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Wild Thing
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In an old Twilight Zone episode, an alien race arrives on earth professing their good intentions and sets about to cure the ills of mankind, such as hunger, energy shortages and nuclear proliferation. They leave behind a book that U.S. government cryptographers try to decode. They finally translate the title: To Serve Man. Soon earthlings are lining up for trips aboard their flying saucers back to their home planet. The chief cryptographer, Michael Chambers, is boarding a spacecraft himself when his assistant runs up after translating the rest of the volume. "Mr. Chambers,” she cries, “don't get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man, it's... it's a cookbook!" Too late, Chambers is whisked away to his doom. But he is surprisingly philosophical. “Sooner or later,” he says, “all of us will be on the menu... all of us."
We humans have grown so complacent about our place at the top of the food chain that we react with special horror to the prospect of winding up as someone else’s dinner. This may explain why this particular Twilight Zone episode remains so memorable after more than half a century. Perhaps our DNA is encoded with instinctual memories from small mammalian ancestors who had to scurry away from carnivorous dinosaurs. These days we are rarely confronted with the bald fact that we must kill in order to eat. Our animal protein arrives neatly sliced and wrapped in cellophane or paper before it is refrigerated and then cooked.
One Thanksgiving our little granddaughter, whose mom raised her as a vegetarian, looked out our dining room window and saw some wild turkeys strutting their stuff in the field behind our house. Then she looked disapprovingly at the big cooked turkey on our dining room table and accused us of having snatched one of the wild turkeys in back for our Thanksgiving dinner. We had to explain to her in so many words that, no, we didn’t kill one of those scrawny birds out back; we went to the supermarket and bought a monster turkey (perhaps bulked up on steroids). Someone else had killed that bird, stripped off its feathers, scooped out its innards and swathed it in plastic shrink-wrap so we could bring it home and serve it to our family to give thanks for all the other animal carcasses we consumed during the year.
This is not, of course, how we normally think about life atop the food chain. We like to maintain a polite distance from our carnivorous behavior. Leave it to my little granddaughter to lay bare the facts, even if she garbled them a bit. For kids, animals are more friend than food. They keep stuffed animals, name them and talk to them. Children’s storybooks are often about talking animals. Some of my favorites as a kid were the Dr. Dolittle books, which featured a veterinarian who learned animal languages from his parrot, Polynesia, in order to better serve his patients. Of course, once you engage in conversations with these furry or feathered creatures, you can’t help but humanize them. It is one thing to slaughter dumb animals for food and quite another to kill and eat your friends.
The writer Tobias Wolff encountered cultural differences over which animals were considered friend and which food during a tour of duty as a Special Forces officer during the Vietnam War. He was attached to a South Vietnamese division stationed along the Mekong River in the mid-1960s. In one telling episode recounted in his memoir In Pharaoh’s Army, Wolff rescued a puppy from a South Vietnamese soldier who was preparing to cook it for supper. He named the animal Canh Cho (“dog stew”), which he was horrified to discover is exactly how the puppy wound up when his hosts threw him a going-away banquet at the end of his yearlong hitch.
Judging by what I see on Facebook, people are endlessly fascinated by cuddly creatures – and they make no real distinction between wild animals and household pets. Videos of the lion-shall-lie-down-with-the-lamb variety are particular favorites, usually featuring animals too young to realize they are natural predators and prey. As for biblical prophecies that carnivorous beasts will one day rise above their blood-thirsty instincts, the Christian writer C.S. Lewis once quipped, “‘If the earthly lion could read the prophecy of that day when he shall eat hay like an ox, he would regard it as a description not of heaven, but of hell.”
On further examination, we have scant reason for complacency when we contemplate our place in the food chain. Barring the arrival of aliens, there is little immediate prospect that we will be served up for someone else’s dinner. Nor, outside a game preserve, do we have much cause to fear being devoured by a lion or other ferocious beast. But there are other creatures whose job it is to clean up after the carcasses we leave strewn about, not the least our own. What can be lowlier than worms or bacteria? And yet they would be justified in scoffing at our pretensions about our place atop the food chain. The cryptographer on The Twilight Zone had good reason to be philosophical. Sooner or later we do all wind up on the menu.
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