“Is he mentally ill?” asked Fox-News anchor Julie Banderas. She
was quizzing an “expert” about the black bear that attacked campers
in Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest earlier this year. The
animal killed a six-year-old girl and mauled her mother and
brother. To listen to Banderas and her expert, the bear acted out
of character. Looking to do what his kind usually do — have a
Teddy Bear’s Picnic — he was seized by an illogical urge to rip
into flesh with his pointy teeth and sharp claws. Naturally,
Banderas reached for the therapeutic idiom to divine Teddy’s
terrible conduct.
When crocodiles devoured a number of young Floridian women back
in May, naturalist Maria Thomson was also ready with a
cross-species adaptation of liberal root-causes thinking. “The
alligator isn’t the problem. It’s humans,” she snipped. “We’re
pushing them to the limit.” Time magazine opted to
describe the Florida feeding frenzy as “a ghastly coincidence.”
That’s right: a prehistoric killing machine attacks easy prey —
humans — and the “experts” blame its victims (or their remains),
while assuring the potential prey that the beast’s behavior is
abnormal. “Every so often, [animals] push back.” After all, they
are being forced “to share territory that humans [mistakenly,
obviously] consider their own,” Time vaporized.
Roald Dahl’s children’s story, “The Enormous Crocodile,” is an
infinitely better Guide For the Perplexed than the croc experts.
Ditto Steven Spielberg’s magnificent thriller Jaws with
respect to sharks. When two teens were attacked last year in the
Florida Panhandle by these killer critters, shark seers treated us
to the same brand of anthropomorphism. They insisted that, if
presented with a menu, sharks will choose fish over folks. (“Too
tough and chewy,” confirmed a spokesfish for the shark
community.)
Dare I say that the alleged culinary preferences of sharks are
because there are more fish in the sea than people? If the oceans
were peopled more plentifully, sharks would adapt their refined
taste buds to human flesh in a flash. A witness — a brave surfer
who paddled to the rescue — confirmed that Sharky didn’t seem
remotely put off, and was doing what powerful, flesh-eating animals
with sharp teeth do: tucking in.
Apparently, the bears and the sharks haven’t had the benefit of
liberal expert propaganda. Neither has the robust cougar
population. The managerial state and its wildlife emissaries may be
responsible for breeding out healthy human habits —
self-preservation — but they’ve failed to achieve similar results
with the wild animal population, now out of control. The proverbial
wolf doesn’t yet dwell with the lamb nor the leopard lie down with
the kid.
While Western man works to rid himself of the most basic ethical
instincts, like defending his kinfolk, animals remain true to their
nature. Wild beasts intuit that their teeth and talons are meant
for tearing flesh — any flesh, the easier the better. It makes
perfect animal sense to attack a thing that is docile, slow, and
passive, like the not-so sapient Homo sapiens.
It has been decades since animals were aggressively repelled
from human habitat, and they now brazenly make themselves at home
in manicured suburbs. It used to be that men killed and hunted
encroaching creatures. Thanks to decades of cultural and legal
emasculation, they no longer have the urge or license to protect
home and hearth. Instead, they robotically intone the Sierra Club’s
subliminal propaganda: animals are the true homesteaders of the
planet.
The handful of honest experts left admits that attacks are up
because politically correct policies have bred fearless critters.
The Pavlovian response to aversive treatment has been bred out of
the wild animal population. Mary Zeiss Stange, author of Woman
the Hunter, says that hunting ultimately has less to do with
killing than with instilling fear in animals that have placed us on
their menu. If animal rights activists possessed a dog’s smarts,
they’d understand the perils of such a program, for an unafraid
animal is a dangerous animal; an unafraid human an endangered
fool.
And so, the casualties of animal attacks are shrugged off. The
only lessons learned, usually elicited on Oprah or Larry King, are
a victim’s lessons of survival: plaudits to you for living to tell
how you lost half your face to a puma. What a hero you are for
curling up in the fetal position and pretending to be a porcupine!
You punched Ursus Americanus with your powder puff?! You go girl! A
real man who greets a bear on the balcony, guns blazing, is
investigated. Did he Mirandize the bear? Was it a justified
“homicide”?
This wildlife worship is thoroughly antediluvian, down to its
human sacrifice component. Human beings should care for and be kind
to animals. That’s ethical (if not compulsory). But people’s safety
and survival must always trump that of animals. A society that
reverses this ethical order is philosophically primitive, base, and
ultimately immoral.
“Arm yourself with knowledge when you go out into the
wilderness,” advised one guru, following yet another perennial,
ritual, human sacrifice to the Goddess Gaia. Wrong: apply your
knowledge and arm yourself!
Ilana Mercer is a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com and
the Free-Market News Network.
