Morality, Hawk-Eyed and Pigeon-Toed
by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2013)
And:
Of course, it must be borne in mind that truth and elegance (or eloquence, for that matter) are most certainly not one.
But to return to the shocking scenes of violence enacted near my house yesterday: I am glad to say that they were not enacted by humans but by birds, sparrowhawks to be precise. These were the birds that the Duke of Wellington advised Queen Victoria were the solution to the problem of sparrows caught in Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, though he did not say what the sparrowhawks would have done after the elimination of the sparrows.
The attacks on the pigeons were so swift that one couple, walking in the close, did not realise what was happening. They looked up and, seeing some of the finer pigeon feathers floating in the air, mistook them for snowflakes, which they found strange because it was by no means cold enough for snow.
The strange thing was that I felt morally outraged by the behaviour of the sparrowhawks. I know that this is absurd, and I know also that I have animadverted previously on the poor behaviour of pigeons in my garden, that (or is it who?) self-importantly and greedily dominate the bird table and drive away the smaller birds to take all the seed for themselves, even though they seem to me quite fat enough already. But between self-importance and greed on the one hand, and outright murder on the other, there is quite a difference, at least in the sub-lunary world. It is the difference between sin and crime.
Rational as it is to view their behaviour as devoid of all moral significance whatsoever, and absurd as it would be to consider those birds as morally reprehensible, I find it almost impossible entirely to clear my mind of the irrational notion that the scene had a moral significance or meaning. If, for example, I had been able by some means or other to protect the pigeons from the unprovoked attack of the sparrowhawks upon them, I should have done so, even though saving the pigeons meant harming the sparrowhawks. It seemed to me terrible that the peaceful pigeons, bullies of my bird-table as they might be (though of course I did not know that these particular, that is to say individual pigeons, had ever visited it, and one should not infer the characteristics of an individual from his membership of a group), should have been subjected to so vicious an attack, and to so gory and painful a death.
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