The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling Page A

able to present science with indisputable evidence of the existence of the monster. And perhaps if I succeed in this enterprise naturalists all the world over will be roused to hunt vigorously for other unknown animals; for if this prodigious dinosaur, which is supposed to have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, be still in existence, what other wonders may not be brought to light?
    Though the ‘wonders’ of his imagination were coloured by a showman’s lust for size and ferocity, and though the Rhodesian swamp-monster would never be found, serious-minded zoologists ever after have been fired by the same unquenchable optimism, and surprisingly often have been rewarded by the reappearance of ‘living fossils’ or by entirely new species. In my own small way, I am in the grip of it myself. It is not amonster that I seek, but only a tiny scrap of evidence that will prove the existence of the world’s most elusive mole. People still ask me why, and my answer echoes the oldest enticement known to man. Because it is there .

CHAPTER FOUR
    Werewolf Seized in Southend
    A hundred years after Hagenbeck’s death (he died, aged sixty-eight, on 14 April 1913) we stand atop a mountain of accumulated historical data. From this high vantage point we have clear sight of how animals are feeling our influence. The evidence is consistent and unignorable; the conclusions almost too painful to articulate. ‘It makes me ashamed to be of the same branch of biology,’ said the late Ian Nairn in a film he made for the BBC in 1973. What had inflamed him – brought him almost to the point of tears – was the demolition of a Victorian church. How much more shaming, then, is the destruction of a work of nature? It seems, or should seem, almost inconceivable that, like historic churches, libraries and market halls, species cannot be saved without a fight. This very day, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has placed an advertisement inviting people to ‘adopt’ a snow leopard. This elegant native of central Asia has had a hard time of it. Rapaciously hunted for its fur in the old Russian republics, persecuted by farmers, it has declined by 20 per cent in just two generations. Beyond question, it needs help. But so do thousands of others. The giant panda, Marley’s golden mole, the black rhino (recently declared extinct in West Africa), the brownstriped grunt . . . Their names alone would fill many pages of this book. TheIUCN Red List contains 5,488 species of mammal. Seventy-six of these are extinct with two more gone from the wild; 505 are vulnerable, 448 endangered and 188 critically endangered. Others are ‘near threatened’ or ‘data deficient’. Only 3,110, for the moment, are of ‘least concern’.
    One of these, unsurprisingly, is the ubiquitous red fox, Vulpes vulpes , which has coexisted with humans since the Ice Age. Like no other, it has clung to life with a tenacity that invites all kinds of anthropomorphic projections – it is intelligent, resourceful, limitlessly adaptable, the possessor of unsurpassable beauty. Despite its modest size, the sight of one always quickens the pulse – especially in England, among whose much-reduced native fauna it reigns as undisputed top predator. It is important also because of what it represents in the eternal processes of negotiation between man and beast. It has the widest range of any land mammal on earth, right across the northern hemisphere from the Arctic Circle through North Africa and Central America to the Asiatic steppes, as familiar in Afghanistan, Mongolia and Bangladesh as it is throughout Europe. You would think that 10,000 years would have been enough for us to get used to each other. Yet no other animal, save perhaps the rat, has rubbed so abrasively against its neighbours. Its role in fiction is as old as story-telling – fifty-one of Aesop’s fables involve foxes, and children’s