Free The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling Page B

wildlife and slave trades of the nineteenth century left scars that have yet to heal. In a sense, Hagenbeck was ahead of his time. Writing of circus animals, he observed, ‘it is impossible to achieve by ill-treatment one-hundredth part of what can be done by humane and intelligent methods’. It could as easily have been a stricture on the treatment of children in the London of Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, or on the Europe of Hitler and Stalin. In searching for the golden mole, I feel, I am connecting with a thread of what ought to be common humanity.
    On that front, there are two new points of interest. First, my philosophical friend Oliver Riviere has sent me a picture of a ‘golden mole’ that he has trapped in his English garden. It is undoubtedly golden, it is undoubtedly a mole, and it is a puzzle. The European mole, Talpa europaea , is typically dark slate in colour, but this one is like fine-cut orange marmalade. How to explain? I assume it’s an albino.
    More to the point, passing through London I go to look at the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum. Faded in their cabinets, they are kept now more as historical curiosities than the unique specimens they were when Selous and his contemporaries first took aim at them. A short-beaked echidna shares its case with a duck-billed platypus. There are anteaters and armadillos, a vampire bat, a flying lemur, a pangolin and a hyena. The big cats – cheetah, lion, tiger, jaguar, snow leopard – have faded over time into gaunt, sepia-tinted memories ofthemselves. Apologetic notices explain that the museum no longer collects skins for taxidermy. But never mind. Here among all the giants and curiosities of the jungle, unregarded and unphotographed by anyone but me, is an unprepossessing scrap of sand-coloured fur. The giant golden mole, Chrysospalax trevelyani , looks nothing like itself. It is tail-less, coarsely furred rather than conventionally moleskinned, with no ears, eyes or visible feet. The process of taxidermy has left it with an improbably shiny, joke-shop nose. Overall it looks more like a novelty slipper than anything that might once have had breath in its lungs. The word ‘giant’ is not misplaced. C. trevelyani is roughly twice the size of other species, including the Somali. The museum label explains that golden moles eat worms and other soil-dwelling animals. They are active in the rainy season but may become dormant during the dry or cold season. Looking it up afterwards, I find that the giant golden mole was first described by the museum’s newly appointed keeper of zoology, Albert Günther, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1875: ‘Mr Herbert Trevelyan has presented to the Trustees of the British Museum the skin of a new species of Chrysochloris which he distinguished by its gigantic size . . . He obtained it from a Kaffir who accompanied a shooting-party in the Pirie Forest near King William’s town (British Caffraria), and believes that it must be very scarce or local, as none of his companions had ever seen another specimen. Unfortunately the skull has not been preserved; otherwise the skin is in a most perfect condition. I name this species after its discoverer . . .’
    He reported that Calcochloris trevelyani (since renamed Chrysospalax trevelyani ) was nine and a half inches long. ‘The colour and quality of the fur reminds one of an Otter; it is moderately long, rather stiff, and of a deep chocolate browncolour, with a dense whitish under-fur. Margin of the lips white. On the abdomen the fur is less dense and shorter; and patches of the whitish under-fur are visible in the posterior parts of the abdomen. Muffle flat, projecting as in the other species, but comparatively narrower. Claws whitish; the inner and outer of the fore foot very conspicuous. The third twice as strong as the second. No trace of an opening for the eye or ears, or of the tail can be