OUR PLACE – THE SUPER PREDATOR

There is something different about walking in the wilderness. In a vehicle you are an observer. On foot you are a participant. You assume the role that your ancestors played for more than a hundred thousand years. You become the super predator, the only bipedal mammal walking the earth. You are the only animal capable of sustained planning and constant adaptation to circumstance. You have arrived where it all began, on the savannahs of Africa, where man learnt to manipulate his environment and became the most ‘successful’ species the world has known.

Yet when you step from your super manipulated, super comfortable environment onto the raw African earth it is difficult to shake the notion of inadequacy. You have so successfully assimilated comforts that you have all but forgotten how you came to live where you do. You feel far less the predator than the prey. You realise that hours in the gym have done nothing to change the fact that, compared with the creatures around you, you are woefully physically inadequate. So slow, so stiff and so feeble that it becomes impossible to imagine survival in such a place.

But you forget the weapon that made you what you are today. You forget the reason it took you more than sixteen years to become independent instead of a few months. Your brain is bigger and more useful than any other in existence and it is for this reason, and this reason alone, that animals are afraid, no, terrified of you. Since you were able to throw stones and fashion rudimentary spears, you have been hunting, chasing and stealing food and water. You have ambushed, stalked, stabbed, trapped and hounded the animals of these plains since prehistory. You may have forgotten, but they remember. It is because of this that you are able to walk on this ancient land in careful confidence. If you respect the animals, if you do not threaten them they will leave you alone. In most cases they will flee from you with a haste that defies logic. A 1400Kg giraffe starts at the mere sight of you fifty metres away. He will not let you approach to within thirty metres before taking flight. Impala, zebra, wildebeest, warthog and even diminutive steenbok, so fleet footed that they make the fastest hundred metre sprinter look asleep, alarm call and hurtle away when you cross the thirty metre flight line.

Viciously portrayed buffalo bulls will just watch you walk by if they perceive no threat from your presence. Leopards will quietly sink into the grass unobserved, not to stalk but to hide as you pass. An elephant bull may turn to face you, his ears out wide, throwing dust in the air menacingly but should you choose to bypass him, he will most likely not follow. It is not menace behind his threat. His perceived aggression is a manifestation of fear not anger.

We need to remember our place and how we have come to dominate the world. Instead of feeling smug about it we should feel humbled by it. Africa is so important for people to visit. It is through recognition of our development and history that our souls do indeed re-awake from the slumber of ignorance into the realisation of our place and the responsibility that comes with  it. We are the only species that has responsibility written into the fabric of our niche. We would do well to embrace it.