'Wild saints' worthy of worship

In the 1960s, the veteran grizzly expert and wilderness enthusiast Doug Peacock went to Vietnam as a young army medic. The searing experience changed his sensibilities forever. After his return, the war veteran, otherwise known as ���cranky buzzard���, found himself utterly out of sync with urban America. So he exiled himself to the wilderness which he found to be ���less wild than I remembered���. He set out to save it with the help of the eco-enthusiast Edward Abbey: the duo happily ���monkey-wrenched��� wilderness-gobbling schemes such as logging and land development.

Their adventures inspired Abbey���s cult classic novel The Monkey-Wrench Gang, which immortalised the peacock-turned-buzzard as a character called George Hayduke that was ���a night-time trouble-maker, bar-room brawler, free-time lover���. Shrugging off that image as ���literary licence���, Peacock today prefers to focus instead on his life���s mission, namely, making the world safe for grizzly bears.

The bears turned out to be his healing wild shamans. The towering creatures could have easily killed and eaten him up; yet they had the grace to let him out of situations where they would have been within rights to swat the blundering veteran���s head off.

Peacock is convinced that human intelligence itself evolved in response to being a relatively puny animal hunted by what American nature writer William Quammen once described to your correspondent in an interview as ���God���s Monster��� ��� massive alpha predators such as the tiger, the lion, the Klondike Bear and the Great White Shark. Our collective survival still depends on the world���s wild places in a real way, he says. For without these animals there would be no context for fear, he adds.

The hardcore wilderness groupie is obviously too disdainful to include smooth-faced suicide bombers and their dead-eyed handlers in his list of hunters that strike terror in the hearts of the hunted. In any case, their breeding grounds are in conurbations. What makes them deadlier, however, is the sheer banality of their evil. This stems not from any instinct for food or survival but from a twisted ideology that dehumanises their anonymous victims and denies the very rights and freedoms that the terrorists allegedly espouse, and which they arrogate to themselves as ���God���s chosen people���. In comparison, the carnivore stands out as a wild saint worthy of worship.