GROWING up, I developed a very unhealthy fascination with sharks, lions and crocodiles. Not in the way that a common sadist might revel in the sight of violence and bloodshed inflicted on the likes of a seal, zebra or antelope for purely gratuitous ends, but in terms of trying to get to grips with the mysteries of life and death. After all, coming face to face with such extreme carnage was not exactly a daily occurrence in England and yet the awareness of death was always lurking at the back of my mind and I had always been empathetic to the extent that I liked to imagine what it must be like to pass from this world into the next.

With age, however, the sight of an animal being ripped to shreds by a predator becomes increasingly more distasteful and one begins to question the entire process and ask why one animal would spend its entire life serving as ‘prey’ for another. What is the point of all this suffering? Purely to reproduce and perpetuate our own kind? Do the worst of us re-emerge from the aether simply to spend our next incarnation as hapless frogs making our way through a treacherous jungle full of ravenous snakes?

Finally, it began to dawn on me that what seems like utter futility is all part of the Great Plan. I had always known such things to be ‘the way of nature,’ that goes without saying, but it took a while for me to appreciate what seemed like the sheer pointlessness of one animal inflicting brutality on another. Part of the reason why humans feel so alienated or detached from nature is the way that animals are presented in the media. There are two polar extremes: on the one hand, the inane fluffiness that one finds among the crass anthropocentrism of Disney’s animal caricatures and, on the other, the way your average nature documentary has a disturbing tendency to present the aforementioned predators as terrifying monsters alongside hysterical commentary and a heavy metal soundtrack. The first offers a completely unrealistic scenario in which a tiger or a bear might croon like Louis Armstrong, or dance like Fred Astaire, thus sanitising the animal by removing it from its true context, whilst the second dwells merely on the extremities of violence and death to the exclusion of all else.

Whilst the domesticating poison that one finds in Disney should be dismissed by anyone in their right mind, and you would do well to keep your children away from this contaminating garbage, it would be foolish to sweep nature’s more alarming aspects under the carpet and risk falling into the same trap. Some documentaries, after all, now refuse to show the precise moment when one animal kills another. The solution, therefore, lies in a readjustment of perspective. It may be a fact that predators sit at the ‘top of the food chain,’ as the high-falutin reductionists of the scientific world like to put it, but rarely are we shown how one ecosystem interacts with another to form the biosphere.

Wolves, for example, are invariably portrayed as salivating beasts who ruthlessly chase and exhaust their ‘prey’ before devouring it in great numbers. However, whilst this may be true on a surface level more recent studies have shown that reintroducing wolves to certain areas has led to the replenishment of the entire region and that once they begin lowering the numbers of deer and other grazing animals the land is transformed and nature restored. The return of the wolf has even altered the course of rivers and other waterways. Life, in other words, can spring from the very jaws of death.

Nature is not something that should be viewed through a selective lens that inevitably removes one particular aspect from the more general context, because it is multi-dimensional and the events that take place within it have a much wider significance. The cycle of life and death is absolutely crucial and unless we step back and learn to see the whole picture everything will indeed seem utterly pointless.