The Birds: A Prophecy?

I never appreciated the reverence afforded to Alfred Hitchcock. The majority of his films - aside from 39 Steps, Psycho and Vertigo - were insipid and, when shot in technicolour, nauseating. The Birds was one such film which, though disliking, enthralled me nonetheless with its hypothetical scenario of beasts conspiring against man.

Trying to do for avians as Psycho did for showers or Vertigo for nuns, the film set about commodifying a terror - and, though confined to the realms of fictionalised horror (as it would have been at the time of its release), we are now seeing an uprising of animals against man analogous to that of The Birds.

This article in The Telegraph reports there are an increasing number of assaults by animals upon humans. Further to Sementivae alluding the plight of pachyderms, it would seem that elephants have had their fill of humans' abuse and are now fighting back.

What is curious is not so much that elephants are attacking humans without precedence, but that elephants continents apart in both Asia and Africa are doing so. In fact, not just elephants but many other species of the animal kingdom from chimpanzees to crocodiles to badgers.

More than just coincidence or scaremongering or glorification, this intriguing phenomenon is accepted scientifically. In the name of science we ask why and how is this happening?

The most casual explanation is that there are an increasing number of humans which means an increasing number to be attacked by animals, but this doesn't explain why hitherto benign animals are assaulting humans - fox attacks in Edinburgh being one such example.

We could say that animals have realised that humans as prey are relatively defenseless. Indeed, take away our weapons, our harpoons, rifles, bombs, then we are - so to speak - quite toothless. Physically weak as the human species is, not all animals attacking humans are predators of humans - Sea-horses, anyone?

I wonder if this is not evolutionary pressure. This biggest threat to the existence of every mammal on the planet - whether directly through hunting and scientific testing or indirectly through global warming - is humankind.

It makes sense, in context of these species' survival, that they compute the threat of humankind and act to combat that threat, consciously or intuitively. Where chimpanzees' territory and livelihood is endangered by humans, you want chimpanzees that are powerful enough to defend what is theirs.

But what is most remarkable is that this is an inter-species attack. It would be much less inscrutable to the human mind if, say, sharks had conspired among themselves to increase their diet of surfers intra-species without other species similarly increasing their attacks on humans.

Yet the species are fighting back in concerto against human kind. The most rational explanation is that humans have simply pissed off a great number of species instead of their being a collusion telegraphed between chimps and rhinos and sharks, but the phenomenon is no less impressive.

This 'mobilisation' should never have been unpredicted by scientists, or the exclusive domain of fanciful celluloid, because its stands to reason that humans can't expect to put such a burden upon the natural world and live free of bad consequence or a massive-scale Gaian equaliser.