Questionable Monkey

Nature created a world full of monsters,

consummate bad-asses,

beautiful killing machines.

Bears the size of bungalows

Cats the size of horses
With canines the size of butcher knives

And you, questionable monkey,

You weak hairless fangless ape

you surprisingly turned out to be

the biggest monster of all of them.

Today I spent a little time looking into the eyes of big cats in pictures, and it doesn't take much to imagine the pure horror one would feel to be at the mercy of one. It is a horror that goes deep in our collective unconscious, even more than the subconscious fear of snakes that some people have. Hungry eyes in the forest, in the darkness. And although getting ripped apart by a carnivore might be a relatively quick death, it would be a nightmare death also. It's instinctive to humans, I think, this fear of big carnivores. To this day, as endangered as tigers are, there are still places where they hunt humans as prey. Even healthy normal tigers hunt humans in the Sundarbans mangrove forests in Bangladesh. Leopards very rarely hunt humans, but when they do they are often considered more menacing because cleverer and more subtle. You open a door to a shed, bam, there's a leopard hiding and he grabs you by the neck and runs off with you. Makes a snack of your liver on some nice sunny tree branch somewhere, smiling a leopard's red smile. 

The point is, that while we are unquestionably the most dangerous creature on Earth, buried in our legacy is life as a prey animal. Apes don't generally hunt, monkeys don't generally hunt, they are hunted. True, we've been hunting for a million years or more, but somewhere in some primitive part of our brains, we are the monkey living in fear of the leopard. Somewhere in the backs of our brains is the primitive hominid living in fear of a world where true monsters, genuinely horrific killing machines, are all around. Many of these we have now driven extinct, and some today are on the edge. Tigers are very much on the edge of extinction. Lions aren't doing great. Cheetahs, near the edge. Pumas, not doing very well. Grizzly bears, polar bears, not doing so well. Wolves are coming back from the edge. Some leopard subspecies are endangered, though generally leopards are doing better than their bigger cat cousins.

We have to understand this legacy to understand ourselves. Human-caused mass extinction isn't a new thing, it's been going around for as long as there have been humans with weapons. And we did genuinely evolve in a world full of often beautiful but legitimately horrific monsters. Cave lions, saber-tooths, dog-bears, giant carnivorous monitor lizards. And here we were, these weak hairless weak-toothed clawless things. Who happened to be the only creatures on Earth who could make projectile weapons that kill at a distance. Somewhere in the rearmost mind of the business executive that orders the destruction of a forest for lumber or oil sands, is the primitive hominid who fears the monsters of Nature. Hunter-gatherers feared aspects of Nature too and controlled that fear, but when people started farming and civilizing and building cities, they imagined a world in which those real or imagined enemies could be excluded, boxed out, driven away, vanquished. Our war with nature isn't of recent vintage though. We've been at war for a long time, we caused the extinction of species long before there were cities. We are a weak scared monkey that had been given the evolutionary equivalent of nuclear weapons: our brains, and the tools and weapons it can build. Still inside us though is that weak scared monkey. So we lash out a lot, out of fear.

I think that twenty thousand years ago, if Nature could pass a verdict on us, she would say that we were a really surprising organism, really really successful, and congratulations for a seemingly improbable survival. We thrived in sometimes very adverse conditions. Consummately adaptable, ruthless, and clever. A good monster. Now however it would be more like, enough's enough, knock it the hell off. But we have to understand that we are a monster that evolved on a planet full of monsters, and that unlike almost all of them, we evolved from prey animals not predators. Which means we are the most dangerous kind of monsters: scared ones. 

For most of us, tigers won't come in the night to eat us. But they still live in us, and still mold our outlook. People are still scared of nature all the time, sometimes I am too. Sometimes concern is called for too. Don't go swimming with the alligators, don't feed the polar bears. One dude got his hand nommed off for doing that actually, he was drunk and passed out in a zoo, woke up in the early hours and tried to feed a polar bear a cookie. They never got the hand back. Or the cookie, I guess. 

It's time to call the war on Nature. To the extent that we could ever "win," we won. Congrats. Now our "winning" threatens ourselves too, and more than just our survival. Whatever our mixed relationship with Nature, Nature is a part of us. We are Nature too, just another one of the monsters in the zoo. Even if we could survive on some totally wasted landscape, living like astronauts on our own planet, we will have lost things, a part of ourselves, we can't replace. We are more than just the scared apes with superweapons, repressing the natural with guns and chemicals and bulldozers and chainsaws. More than a monkey with a gun. We are tigers our own selves, and just as threatened. If we lose nature, we lose the only part of us that was really worth keeping. What would be left, would be more machine than human. A real monster, such as tigers never were.