I small but significant ways, some of us are getting better at how we regard and treat other creatures. Better for us and a lot better for them. Take our gardens for a start. Until recently, during spring and summer, gardeners would relentlessly patrol from dawn to dusk with toxic sprays and poisonous potions, ready to slaughter virtually anything that crawled, slithered, fluttered or flew within range of their precious flowers or fruit and veg. Now, largely thanks to television gardeners such as national treasure Monty Don, we are more receptive to visitors to our green patches. Even welcoming – we build bug hotels, stack log piles, hang bird feeders, and provide safe pathways for pond life. We’ve realised, at least many have, that it makes sense to share, not simply because we’ve suddenly learned to love all those bugs and mini beasts but because we’ve finally realised that we need them if the planet is to survive. We’re even more considerate to creatures dwelling under the ground, adopting “no-dig” gardening that focuses on protecting the life in the soil. Worms are allowed to wriggle and burrow and microscopic insects to contentedly crawl. And we’ve changed approach inside our homes too, with many now more amenable to those animal cohabiters of our living spaces. We may not hail that spider sheltering in a quiet corner as a friend, but we recognise its right to exist and go about its business. So we look the other way, hoping it will swiftly shift to some other out-of-sight location. Live and let live, eh?

At home, then, many of us, prompted by gentle celebrity reminders, are making serious efforts at improvement. And we have our pets, of course, which we mostly love, sentimentally and unashamedly. But keeping pets raises issues of its own. Is it animal love, or animal enslavement of a once wild species? We love donkeys; many of us would rescue ill-treated donkeys if only we had a field going spare. We love elephants and lions and polar bears, and all those pretty, or magnificent, or simply adorable animals that grace calendars or make brilliant screen saver shots for our phones. But then there is that multitude of creatures that at best we treat with total indifference, and at worst – well, frankly my dears – we don’t give a damn about. Species are disappearing from our planet every day and we don’t care enough to make that further effort at improvement. It may be that those vanishing species are unknown to us or live in a part of the world not relevant to us. Or so we think – if we think about it at all. It’s a short-sighted attitude. Some of us will remember, as children, regularly seeing slow worms, and grass snakes. Neither of those are extinct in the UK, but they teeter on the edge, like numerous other species. So, do we care? Or is it a fact that for some species, we live and let die?