There is something uniquely pathetic about a nation that cannot manage a single bear. The headlines from Japan, breathless and giddy, tell us of a black bear captured after ‘days of chaos’ in a suburban Japanese town. Chaos? A bear wandered into a convenience store, rummaged through bins and terrified pensioners. This is not chaos. This is a very modern form of decadence: the total inability of a sophisticated society to handle the natural world without calling for foreign experts. And oh, how the Brits oblige. “British wildlife experts advise on urban mitigation.” Because of course they do. The same country that cannot manage its own badgers, its own urban foxes, its own feral parakeets is now dispensing wisdom on Japanese ursine management. The irony is almost too rich.
Consider the historical parallels. Rome, in its late decline, was overrun by barbarians not because it lacked legions but because it had forgotten how to fight. It outsourced its defence to Germanic mercenaries, whose loyalty was to gold, not the Empire. Sound familiar? We now outsource everything: our thinking, our problem-solving, our very capacity for common sense. We call in the experts from the British Wildlife Trust, who, I’m sure, arrive with clipboards, risk assessments and strategies that involve a lot of words and very little action. The bear, we are told, was eventually tranquilised and relocated. Relocated. So it can cause chaos somewhere else. Brilliant.
But let us not be too hard on the Japanese. They are merely following a global trend. In my own dear England, we have a population of urban foxes so bold they will snatch a sandwich from your hand, and what do we do? We set up Fox Welfare Committees. We issue guidelines. We never, ever shoot them, because that would be barbaric. As if a quick death from a skilled marksman is more barbaric than a slow starvation or a messy encounter with a car. We have become a society that fetishises the lives of animals while losing all grip on our own dignity. We treat a bear like a visiting diplomat, not a threat.
What would a Victorian have done? He would have shot the bear, hung its head in his study, and written a letter to The Times about the declining standards of manliness. There would have been no experts, no mitigation, no fuss. Just a dead bear and a satisfied populace. But we are better now. We are wiser. We are more compassionate. And a bloody nuisance.
The truth is that our obsession with non-lethal mitigation, with welfare and consultation and risk assessment, is a symptom of a deeper intellectual decadence. We have lost the nerve to draw a line between human habitat and wild animal habitat. We expect the land to serve us but refuse to accept that this sometimes means culling the creatures that threaten our safety. The bear in Japan was not a visitor; it was an invader. And we treat invaders with courtesy these days, not force.
So let the British experts advise. Let them drone on about ‘best practices’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’. The bear is caught, for now. But the chaos, the real chaos, is not in the streets of suburban Tokyo. It is in our minds. It is a chaos of misplaced values, of sentimentality that masquerades as ethics, of a refusal to take the hard decisions that any self-respecting society must take. The Empire is falling, and a bear is the least of our worries.
