From http://www.cosmoetica.com/DSI8.htm :
DM: I was a child during World War Two and grew up viewing adult humans as rather disgusting - people whose main goal in life was to kill one another. Worse still, I spent the first part of World War Two watching my father suffering from wounds he had received in the First World War. I was fourteen when he finally died and at that age I decided, in my passionate, juvenile way, that all authorities, all governments, all religious leaders and all political leaders were the scum that floated to the top of society. I had to rebel, but I was a good little boy, well brought up by loving parents, and my rebellion could not be a destructive one - after all I was rebelling against mass violence and hatred, so my rebellion had to be of some other, more positive kind. I had two great interests, art and animals. My artistic rebellion took the form of turning my back on accepted, traditional art and associating myself instead with the Surrealists. The Surrealist Movement had itself started in the 1920s as a rebellion against the horrors of World War One, so it suited my mood perfectly. As a teenager I began painting with an obsessive fervour and, when I eventually exhibited my works, was thrilled to find that the authorities hated them.
My second rebellion saw me spending more and more time in the company of other - strictly non-human- animals. I became an animal-watcher, and longed to have a career as a zoologist. My family wanted me to become a doctor - a safe job- and were alarmed by my opposition to this career. To cut a long story short, I won my battle and did indeed become a zoologist, studying animal behaviour until, at the age of 38, I finally decided to turn my attention to the human animal - a remarkable species I had finally come to like. I wrote a book called The Naked Ape that looked at mankind as just another animal species and realized that, approaching human behaviour as a zoologist rather than as a psychologist or a sociologist, provided some intriguing new insights. I decided to take this approach further and since than have written a string of books about human beings, with occasional reversions to studies of other animals, especially dogs, cats and horses. My painting has continued, and it is a totally selfish pursuit. I paint only for myself, creating a private world of my own on my canvases. If other people like that world, I am delighted, but I make no concessions to other tastes or preferences. My writing, on the other hand, is always done with my readers in mind. I never write for my own amusement. I always try to put across an idea that I feel is important, in the most easily readable form I can manage. This has annoyed some of my academic colleagues, who feel that I am oversimplifying my subject, but I argue that at least my writings are widely read, while theirs stay firmly within the confines of their academic ivory towers. And I always work with one special rule in mind: simplification without distortion. This is, in fact, much harder that the usual self-indulgent academic writing.
I also carried my message - about how fascinating animal behaviour and human behaviour can be - to an even wider audience by making television programmes, and presented a total of about 700 programmes over a period of half a century. I have now stopped that work and I am devoting my final years to the three things I enjoy most; writing books, painting pictures and travelling the world. I have so far managed to visit 95 countries and I have a schoolboy ambition to make that 100 countries before I die.
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DM: When we first developed verbal language we were able to talk in the past, present and future tense. Other species only communicate in the present tense- so a dog, for example, has no idea that one day it will die. Once we were able to contemplate our personal future and realize that one day we would be dead, we had to protect ourselves from this terrible thought and so we conceived of an afterlife. And (to cut a very long story very short) in this way religion was born. We still fear death which is why, I suppose, religion still manages to prosper, even in a scientific age.
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DM: There are two Americas. One is the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, city world of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, bursting with innovation and lively intelligence, and the other is the redneck Bible-Belt world of the good ole boys, full of bigotry and backward-thinking nonsense. This is, of course, a gross over-simplification, but it helps to explain the many contradictions that come out of America today.
