| 1 | 1 | | Desmond Morris always wanted to be a sea otter. 'They just swim around all day and |
| 2 | | never come ashore. They have a quite marvellous playful existence,' he says. |
| 2 | 3 | | 'But some time ago I made a rather unhappy discovery. Sea otters suffer from |
| 4 | | dreadful chest conditions due to the way they feed themselves. They dive into the sea, piek |
| 5 | | up a shellfish and a pebble, then lie on their back, put the pebble on their chest and |
| 6 | | hammer the shell against it until it breaks. It is clever but it seems that after years of all |
| 7 | | this bashing, they get dreadful chest complaints.' |
| 3 | 8 | | The bad health of the sea otter is one of the sadder discoveries Morris made while he |
| 9 | | was working on his new book, Animalwatching. H's the result of twenty years' research. 'I |
| 10 | | feit I had to write this book to pay a debt,' he says. 'And I hope that when people know |
| 11 | | more about these marvellous animals they'll respect them more.' |
| 4 | 12 | | 'We don't care enough about animais. I'm very angry about the way they're treated. |
| 13 | | Factory farming, experimentation, trapping them for fur - I find all th at totally disgusting. |
| 14 | | The problem is that immense commercial interests are involved and they're not going to |
| 15 | | change unless public opinion forces such a change.' |
| 5 | 16 | | As our conversation continues, mild-mannered Desmond starts to sound like one of |
| 17 | | those radical animal activists who plant bombs in cars and raid animallaboratories. And |
| 18 | | when he's asked what he thinks of them, he admits rather shockingly: 'I guess if I were 18 |
| 19 | | today, I'd probably be one of them. I don't agree with all of their tactics but I'm basically |
| 20 | | on their side.' |
| 6 | 21 | | 'We still don't have enough respect for animals and it's extremely difficult to get a |
| 22 | | change of attitude. That only happens if some people become extremists and drag the rest |
| 23 | | of society along with them. They go too far sometimes and do silly things which damage |
| 24 | | their cause, but I understand entirely how they feel. ' |
| 7 | 25 | | But what about medical research? Is the well-being of a rat more important than, for |
| 26 | | example, a cure for cancer? Desmond is having none of that. 'To start with,' he says, '80 |
| 27 | | per cent of all cruelty to animals could be removed without the slightest loss to society. It |
| 28 | | is totally unnatural to turn animals into food machines for factory farming. And cosmetic |
| 29 | | research is completely unnecessary. Surely we have enough shampoos in the world now to |
| 30 | | satisfy anybody, so why do we need any more?' |
| 8 | 31 | | 'If you take away that 80 per cent, you're left with medical research, and if |
| 32 | | experimentation was not so easily allowed, people would be forced to find ot her ways of |
| 33 | | doing the research. After all, animal experiments have been rather unsuccessful. They've |
| 34 | | been going on in cancer research for years and years now, so why haven't they worked?' |
| 9 | 35 | | Does he think things will improve? 'I suppose things are starting to change - but not |
| 36 | | quickly enough. That's why the animal activists get so angry and do mad things. My way is |
| 37 | | to write a book like Animalwatching and teil people how marvellous animals are. Once |
| 38 | | you understand animais, there's no way you can be horrible to them, because you can 't be |
| 39 | | horrible to your friends. ' |
