Animals Fight Back

We are not superior to animals.

COVID-19 has exposed us. We do not have the capacity to adapt like animals. They’ve done relatively well considering that they lost their habitat to money.

We needed the land for civilization: houses for masters and townships for economic slaves; factories that pollute the air we breathe leading to new diseases like COVID-19; railways to transport Africans to mines and cities to dig gold and platinum that will end up in London England and other G-7 countries; building mega factories on the banks of rivers so that we can throw industrial waste into the water and churches for Jesus, who came with the colonizer’s gun.

We are superior than animals because we have power to contain them, keep them in the zoo and game parks. We even have the right to kill them if they have more babies. I was shocked when I first learned that zoos kill ‘surplus’ animals and unwanted pregnancies. They should not be in captivity in the first place.

We contain animals when they are an obstacle to development. Despite all that, they have survived. Can we? COVID-19 is making a mockery of money. We killed the buffalo and other animals because we need the land to make money.

It was going to take care of everything. We even made movies to demonstrate what money can buy: smoking, bars in the house, automobiles, mansions in the Caribbean and White House residence.

That same money cannot save us from COVID-19 because we don’t know what it is. What we know is that there’s something in the air, or something missing from the air. We cannot write a cheque to get rid of it. 

We voted out politicians who said climate change is real. They were an obstacle to development. Climate change does not affect the bottom line. It has nothing to do with us, sipping cappuccino while watching our shares in the stock exchange rise. It is very remote, ice melting somewhere in Canada, leaving polar bears homeless. Who cares?

What our superiority over animals should do right now is find out why the air is stale. It’s not even stale. It is rotten. It resulted in COVID-19. That is why we are masked to the hilt.  

Solution? Put ‘development’ on hold, until the air is fumigated, but is that possible? Nature had its way of healing scars on the land, but we rejected it as ‘under-development’?

Animals have the cure for COVID-19. They will be infected at some stage and they will descend upon the condos and business districts for retribution. Unfortunately, we will kill them, the same way we shoot a lion that took the life of a human being.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.