Two
images from last week are stuck in my mind. Both involve cats trapped in
crowds. One was a moving image, the other, still, but both revealed something about
the hostility of such gatherings.
The short film, posted on Facebook, was about the
fate of a lioness trapped upon a small rock, surrounded by a multitude of very
angry Cape buffalo. The film did not show how the lithe feline came to that
predicament. It just concentrated upon the herd mentality of the buffalo as
they closed in for the kill. The lioness was tossed around like a rag doll; and
stomped upon by half a ton each worth of milling hooves. Her defiant roars and
snarls were barely audible above the thunderous lowing of the bunched up bovines,
their hoof stampings, and the sickening thuds of their massive horns. Towards
the end, the cat’s cries sounded piteous. She did not escape.
This was a natural encounter in the wild. To kill and
be killed, to eat and be eaten, are the unwritten laws of wild creatures. They
don’t know this, and they are none the worse of it. We do, but our opinion does
not matter to them. Survival, and natural selection have their task cut out.
Emotion is not part of the process.
The static image was of a leopard, lynched from a
tree by a mob in West Bengal [http://tinyurl.com/oxljl27]. I was naturally drawn into the action on the African
plain, but repelled by the murder of the leopard. The prequel to the hanging
was a familiar story. The leopard was spotted near some fields. Given chase, it
took refuge inside a hut. The hut was locked from the outside, and the
authorities informed. Meanwhile the crowd of onlookers began to swell. The
identity of the prisoner was known, so all were armed with lathis, iron rods,
and sharper stuff. Upon arriving, the person of authority went straight to the
hut and unlocked the door. All hell broke loose. From the depths of that
confining human abode, the petrified cat sprang towards freedom. All it wanted
was to escape that madding crowd and return to its haunts. But frenzy was at
fever pitch. A bull-headed mob mentality kicked in and the cat was beaten,
clubbed, and stabbed to death. However, the mob’s pent up fury, or its fiendish
frustration, wasn’t satiated. The mobsters cut off its paws, and docked its
tail. Then they swung its carcass from a tree.
It was a depraved state of utter senselessness. Those
that are hanged unto death, are graphic messages to the living, of an impending
fate if the prevailing law of the land be violated. Onlookers comprehend the
deathly image, and spread the word. But who was this sign for? Were there
leopards in that milling multitude, or just craven chest-thumpers who found joy
in the message hanging from the tree, “fear not this one, it’s done for.”
Frenzied mobs have an ancient history that’s remained
static through the march of civilisation. Amok, they return to the anarchy of
the uncivilised. The cerebellum shrinks, the upright stance disintegrates into a crouch, the club is hefted in the hairless hand, and manic sounds emanate
from quavering throats, bolstering one another’s puny angst. A mob may wrest
the license to kill, unto itself. It may be absolved of the crime too,
especially when the victim is not even considered a fellow citizen. But will
the mobsters be able to absolve themselves of the cowardice of their act?
Cowardice is an inherent element of a rampaging human mob. Individuals that
comprise it would not act thus if they were not in a group, surreptitiously
ignoring each other’s wrongdoing, mutually drawing courage from each other’s
hubris, slyly complicit in the horror of their act.
The hanging was dastardly because the men could have
left the animal alone. Prudence is a human prerogative. It was foolhardy in
that the spotted one may have been an invisible vigilante protecting the fields
of its murderers, from hungry hooves.
Though it’s best to stay far from a madding crowd, the
buffalos seemed the saner in this instance, compared to the psychopathic dementia
of the berserk humans.
I hope there is an inquest into this crime. The law
of the land is clear, but do the enforcers have the will, and the teeth?
