We need to give the country’s largest returned predator time and get used to each other. So says biologist Midas Dekker. For him, it’s not all that complicated in the sublunary. “The art of living is adapting.”
The most colorful biologist in the Netherlands has an anniversary to celebrate. He plays the guitar for half a century, at least an hour a day. “And I’m still not getting it right at all.”
Whence then the persistence?
“To that it can also be a lot of fun to do something that you are sure you will never get good at. Are you immediately relieved of all ambitions. That gives peace, you know it won’t work out anyway. I still stumble over exactly the same size as fifty years ago.”
Midas Dekkers just wants to say: a person would be wise to know his limitations. He actually wanted to be a physicist. Building rockets and stuff. But he said he was too stupid for that.
“I wanted to be a scholar, and of course in the most scientific of all sciences. Good plan, if only I wasn’t smart enough for it. You just have to accept that.”
We are sitting in his office, the stunningly beautiful former council chamber of the municipality of Weesperkarspel, turned into a private library with a complete cupboard full of books written by Midas Dekkers himself. Tangible proof of something he is good at: writing. About nature, animals, people.
“One hundred percent pure nature is as utopian as one hundred percent pure love. That is no reason to abolish love or nature.”
There are concerns about nature, the wolf is under pressure, last round for the brown pub… You’ve known better times.
“The t Times are as they are and the art of living is to adapt to it. To my regret, nature and the brown pub are doing badly, but the wolf is doing well and that makes me happy. It is the hour of truth for the wolf. The hour of the wolf, not coincidentally one of the most beautiful TV programs ever made.”
In Africa, cheetahs, leopards and lions eat impalas and what’s left is for hyenas and vultures. In the Netherlands, a wolf kills ten sheep and leaves them lying there. That has nothing to do with ecological balance, does it?
“How can you already expect equilibrium? That wolf just arrived! The party hasn’t even started yet. The animal has arrived cold as a visitor, looks around a bit awkwardly, has not yet found its territory, sometimes walks through residential areas. The wolf hasn’t even taken off his coat yet.”
Looking around awkwardly? The beast bites sheep to death.
“Much me sheep are killed by dogs. People just don’t want to understand that the wolf is just a dog. A million wolves have been walking through the Netherlands for years, but they have a collar and become Fikkie named.”
Sheep herders make a different noise.
“We m just need to get used to each other. When the first cars started driving, there were many casualties. Millions of these things are now driving through the densely populated country.”
You say wolves don’t like mutton. Then why do they sink their teeth into it?
“A wolf’s dog food is called deer, no and sheep. But it’s like a fox in a chicken coop. Because of that fluttering, the animal bites around itself. Such a pen is not natural, nor is a herd of sheep on the heath. Wolves get excited about that. A completely unnatural state, which was possible for a century and a half because there were no wolves. We Dutch give money to the World Wildlife Fund to save the tiger in India. That predator regularly devours a human being. We apparently don’t care, because that’s nice and far away.”
Johan Derksen no longer dares to go to the woods in Grolloo with his labradoodle, because the beast looks like a sheep.
“Well, d and there is something he doesn’t dare to do, hahaha. As humans, we just have to accept that we are not lord and master over our pets. If you have a cat, you have to accept that he occasionally comes home with a bird in his mouth. If you let a dog loose in the woods, you have to accept that he can grab a lamb or be grabbed by another animal himself. Many of the birds eaten by cats are also not natural. We put houses in the garden for them and feed them, so that the really wild birds have less living space. What happens in your garden is by definition an unnatural affair.”
The most famous biologists in the Netherlands: Maarten ‘t Hart, Midas Dekkers, Freek Vonk. Do you feel at home in that list?
“Er Z There are thousands of ways to teach people about nature. One does it enthusiastically, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. The other does it thoughtfully, perhaps a little too thoughtfully, not to say grumpy.”
Midas Dekkers reaches a large audience by writing compellingly about animals, Freek Vonk by sometimes literally diving right into it.
“If I were a crocodile, I’d rather be with a philosophical dealing with a biologist than with a biologist jumping on me. I belong to the school of admiring nature. Enjoy, with respect. In recent years I have seen that nature is increasingly being monetized as a consumer item. A bird can’t fucking brood in peace without a camera being shoved into its nest. You should do that to the neighbor, but people love to watch it. When they walk through nature themselves, they don’t see a single nut. It saddens me greatly that nature becomes entertainment.”
As a student you were a translator of animal encyclopedias. Was the word always as important as the living being?
“Of the 10 million animal species, there are 9,999,999 that lead an extremely interesting and meaningful existence without uttering a word. Life is by definition more important than the word, but the word is my tool. I am artisanal. Writing is tinkering with words. I love it.”
You had a sign in the window with the word “bookmaker” on it. There were wrong types.
“I was in one of those beautiful Haarlem alley literally behind the window. Behind a desk with a typewriter. If you then have such a sign in the window, people are indeed misled. I had a dream that still hasn’t come true. Really wanted to be a bookmaker. Come up with your own text, write, typeset, print, bind, sell. The whole process. That was my goal. To date it has not happened.” “I started out as a children’s book author. A publisher asked me if I wanted to make a children’s fiction book. No, I replied. But we offer you a lot of money, I was told. Come by this afternoon, I said. Result was Whale Lake . About a crook who wanted to kill whales and a hero who managed to prevent that. Translated for twelve countries.”
Speaking of children… “School gymnastics is child abuse,” you said. How is it possible that a person has such an intense dislike for physical education and sports?
“If someone wants to exercise, go ahead. But forcing children to perform physical actions from the age of four to eighteen is something I strongly oppose. Gymnastics has no more place in schools than pimpampets or any pointless activity.”
According to you, ‘healthy person’ is as nonsensical a concept as ‘healthy lamppost’. You don’t believe in a healthy mind in a healthy body?
„’Gez a healthy mind in a healthy body’ is a saying of Juvenal from Roman antiquity. Juvenal was a writer, but above all a satirist, a joker. Someone once took his statement literally and gymnastics education was built on that misunderstanding. The ancient Greeks did gymnastics, the ancient Romans did a little for public entertainment and after that there was no gymnastics for more than one and a half thousand years. There was no sports. Fantastic! Sport was only rediscovered in the mid-19th century by the Prussians, who invented nationalism. Countries started to fight each other and the armies were a bunch of farmer’s sons who were handed guns instead of pitchforks. Those armies had to be more professional.”
“Children were given gymnastics at school so that they could later join the army as agile soldiers. Nice smooth cannon fodder. We are still stuck with that nonsense. The gym… The only school where you don’t learn anything. There is one good reason to exercise: to have fun. But they shouldn’t be selling nonsense. Not to say that sport fraternizes. If something doesn’t fraternize…”
The more a person moves, the more fuel he needs. “If we factory-produce 90 percent of our food, we might save the planet,” you say.
“I think and not everyone realizes that 90 percent of the food will soon have to come from the factory. From halls with huge barrels full of fungi, bacteria and other very small organisms that even Lenie ‘t Hart cannot feel sorry for. You get proteins, carbohydrates and fats from that. Can the food industry turn it into a tasty morsel? And then produce the remaining 10 percent in the old traditional, biologically responsible way.”
Dutch farmers are the best and feed large parts of the world.
“If you Z o want to make as much food as possible cheaply, then we are the absolute champions. The only question is whether that should be your goal.”
If you move livestock farming to less developed countries, the cows are no better off .
“Pass after we let things get completely out of hand, we started thinking about animal welfare. We cannot go back to the time when humans and animals lived together, as it were, hand in paw.”
“Having children is biologically the stupidest thing you can do,” you say. Imams and other religious leaders think differently about that. Isn’t birth control by far the best remedy for climate change?
“Yes, boo Restriction is an ideal solution for all possible problems. The best pill against corona is the contraceptive pill. You get those kinds of pandemics when you’re crowded together with way too many people. Problem number 1: there are really too many people in the world. Problem number 2: no one is doing anything about it.”
Your latest book is about human races.
“If you want to fight racism, you have to know first n what a race is. Arnon Grunberg wrote an article about it NRC . He mixed up race, species, Judaism, and DNA. If he had handed in that piece of his in a biology class, I would have given him the worst possible fail.”