Notebook: Chloe Dalton

It's become a bit of a commonplace in contemporary natural history memoirs that the subject can't only be the natural world; there has to be some kind of personal dysfunction that can be healed or at least moderated at the same time. This is true even in the very good ones, like H is for Hawk, where Helen Macdonald describes her depression and grief as well as her goshawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is about out-of-control alcoholism as much as it is about the wildlife of Orkney. By comparison, the author of Raising Hare seems fairly stable. Chloe Dalton has been a longtime foreign policy advisor to British politicians (mostly to Tories, apparently) and has spent much of her life abroad, but she doesn't tell us much about herself, her romantic life, or her choice of substances.

If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do at a few hours' notice. I avoided fixed plans that would remove the flexibility to take a bag and go, and what I missed of holidays and family occasions I believed I gained in novel, unrepeatable experiences and exposure to parts of the world I might otherwise never have seen: glimpses of Bamako, Baghdad, Kabul, Algiers, Damascus, Ulaanbaatar, Tallinn, Sarajevo and Siem Reap.

The precipitating factor in her book is the COVID pandemic, which grounds her, exiles her from her urban rounds, and confines her to a converted barn somewhere in the countryside that she has been slowly restoring. She finds a leveret — a baby hare — that has apparently been abandoned or orphaned, and decides to take it in, although no one seems to have much information about how to foster a leveret or even about whether it can be done at all. Though she feeds it with a pipette, she refuses to regard it as a pet and never names it. Surprisingly, the animal survives and soon makes itself at home. Eventually allowed to come and go at will, it wanders the nearby garden and fields, bears several litters of young (we — and Dalton — only then learn that it's a female), but still likes to come in and lie by the fireside. Apparently hares are notably clean and instinctively house-trained, and the greatest damage it does is to chew through some computer cables.

I see lots of rabbits in my perambulations, but my only experience of hares — except, perhaps, in a zoo — was during a bus ride one spring through the Berkshire Downs, where I witnessed from a distance the sparring and dancing of their mating season that gave rise to the expression "mad as a March hare." Anyone writing about hares is quick to point out that they aren't rabbits, and are very distinct in form and behavior. Oddly, the staff at the Library of Congress doesn't seem to have gotten the message. Here is the CIP (Cataloging in Publication) subject data from the copyright page of the Vintage Books edition:

Subjects: LCSH: European rabbit—Great Britain—Popular works. | European rabbit—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Behavior—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Infancy—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | Human-animal relationships—Popular works. | Dalton, Chloe.

I've been somewhat skeptical about attempts to cross the human-wildlife divide (see earlier post), but Dalton's book effectively makes the case that the divide isn't necessarily absolute, if one respects the fundamental nature of the animal in question. She doesn't domesticate the hare (it can't be done), and only partially "tames" it, but it accepts and values her presence and, perhaps of equal importance, re-centers her perspective on the relationship between human beings and the other inhabitants of the planet.