I READ a letter to the editor by Sahodeo Bates about the shooting of a jaguar by an over-enthusiastic miner who was in possession of a shotgun or rifle. He had stalked and killed the jaguar, motivated by no threat from this animal — except, it seems, driven by a need to satisfy some inner missing link.
I’m no stranger to the hinterland. I can recall a walk to the back-dam in the 1970s; upon crossing a tacouba, I saw a snake coiled beneath its edges on the bank of the waterway. I alerted the late “Cash Morgan” and asked for his cutlass. He looked at me with a questioning, serious stare and responded, “Duh snake do yuh something?”
To that, I remained somewhat pensive. I came to understand why, in checking our jute-bag beds, we explored for snakes which, if found, would be thrown out of our huts and hammocks, but seldom killed. I mentioned a similar experience at Kura-kura involving tiger cats (ocelots) in a previous article.

The age for the callous killing of animals due to our primate fears has passed, due to the realisation that some animals are not to be eaten, nor to be eliminated. The ancient errors of humans — the self-destructive egos of elimination initiated by some human tribes — led them to consume without observing the volumes they destroyed. They destroyed even what they did not eat, thus committing themselves to starvation and extinction.
Much like the example of the rise of human life and creativity on Easter Island, and the probable reason for its population’s disappearance, they ate everything and thus starved to death, even if they resorted to cannibalism, too late.
In trying to understand this garden that our species is supposed to explore and sustain, we begin with the life forms and the medicines among the fruit and botanicals that the older life forms (animals) explore and use. The more balanced among our species also explore, observe, and adopt — but it’s the multitude of others of our kind that we must be cautious with.
My children can accuse me of depriving them of visits to the zoo. After seeing animals in the wild, observing them in extremely limited-size cages can be disturbing — to see an ocelot in a 3ft by 4ft cage, on average, when you’ve seen that animal move in the wild at its natural speed. In that case, the cage becomes a thing of torture. I’m sure that some of our caged animals, without movement, went mad before they perished.
There’s an area in the wild that doesn’t come to the fore — that some animals should not be eaten. I’m not going to mention any species; that should be left to the professionals. Most of nature is older than us humans by over 100,000 years. We like to chant about wildlife, but those who study these areas should bring these life forms to the fore. You’d be surprised what some folks eat.
In closing, we do need to guard our wildlife. There are lots of “never see come fuh see” folks who might be tripping on a newfound permitted lethal toy—they need guidance.
And don’t know it, till next time.