevailing view, argued by Rene Descartes in his Discourses, was that animals did not even feel pain. He was ringingly endorsed by Pope Pius XII, who proclaimed that cries from an abattoir should not arouse unreasonable compassion "any more than do red-hot metals undergoing the blow of the hammer".
European concern about unnecessary cruelty to animals emerged from the humanitarian movement in the 19th century. Inevitably, the focus was on household pets and farm animals. In Britain, quite rational people are to be seen addressing the latter as if they are children. The campaign against blood sports has blurred further our view of animals in the wild and their relationship to man.
However, our fits of moral indignation are subordinate to a more powerful stinct. In Western Europe, a unique conviction developed that it was our destiny to subdue and dominate nature for our own needs. The belief that we alone possessed souls separated us from the rest of creation. Darwin's theory of natural selection set us above the other animals. "Man chewed his habitat while secreting theories to justify his acts," Professor Jean Dorst noted drily in Before Nature Dies.
Some believe that we have already killed nature, or that world which was here before we arrived. "We as a race turn out to be stronger than we suspected - much stronger. In a sense we turn out to be God's equal or at least his rival able to destroy creation," Bill McKibben wrote in The End Of Nature (1990). In genetic engineering, we have gone one better, with serious implications for wild animals. By picking the locks which nature installed as definite limits on cross-breeding, we can build our own nursery of cuddly animals. Fulfilling man's dynamic towards moulding nature in his own image, many of the new creatures will have human characteristics. The question "Man or mouse?" was first resolved by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who inserted human growth genes into a mouse foetus. When born, it grew to twice the size of any mouse in history.
As we narrow our vision to the mysteries of microbiology, the natural world becomes increasingly an abstraction. We have changed the climate with higher carbon dioxide levels, and acknowledge with sadness and shame that some things are now almost irreversible. As urban dwellers, we may not have much contact with nature, but at least we have it in the can. There is something deeply reassuring about the wildlife films played on television. Is it possible that videos will be all we have left?
There is a disturbingly prophetic scene in the otherwise undistinguished science fiction film Soylent Green (1973), set on an over-populated and dying earth where euthanasia is compulsory. The old are given one last vision before being turned into biscuits. To heavenly strains of music, they gaze at the video image of a beautiful glade, in which a fawn shimmers. It is implicit that all wildlife on the planet is dead.
Twenty years on, we have more of nature in the can. We have the promise of being able to reconstruct tigers from their genes. So will it really matter if they die out in the wild? We can fix up their natural habitats later. After all, there are twice as many Siberian tigers in zoos as in their normal surroundings. Nor will it matter when our distaste for imprisoned animals closes down all the zoos.
Our obstinate belief that we are entities distinct from the biological world points down this road. Perhaps we need a reconciliation with the primitive, whose beliefs and wilderness are deemed retrograde. Or we could discover an alternative option which few suspect.
The Genesis story, with its emphasis on dominion, has been blamed for legitimising man's impulse to tame nature, but a very different picture emerges in the Book of Job. Job was a good man whose faith was sorely tested by God. Eventually God spoke from a whirlwind, glorying in those parts of creation not occupied by man. The message, a radical departure from our most deeply instilled beliefs, seemed to be that we are not the centre of the universe, but some kind of experiment.
If so, one day there might be a smile on the face of the tiger.
