Monsters are the mainstay of fairy tales. They bring delicious fear to generations, reminding you of the evil that lurks in the dark and how in the end, good triumphs. Monsters, however, walk among us in broad daylight, too, with convivial smiles and cheerful greetings, hiding the deviant darkness in their hearts. All crimes are not just about sex and money. Last week, two freaks made headlines. One is a medical student who flung a dog off a terrace in a video that went viral. Another is a hausfrau who smashed the heads of six puppies for being born in front of her gate. Both are avatars of the casual cruelty that demonstrates the power of ordinary men over animals that cannot hit back.
There is no being in existence crueller than man, and none more helpless to face him than other living beings that inhabit the sky, the earth and its waters. Men kill for fun, entertainment, sport or out of sheer boredom. On July 3, 1844, a Scandinavian hunter named Sigurður Ísleifsson killed the world’s last pair of Great auks. Meanwhile, his partner Ketill Ketilsson destroyed their egg with his boot, thus dispatching the gentle birds to the lost horizon of extinction.
Ísleifsson and Ketilsson were mindless brutes, who enjoyed killing for its own sake. The primeval war between man and beast, however, waged since prehistory, is about survival. As the first settlements came up and grew, farming began and commerce flourished over the centuries. Advancing populations wiped out species in their path with little regret. History and myth merge in the narrative of this ruthless march. In cave paintings, hunter and beast are depicted in an elegant dance of death. Heracles killed beasts in his victorious quest. Hemingway glorified bullfights as the triumph of machismo. Francis Macomber discovered his true self at the claws of a lion. The hunting of Moby Dick by Captain Ahab, a “grand, ungodly, god-like man” (who) “has his humanities”, is a Biblical romance of the pursuit of something primordial, which death redeems. Humankind’s sense of superiority is more Fata Morgana than real civilisation. Man has Mozart and mozarella, Tagore and Tom Hanks, Picasso and Prince, comfit and computers. What does the lion have except its fetid roar?
In India, big game hunting almost extinguished the Asiatic lion and Bengal tiger. The Great Indian Bustard, Waynad Mahseer and Indian elephant stare at a similar fate. Herds of American bison, which roamed the grasslands of North America in the 1800s, were slaughtered by holiday hunters from the safety of railway carriages. Many species of sharks, rays, dolphins, whales, tuna fish, salmon and turtles face extinction from overfishing. The grim war of endurance has given way to killing for fun or profit. Powdered rhino horns and tiger testicles are sold on the black market as elixirs. Nilgai are culled. So could be elephants, soon. More harm, however, has been done to the ecosystem by the clearing of forests and agricultural land deals by the real estate mafia and politicians.
But both man and beast are stakeholders in evolution. The banal barbarism of men questions how evolved humanity really is, in the face of industrial greed and terrorist Armageddon. Nature wins in the end. There will be no fairy tales left, then. Only the memory of monsters.
ravi shankar ravi@newindianexpress.com