wild things do not make my heart sing

There's something about wild creatures that confers upon them a status approaching the disabled in our culture. Being wild and therefore (?) part of the planet's delicate eco-balance, it's a wonder they don't get reserved car parking places at supermarkets. One imagines cinemas with cool, wet gradually-rising surfaces to enable easy access for slugs, and usherettes offering carrots for any rabbits which might be in attendance. (Sorry - usherettes. That really dates me. I do beg your pardon: ushpersons.)

But as with the real disabled, the assumption that disabled = nice is quite wrong.

Go on safari, for example, and you will see whole hard-working families of trees tossed carelessly by the wayside and left to die. Why? Because that majestic beast the Elephant wanted to reach the tender branches at the top. If elephants were the dominant species, the Earth's chlorophyll production would grind to a halt, and the planet would within weeks have the climate of a Turkish bath.

For the gardener, all this correctness about all things wild and wonderful is especially irksome. People shriek with horror at the mention of slug pellets. "Pellets?" they ask, in an accusatory tone, "Pellets? Good God man, don't you know there's a climate change on?" But anti-slug pellets these days kill only slugs. They're organic. More organic in fact than most beer - the solution for killing them offered by the Animals Police.

Apart from Bob Flowerdew and my pacifist chum Alan, I don't know anyone who has a nice word to say about slugs. Not that it comes up in conversation that much - "D'yer know, I've never met a slug I liked" - but most folks agree they look monstrous, feel creepy and eat leaves that you really didn't want them to eat.

Slugs get a bad press partly because they're travellers rather than homeowners: stick a shell on its back, and horrid Mr Slug becomes garlic-soaked delicacy Monsieur Snail. But we shouldn't get all pc about them. They eat the green stuff that reacts to release oxygen, and they bugger up vegetable patches and rockeries. With nothing but slugs in the world, there'd be no air to breathe and nothing to eat. Slugs kill planets, right? Somewhere out there when we finally bodly go, there will be extinct planets that owe their demise to slugs. Slugicide is justified, OK?

There are lots of animals that Townies would see as excellent candidates for species protection, and possibly the Nobel Prize for sweetness. But the reputation is ill-deserved. Deer are a classic example. Deer are the Tony Blair of the animal kingdom: stupid grin with big ears and lots of 'I'm quite sweet really - now shut up while we invade Iraq and force you to have an ID card'. If you're trying to grow trees to repace all the leaves eaten by the bloody slugs, deer nibble the bark of - and rub their growing horns against - anything with a trunk. Except elephants of course, but that's not an issue down here. Africa has the elephants, Europe has the deer. Get real: deer kill trees. If there were only deer on the planet etc etc see earlier.

Even rabbits - and their renowned lettuce habit - feature in kids books and Disney movies and daft novels where they're given names like Thumper. But rabbits are vile Underclass. They breed like, well, rabbits, and then of course the men don't support the one-parent burrows because they're too busy eating my sodding lettuces and digging holes in the drive. And you know what they do having dug holes in our charming chemin? They shit in them. Nice. If there were only rabbits in the world, it'd be covered in shitholes, the stalks of salad plants, and rabbits.

Less popular are toads, although they don't do any damage at all to the environment. They eat flies and other bad stuff, and as far as early death is concerned they tend to be victim rather than predator: when the toads near us migrate, it is a sight to see - or rather it would be, but they do it at night. Which is how you wake up next morning to find forty-three squashed toads on the drive. Even then they're useful. They fill up the rabbit diggings a treat.

But that's the end of the good news about toads. Ever picked one up? They are severely slimey, horny and obese. You know that dinner party game when everyone's pissed and handing round mystery objects, and something is passed to you and you think 'Uurrggh - a toad'? Well in real life, they are much worse. And the downside of mass toad movements is that your migrating toad loses any sense of things being in the way and therefore to be avoided. Wells, tables, dogs, pools, cars, houses - they just keep on truckin' until the broad lava flow of wriggly brown reptile reaches its goal. And there's another thing: does anyone know what the goal is? I don't. Could be a pot of gold or the Big Match, might be a drive-in movie.

And they are big mothers, some of them. Eight inches by eight inches, flopping along like brown pizzas with wiggly legs. No wonder Kenneth Grahame made the villain in The Wind in the Willows a toad. Imagine how many flies you'd have to eat to get that big. It doesn't bear thinking about.

However, what toads do most is croak. About this time of year, it ceases to be a cartoon-croak and becomes like the sound of a million monkeys chattering with their mouths full of bananas. On and on it goes, all night, drowning out even the most extrovert cricket. By morning they're all hoarse, spraying their throats ready for another session the next evening. If there were just toads on the planet, you'd be deaf. Except you're not a toad, so the question is academic.

Grahame made Moley one of his heroes, but it's hard to figure out why. They are very solitary creatures, almost blind and with claws sharper than a Stanley knife. It's always puzzled me how they find a mate, being blind and solitary and all. They could cut themselves to ribbons if there was any passion involved in the eventual encounter. On the whole I'm glad it's difficult for them to reproduce, because they are the most anti-social mammals on Earth, without exception.

There is no point to moles, none whatsoever. They ruin lawns, eat roots, kill soil-aerating worms and refuse to go away. The sole legacy they leave behind is eight million slag heaps, and an underground maze that nobody ever visits - not even other moles. If moles ruled the world, there would be no grass, and one day the whole planet would collapse in on itself. Also nobody would be able to insure their homes because of the dangerous mole workings underneath.

So there you are, d'you see? A representative cross-section of the animal kingdom, and every one a damned nusisance. So busy are we castigating man, we give no thought at all to the destructive power of anything else. But the truth is - as I keep on saying - there's just too many of everything. The animals may have gone into Noah's Ark two by two*, but they certainly made up for lost time afterwards. And while this is especially true of us, the only difference is that we've got medicine and they haven't. Your mole gets a cut, and he's dead - incipient haemophilia. Your rabbit consorts with the wrong crowd, and he gets terminal mixamatosis. A toad crashes his silly car going beep-beep, and dies of his injuries. But not man: he goes to Casualty and - if he's under fifty-five - gets pumped full of intensive care and curative drugs.

There are two possible conclusions to draw from all of this: get rid of doctors and vets; or make birth control obligatory for all species. There are also two chances of that ever happening, and so I leave you with this essential advice: next time the neighbours' young Lolita starts coming on to you, think of all those slugs, rabbits, moles and deer killing your lettuces, lawns and trees. At our age, the urge for harmless homicide is far stronger than the other thing.

* For all those Seventh Day Fundamentalists, I'd just like to point out that had Noah get back from his spot of inclement weather with two of everything, life on Earth would be extinct. Once having established itself, an animal species needs a minimum number of members to survive. And the figure is a lot bigger than two.