Since the famous mid-20th century experiments on “operant conditioning” by BF Skinner, people have been tempted to describe modern humans as a “rats in cages”, forever pressing levers for tiny pellets of pleasure. Before that, however, the dominant metaphor involved a different rodent. In the 19th century, caged squirrels were popular pets, getting their exercise from running on wheels. “The tendency of the entire national energy,” John Ruskin wrote, “is to approximate more and more the state of a squirrel in a cage.”
The Victorians, indeed, were initially just as fond of the grey squirrel as of the indigenous red. American grey squirrels were first brought to Britain in 1876 by a Victorian banker called Thomas V Brocklehurst, and soon became a fashionable import. But by 1912 they had become the dominant squirrel in Regent’s Park, London, and so began the long backlash, which rumbles on to this day. As Peter Coates’s splendidly rich book demonstrates in deep cultural detail, the long “squirrel wars” of 20th-century Britain are a microcosm of wider arguments about biological belonging and what he nicely terms “the emotional ecology of home”.
