Gillian Burke is a biologist, black and originally from Kenya, but now indigenous to BBC Television Centre in London, within whose back office burrows she currently writes op-eds for BBC Wildlife magazine with titles like ‘What We Call Living Things Matters’.
In this particular piece, Burke recalled being harangued by a “wonderfully neurodivergent” 11-year-old girl who was annoyed that, in a 2016 episode of the BBC wildlife series Springwatch, which Burke helps co-present, a newly-hatched golden eagle had been given the nickname ‘Freya’. “Why do you have to give them names?” demanded to know the delightful infant. “Why can’t you just allow them to be wild animals?” (The girl’s name was ‘Flora’, by the way, making her objection towards the naming of fauna after humans somewhat hypocritical in my opinion.)
Being a modern-day BBC presenter, Burke didn’t just tell the kid to shut up then slap her, but took her wholly unreasonable complaint seriously, using it as a platform to approvingly cite the work of Danish academic Sune Borkfelt, namely his “paradigm-shifting” view that “whether what is named is land, people or animals, the process of naming reflects the worldview of the one who names, rather than the view of what is named”. According to Burke, “this makes naming a powerful tool of control”, as “we are unwittingly wielding some form of control by naming wild animals such as Freya the golden eagle”.
Inevitably, all this ends up gaining some kind of racial aspect to it, as the common English-language names for various species of African wildlife were purportedly derived from old-time white imperialists, with their dreaded colonial mindset, not from native black Africans themselves:
The English names for East Africa’s iconic wildlife – so heavily featured in natural history films and in this magazine – jar, at least to my ear. In my own writing I prefer re-introducing these familiar animals by their Swahili names: ndovu (elephant), twiga (giraffe), fisi (hyena) and my personal favourite, because I used to love how my dad said it, kongoni (hartebeest).
Burke doesn’t specifically call for the animals in question to be renamed, but that seems the increasing trend in zoology these days. There are several animal species out there whose nomenclature has now been deemed irredeemably racist/sexist/homophobic/colonialist by today’s new woke Western scientific establishment, and therefore deemed fit candidates for immediate forcible relabelling. I have recently exposed elsewhere the attempts of some palaeontologists to pretentiously christen various sub-species of extinct trilobites after a range of prominent drag-queens.
Yet the desire to rename animals is not an entirely new phenomenon when totalitarian-style New Orders come to power, and begin trying to systematically reset everything around them back to a desired political Year Zero. In 1942, the German Society for Mammalogy passed a resolution to replace the common German name for a bat, Fledermaus, as the word literally meant ‘flying mouse’, and bats are not actually winged mice at all, they just look a bit like them, cosplaying. This thoroughly unnecessary decision drew the ire of no less a figure than Adolf Hitler, who issued the following warning via his secretary: “Should members of the Society for Mammalogy have nothing more essential to the war effort or smarter to do, perhaps an extended stint in the construction battalion on the Russian front could be arranged.”
If even Hitler could see that scientists spending ages pointlessly debating the renaming of random creatures in the name of ‘modernity’ was a complete waste of the time and resources of everyone involved, why can’t today’s ideologically blinkered biologists see likewise?
Birds of Ill Omen
That today’s bat-blind scientists cannot see this fact is conclusively shown by the saga of Scott’s oriole, a breed of American desert-bird which a U.S. Army officer spotted in 1854 and named after his commanding officer, Winfield Scott – a man today notorious for having engaged in the brutal ethnic cleansing of Native American Indians in the 1830s by forcibly shipping them all out into designated Reservations away from their original homelands on the so-called ‘Trail of Tears’. In 2020, when George Floyd died in Minneapolis, pressure was placed on the American Ornithological Society (AOS) to, as one petition of concerned bird-fanciers put it, erase all bird names containing “significant isolating and demeaning reminders of oppression, slavery and genocide” – prime amongst them Scott’s oriole, which will indeed now be compliantly renamed, possibly as the yucca oriole.
Such demands from obsessive activists were clearly politically motivated in nature, and intended not simply to make the ornithological world more ‘inclusive’, but to contribute to the transform Western society along race-Marxist lines more completely – to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. The most prominent pressure group involved in the campaign was ‘Bird Names for Birds’, whose website explicitly makes reference to the iconoclastic toppling of statues of old Confederate generals and suchlike which was then ongoing during summer 2020’s BLM riot-fest:
Eponyms (a person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named)… are problematic because they perpetuate colonialism and the racism associated with it. The names that these birds currently have… represent and remember people (mainly white men) who often have objectively horrible pasts and do not uphold the morals and standards the bird community should memorialise. … Eponymous common names are essentially verbal statues. They were made to honour the benefactor in perpetuity, and as such reflect the accomplishments and values that the creator esteemed… we [modern, right-thinking people] should make decisions about who and what we honour based on our own values, values that create a more equitable world for all. By continuing to use eponymous common bird names, we continue to reference and honour our distressful colonial heritage and the racism that was a direct consequence of this malicious exploitation. This is unacceptable, and we must do better.
In October 2023 the AOS further issued a new ruling that, besides Indian-killers and other such reprobates, to avoid future similar controversies arising, eponyms of any kind would henceforth be banned from the world of American birds entirely, even retrospectively: the AOS will now have to begin rechristening 263 relevant U.S. bird species, 5.5% of the entire total, even ones with eponyms as wholly inoffensive as ‘Anna’s hummingbird’.
As AOS President Colleen Handel put it in a statement (which sounds distinctly similar in phrasing and sentiment to that of Gillian Burke in BBC Wildlife magazine): “There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today.” Furthermore, “it is a questionable premise that species should be named after specific humans at all, as if bird species were possessions or trophies,” added the AOS.
Turds of a Feather
Examining the AOS’s incredibly lengthy and tedious report into this matter – the result of “nine months of bi-weekly deliberations”, enough to gestate an actual human baby – is to reveal a world strangely similar to that of science in the old Soviet Union, where needless debates over ideology and politically-correct terminology frequently ate into time that could have been spent doing something far more scientifically useful.
The AOS’s report determined that the flesh-footed shearwater, for example, with its pinkish-coloured feet, now had to be banished from dictionaries forever on the grounds that its “name implies a default skin tone” of roseate whiteness, not dusky blackness or brownness. Such absolutely essential administrative measures, it was proclaimed, would “pave the way for the biodiverse, equitable and healthy futures toward which we all strive”.
The whole document is steeped in classic Critical Race Theory dogma. The idea all eponymous bird names should be replaced, not just those of Hiawatha-displacing mass murderers, was justified by the ‘fact’ that
individual and structural acts of oppression are intertwined. Trying to identify the people who committed harmful acts broadened into identifying people who did not individually commit harmful acts but whose work produced, or was used to support, state-sanctioned acts of violence, or to identifying people who did not individually commit harmful acts but who were supported and enfranchised by a system of inequity and exploitation.
White American society as a whole is inherently racist, oppressive and worthless, then, so even the most blameless bird-watcher who might have had a species named after them was ‘guilty’ of helping maintain black slavery and Indian-genocide nonetheless, even though he personally may have had nothing to do with either. The fact that most eponymous bird species were named after straight white males further reflected dominant power structures of the sinful, irredeemable Western past, and all traces of such “legacies of colonialism” must be removed, even in terms of bird names. Somehow, this would all lead to a process of utopian world-transformation, as Marxism always does:
We believe that changing the naming process can be a powerful signal of systematic change. Enacting that change will provide an important space for learning new processes of engagement and ultimately catalyse the kinds of organisational and field-wide changes that will realise AOS’s DEIBJ [i.e., Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] vision and, thus, strengthen ornithology in the long term.
Will it really? Or will it just burn through the AOS’s limited financial resources for no good reason?
Altered Beast
By one estimate, if the AOS’s measures were adopted worldwide, and all eponymous animals relabelled along PC lines, not just American birds, it would require some 200,000 reclassifications to take place. To what meaningful end? Purely to make woke liberals feel good about themselves.
Around 2020, the aptly-named Washington Department of Agriculture employee Dr. Chris Looney made calls for an invasive species of hornet in his home state to be renamed. The new alien insect was being popularly referred to in the media as an ‘Asian giant hornet’ and a ‘murder hornet’. As 2020 was also the year the ‘Chinese virus’ of COVID-19 broke out, leading to an alleged epidemic of anti-Asian hate-crimes across America, Looney worried these popular monikers might help fuel further violence against Asians – or, even worse, “stoke entomophobia” against the innocent insects themselves – so lobbied to get it called the ‘northern giant hornet’ instead.
Pathetically, in 2022, the Entomological Society of America caved in to Looney’s demands: the entomologists had been forced to become etymologists instead. But was the whole process really worth it? Well, no subsequent U.S.-wide genocide of Chinese or Korean people took place, so I suppose in the end it must have been, right? This entire very public procedure can’t just have been one gigantic stupid moral vanity project, surely?
Moral vanity is now all that matters in many of our institutions, sadly, not mere trivia like practical reality or affordability. Extraordinarily, if you read through its report, the American Ornithological Society basically admits the whole exercise of bowdlerising birds will be so costly as to be unaffordable to them:
Throughout the process, the AOS will need dedicated personnel to be in charge of communications. Administrative support for this step will not be trivial. For the public comment period [on what each censored species should henceforth be renamed as], interactive platform(s) will need to be set up in order to moderate and accept the desired input. For broadcasting new names and general publicity, substantial investment will likely need to be made for setting up workflows to track and manage web and social media communications, publish press releases, and handle media relations… We recognise this process is potentially costly. If the cost is prohibitive, then partnerships with other bird-focused organisations may be a step to consider.
What, precisely, is the point of spending ages renaming the endangered General Robert E. Lee Bird if by the time you’ve done so, you’ve got no cash left to spend on any habitat conservation, and so the damn thing has gone extinct?
Hitler knew best how to deal with navel-gazing time-wasters like this: off to the Eastern Front with them all!
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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