Royal Swans Royal Pain In Ass In England

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Before the spread of homo sapiens, Nature always kept everyone in a fair degree of balance except for when extra-terrestrial objects disrupted things or when continents collided or Ice Ages reconnected submerged landmasses and then invasions happened. Now, human meddling is throwing nearly everything out of whack all the time. Here is a typical example in England: mute swans protected by the Crown are destroying the environment for other creatures and plants in their chosen ecosystem.

&hearts The Crown always protected swans because they loved to hunt and eat them.

By Marie Woolf, Political Editor
Published: 31 December 2006

The swan, beautiful, graceful and protected by Royal Charter, is becoming a nuisance and a threat to the environment.

After a string of mild winters, the bird's numbers are increasing exponentially and there are now so many of them they are threatening pond ecosystems.

Since 1990 the population of mute swans has increased by a quarter, with more than 30,000 of the birds living in England. The numbers have grown so rapidly that flocks of up to 50 juveniles are congregating in rivers where they feed avidly, stripping them of vegetation and driving out other river birds.

William the Conquerer loved to hunt. This passion has been shared by nearly all his feckless descendants. He passed Forest Laws that preserved forests but also he extended his forests by brutally evicting peasants from their Iron Age farms. Peasants were not allowed to hunt anything, not even a mouse, on the vast estates set aside for the nobility's pleasures. This happenstance which was echoed across all of Europe wherever the Normans ruled, meant the place wasn't stripped down to nothingness and turned into a desert.

Since the nobility spent all their free time hunting in these woods, despite it being an artificial environment, it did keep a rough balance of nature because of the variety of animals hunted and the knowledge that if one hunted too many, too often, there was little game. So an army of servants kept track of the forest and all the trees and animals, literally taking a census.

The nobility was very omnivorous and considered all sorts of animals we no longer eat, to be great delicacies. The more 'noble' the bearing and history of an animal, the more delight the nobility had when eating them! Swans are ancient religious symbols going back to the earliest stories from the Stone Age. They are symbols for kingliness, they are the very gods transformed. In fairy tales, they play a big role, as magical creatures.

The medieval nobility loved killing noble animals with sexual or magical attributes. They even made up such animals like the unicorn and made stories and artwork celebrating killing this wild, religious creature.

They hunted birds like the equally religious and noble stork with hawks. Going hawking was considered a refined and elegant way to express nobility. King Harold of England, before he was crowned, visited Normandy to go hawking and his ship went astray and he fell into the hands of hostile Normans who handed him over to William the Bastard, soon to be William the Conquerer.

When kings went hawking, they desired the best birds. They didn't want sparrows, they wanted large birds like swans. This is also why they wanted swans in the moats around their fortresses. Not only did they please the eye while swimming, when dead and roasted, the cooks in the castle could redress the bird in its plumage and show it off at the high table. This was an opportunity to have artists commemorate the dinner with lovely pictures of handsome pages carrying the cooked and stuffed swan in triumph to the delight of the Ladies of the Court.

No longer do the Royals eat swans. But the laws and habits of the dim past continue unabated and since the predators of the swans, aka, the fox and the lynx, the weasels and the stoats, no longer thrive, the swan can merrily reproduce and take over. We see this here in America, too. Our ancestors loved to hunt geese as well as turkeys and Passenger Pigeons. Since we had no kings, these birds were nearly wiped out along with the deer and buffalo.

When laws were passed to protect them, dining habits also changed quite a lot. If one reads Victorian cookbooks (I have quite a few) the number of creatures to be killed and eaten is very astonishing. Song birds, game birds, any sort of creature on the planet went into the kitchen. Today, people don't eat geese hardly at all, for example. Too much fat, too 'gamy', too stringy. Only geese tormented by being forcibly overstuffed are consumed only for their livers. Mrs. Beeton's cookbook describes this in detail and then she tartly says, 'I find this most barbaric and refuse to eat a bird treated so horribly.'

Yet she has recipes for eating small song birds! Her philosophy was, they lived a free and hearty life and now, time for dinner! Because we no longer favor the flavor of wild goose, the birds have greatly multiplied and now huge flocks of them have become perfect pests as they dominate golf courses, corporate headquarters, airports and any standing body of water from the northlands in Canada all the way past Virginia. They don't even bother migrating anymore in winter, it is sufficiently warm for millions of them to stay here in upstate New York, for example.

When hawks and arrows were used to hunt, when dogs and spears were used to kill large game, it was very hard to kill lots and lots of animals quickly because it was too difficult. Even so, if there were no hunting laws, all wild game would be wiped out as it was in the Middle East, for example.

When modern firearms were invented, namely the rifle and bullets rather than flintlocks with round balls, the ability to kill thousands of animals with ease caused a near total collapse in the biosphere. Hunters began to notice there was no game left and the push to save game animals started with Teddy Roosevelt, an avid hunter, and it spread slowly. We still barely protect fishing and the world's wild fishing stock is collapsing from over-hunting with modern tools which can strip an ocean bare very rapidly.

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Comments

[Big Al]

I have often eaten goose. In my opinion it is much nicer than turkey. I would think that swan would be good too, suitable for a very large family.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

I have raised geese in the past. They are popular in places like China still. But in Britain and America, not popular at all anymore. Not like in the old days when Christmas was celebrated with a roast goose.

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