    3

    3

    3

    warmt

    h. You can see the benevolence with which a mother keeps a cub

    from playfully tearing her tail apart. She lifts her huge paw and gently

    shoves the infant aside when his nipping becomes too painful.

    But nature has given these lion mothers only one way of feeding

    their children.  The hunt.  This afternoon, these peaceful creatures will

    tear a gazelle limb from limb.  The panicked beast will try frantically to

    avoid the felines closing in on her.  But they will break her neck and

    drag her across the plain still alive and kicking.  Her eyes will be open

    and aware as her flesh is gashed and torn.

    Suppose for a minute that lions were suddenly stricken with

    guilt about their feeding habits and swore off meat.  What would they

    accomplish?  They would starve themselves and their children.   For

    nature has given them only one option: to kill.  Killing is not an

    invention of man.  It is an invention of nature.

    Nature's amusements are cruel.  A female sea turtle crawls

    painfully up the beach of a tropical island, dragging her bulk across the

    sand.  Slowly she digs a nest with her hind flippers and lays her eggs.

    From those eggs come a thousand tiny, irresistible babies, digging out

    of the sand, blinking at the light for the first time, rapidly gaining their

    orientation from a genetically preprogrammed internal compass, then

    taking their first walk, a race toward the sea.  As the infants scoot

    awkwardly across the beach, propelling themselves with flippers built

    for an entirely different task, sea birds who have been waiting for this

    feast swoop down to enjoy meal after high protein meal.  Of a

    thousand newborns, perhaps three will make it to the safety of the

    ocean waves.7

    Are the birds sadistic creatures whose instincts been twisted by

    an overdose of television? No, they're engaged in the same effort as the

    baby turtles--the effort to survive.

    Hegel, the 19th century German philosopher, said that true

    tragedy occurs not when good battles evil, but when one good battles

    another.  Nature has made that form of tragedy a basic law of her

    <<  <  GO  >  >>