/ 14 October 2005

Don’t shoot ’til you see the whites of …oh, what the hell

Culling, it seemed, was the only viable option. The pesky brutes didn’t react well to sterilisation, and relocating them was out of the question. No, wholesale slaughter it would have to be. They simply used up too much land — one really couldn’t expect to roam expansive territories nowadays — and besides they were hugely destructive to the environment.

“Plus,” said the panellist, his sun-bleached brows beetling over cheeks criss-crossed with duelling scars, “when they’re wounded they become murderous, and have to be shot anyway”.

Tuning into discussion late, and being in a ruminatively fascist mood, one had simply assumed they were discussing Native Americans and reservation casinos; but it soon emerged that the debate was about elephants, of all things. It was a severe disappointment, given that there are so many more interesting and exotic animals to recommend for culling. Great White sharks, for instance.

Indeed, this week a resident of Stellenbosch wrote an impassioned letter to the Cape Times, sealed it with his signet ring, wrapped it in a leather pouch, pointed the pack-donkey and its Khoisan rider at Cape Town, and sent them on their way with a hearty lick of the lash. The citizenry has a right, he exclaimed, to the recreational joys of the beach and sea: by treating people like so much simian dental-floss, sharks are denying us our God-given right to frolic in brine. Had his quill not split and the pig-fat candle not spluttered out, he might have groped towards a sentiment wildly progressive for a town snoozing eternally in the summer of 1948: sharks who truncate fun- seekers are being anti-democratic.

Perhaps a childhood misadventure in a farm dam had prejudiced him, a delicate exploratory piscine nibble on his unmentionables sending him screaming up into the heather. Perhaps he claims Afrikaner heritage, and therefore shares that race’s genetic distrust of anything that thrives in water and is immune to surround-sound emphysema and terminal nostalgia. Whatever the case, his demands were few and to the point: Great White sharks, he insisted, need to have a cap popped in their collective ass.

Of course, it wasn’t a surprising demand. Stellenbosch was, after all, the spiritual home and alma mater of another deep thinker on issues of cohabitation between species. Fortunately Dr Verwoerd was a Christian as well as a philosopher, and so culling — while no doubt briefly tantalising — was abandoned in favour of more humane practices such as throwing people out of windows.

It was, however, a more honest solution than that suggested by the elephant lobby, the limp-wristed gist of which was articulated by the moderator in an SABC television debate: “We need to find some sort of balance.”

It is the standard response of the opining classes where complex environmental issues are concerned, and richly ironic given that it comes from a demographic whose defining characteristic is the rejection of moderation and equilibrium. But it also contains a touching optimism in the face of overwhelming historical evidence. It implies that all we need to return to some pre-industrial pastoral idyll is a nip here and a tuck there. It honestly believes that the planet is fixable while we inhabit it; indeed, that we are the species that will fix it, by bringing back Balance. It’s Jedi conservation, resolutely waving instead of drowning, Love denying Lebensraum, and it denies that the only balance we’re going to be finding any time soon is on the slimy edges of overcrowded driftwood rafts, bits of burned churches lashed together with fibre-optic cables, shivering as we get flushed down the evolutionary crapper.

(What a pity that would be, to succumb as a species without ever having used our nukes properly. How sad to deny ourselves the ultimate technology for sealing the ultimate fate, instead winding up pinned face-down under some flotsam; one last disappointment for our ancient ancestors who so bravely held their watery breath and slithered up on to the beach for the first time, hoping that one day they’d grow handlebar moustaches and be able to shoot sharks from helicopters.)

So do we really want balance? Really? Balance is inhuman. It’s anti-democratic. Balance is for losers. Real life is us or them, and by God it’s going to be them. Elephants, sharks, Khoisan, Celts, Slavs, Jews: they’re swell little chaps and it’s going to be a bummer to see them croak, but it’s a damn sight better than the alternative. I mean balance is okay, but living in some shitty little solar-powered hovel, eating wormy vegetables and stringy chickens, watching the trees and the sky instead of the Saturday night e.tv porn? Next thing you’ll be suggesting we introduce ourselves to our neighbours or read a book.

And that’s just plain unbalanced. Sicko.