Reddest

“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…”  Alfred Lord Tennyson

It is just possible that the meek might inherit the earth, but only if they don’t get eaten by something considerably less submissive first.  The lion and the zebra might well lie down together, but only one of them will be putting a bib on.  Will herbivores inherit the earth?  Clearly not as long as it is filled with bigger carnivores.  All that the average herbivore inherits is a morosely fatalistic view of life and a nagging mistrust of anything that moves quicker than it does.  It is not easy to feel comfortable in the company of anything that has sharp teeth, powerful jaws and claws that are almost certainly not used for flossing, especially when your best form of defence is to invite them to share a carrot.  Might is always right – it is, after all, invariably the bigger beast that gets the biggest apple.

Now, I don’t want you to think for one second that I assume that this is ‘wrong’: it might not be the way I would have planned it, but so little is.  It is nature.  It is how the world works.  It is the circle of life, without the annoying singing lions.  At its simplest, it works like this: beetles eat shit (I don’t mind this: most of them are ugly and I seldom have to smell their breath); birds and lizards eat beetles; small carnivores (let us say polecats, weasels and cats) eat birds and lizards; medium sized carnivores (dogs, wolves and eagles) eat the small, and large (bears, lions, psychopathic pandas) eat the medium.  All of them then shit, and the circle is complete.  Humans, being omnivores, will eat any old shite as long as it comes in a bun with pickle and ketchup.  The circle does, of course, have some evolutionary dead ends such as vampire bats, tapeworms and Vladimir Putin as well as some creatures that only a lunatic would have deliberately put here: mosquitoes, wasps, and cockroaches all point to the fact that even God must have taken his eye off the ball every now and then, but most of the time it works.  If you want to eat veg and survive, your best defence is to be big and short-tempered.

So all of nature is, to some extent, red – either in possession, or as victim of tooth and claw.  Blood flows right through ‘the circle’ and the earth’s fauna is split into two schools: those that spill it and those that consume it.  It is what it is – morals do not come into it: momma polar bear has to feed the cubs.  The seal, after all, does not show too much compassion for the fish it eats, nor the fish for the plankton.  I’m not at all sure what plankton eat, but my money is on the same thing as the beetles.

Life, then, is red, but as with all things there has to be a reddest.  Is it the lion, the polar bear (the only carnivore, I believe, that will actively stalk human prey) the great white shark?  Something with lots of big, sharp teeth surely.  Well, I’m not so sure.  You see, I’ve just been reading about Praying Mantises, and I’ve decided that if they are part of ‘the circle of life’ then I’d really quite like to get off it.  Mrs Mantis is surely the reddest creature of all.  You see, Mr Mantis is biologically programmed (either that, or he has taken some particularly bad dating advice) to mate with Mrs Mantis.  Mrs Mantis is biologically programmed to bite his head off when he does so, in the knowledge that without his head he can continue to mate – in fact he is actually better at it – and she won’t have to endure any of that soppy pillow-talk afterwards.  When the evening’s pastime has finished, she eats him and is thus fortified for bringing up babies.  He, for his part, realises that he has laid down his life in order to pass on his genes (although actually, of course, he doesn’t: this isn’t Disney – he has no brain – certainly not now he doesn’t) and at least he won’t have to share in the nappy changing duties or listen to Mrs Mantis constantly harping on about the loss of body tone…

She is surely the reddest creature of all and, should Buddhists be right about our destiny, I think I would choose the life of a beetle over that of a male mantis.  You know where you are with shit.