Anyone Feel Peckish?

I was always really puzzled by the 'food chain' as a child. I was plagued by constant fears that I would one day get eaten by some weird, dripping-toothed monster or something worse – which was a somewhat ridiculous notion to have entertained really, given that the only thing bigger than a child in our neighbourhood was a Shetland Pony. Mind you, those Shetland Ponies can be vicious creatures when angered – we once heard of one that limbo-danced under a wrought-iron gate and snatched a harmless guinea pig from its cage (but that's another story).

Anyway, back to the food chain. Whenever I would wake in the night, screaming, shouting with terror that a monster was about to eat me, my father would come stumbling into the room and calm me down by carefully explaining that it couldn't possibly happen. "You see," he would say, "we are humans. And humans are at the top of the food chain. Nothing eats us."

And so, in my childish imagination, I envisaged this (quite literal) chain of creatures all lined up together, from the little itsy-bitsy fleas and spiders, through the frogs and the lizards, on to the birds and the cats, up to the jackals and the hyenas, and on to the lions and the polar bears – all politely arranging themselves in order of size and priority, before allowing themselves to be eaten by the next creature in line. It never quite made sense though – nothing was quite that well-ordered; nothing quite so predictable. Let's face it – a snake might eat a rabbit that was not only nearly the same size as itself, but whose diet did not comprise of hamsters for example, or similar smaller rodents, but of lettuce. So I could see that there were certain points at which the food chain became broken. It was a puzzle indeed.

And take the elephant. Elephants are pretty big animals - there's no getting away from it – so in theory they should eat anything that is smaller than themselves (which oddly enough includes humans), and yet all they grasp with their frighteningly dextrous long trunks is clumps of grass and leaves. And here's another thing – if my father was right and we are at the "top of the food chain", then shouldn't we eat elephants too? But that thought is ridiculous, isn't it?

Well indeed, dear reader, ridiculous that thought should remain. Yet it does not. For today, eating elephants is exactly what the blighted and ravaged peoples of Zimbabwe are doing. Crazed with desperate hunger by the policies of that insane and brutal dictator Mugabe, they have resorted to snatching the only food resource that seems available to them – Zimbabwe's glorious wildlife. In the dead of night they are slipping unseen into the bush and are slaughtering zebra, antelopes, buffalos - and yes, even elephants – in a wretched bid to avoid starvation. It's an unthinkable decline of the human spirit – a once beautiful and proud nation of noble and patient people, brought to its lowest point by one man's callous and cruel megalomania.

Perhaps my father was wrong – perhaps it is possible that a human being can be eaten. But the monster isn't some scale-jawed ogre lurking in the night. This monster cannot even be seen, even in daylight – it is merely the blackness and evil that lurks in the heart of one octogenarian egoist whose thirst for power is greater than his ability to strive – as he once claimed to do – for simple dignity for his people. The whole situation is hideous.