Two Hardskins Don’t Kiss

Nothing about survival is gentle. Hunger, competition, danger, loss, death: they are all part of the deal. The caiman isn’t cruel for killing the catfish. It’s hungry.

We tend to judge wildlife by rules that make sense in human society. Cruelty, when we talk about people, implies a choice to cause pain, an intention behind the act, sometimes even pleasure in it. We then put the same label on an animal, as if it had signed on to the same moral code.

Maybe we learned to see the world through stories that always give us someone to root for. There’s a hero, a villain, a victim. Hollywood and prime-time television taught us to pick a side and wait for the good guy to win. The wild doesn’t work that way. The catfish isn’t innocent. The caiman isn’t evil. One gets a meal. The other becomes one.

And we’ve gotten very good at keeping the things that sustain us out of sight. We work, earn a living, walk into a supermarket, and find food washed, wrapped, labeled, and ready to take home. Everything that had to happen before that package reached the shelf has been stripped away. We leave the killing to someone else and enjoy the comforting distance between what we eat and what it took to get there.

That distance disappears in this photograph. That’s what makes it hard to look at. The caiman isn’t doing anything extraordinary. It is simply eating. But here, there is no packaging to hide behind, no refrigerated display case, no convenient story telling us whom we should feel sorry for.

The wild doesn’t owe us a softer version of itself. Life goes on. Every species finds its way to survive. The catfish became food. The caiman will hunt again. And we will keep finding ways to look away from the part of the story we would rather not see.