I very seldom sign online petitions

regarding the welfare or otherwise

of non-human animals, assuming

that if we gave proper consideration

and care to one another the rest

of the animal kingdom would prosper

accordingly. I made an exception

today signing and sharing one entitled

‘Save the Wallabies of Loch Lomond’.

 

The Loch is a freshwater lake whose north

is in the highlands, its south in the lowlands.

It is the subject of a Jacobite song of love

and death – ‘The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond;

has more than thirty islands, some crannogs

man-made in prehistoric times, most

organic, all uninhabited, like

Inchconnachan, ‘Island of the Colquhons’,

whose property it was from medieval times.

 

For Fiona, Countess of Arran, née

Colquhon, Scottish power boat champion,

‘the fastest woman on water’, from childhood

the island was a haven. In time

she built a timber-framed bungalow,

boathouse and pier for her personal use.

On their estate in Hemel Hempstead,

near St Albans, in the Home Counties,

she and the Earl kept non-native mammals,

like llamas, alpacas, and wallabies.

Shortly after the end of World War II,

for some unrecorded reason she settled

a troop of the marsupials on the island.

For more than seventy years they have lived

in harmony with native flora and fauna.

 

The new owners want the wallabies removed,

whether exiled or culled is not clear –

hence the petition. Some see them as a

rather charming quirk of history,

a useful tourist attraction – others

an invasive species. These wallabies

are yet another victim of the British

Empire, and the selfish, careless whimsy

of landowners ancient and modern.

They are no more responsible for where

they are or what they are doing than escaped

mink eating grouse eggs on some money-making

moor, or, from some vast estate, self-seeded

rhododendron, lush and exotic

in the acid soils of Scotland’s west coast, its

empty glens cleared of folk.