Photo by Michael Dum
There are few things which send shivers down my spine like the idea of death by reptile. My recent discussion of the two boys killed by an African rock python in Canada was partly fuelled by exactly this – the idea that to be slowly suffocated to death by the cold, crunching, unforgiving barrel of muscle that is a python’s body, pinched a certain nerve in me. In that instance the point was not to vilify the creature at all – I was trying to make the (admittedly slightly obvious) point that you can take the predator out of the wild, but you can’t take the wild out of the predator.
I imagine that there are few ways to go which would be worse than being killed by a croc. The infamous death roll – in which the pre-historic giant leather scaled lizard grips you in his jaws, pulls you below the surface and spins you until you can no longer struggle or breathe – is the stuff of nightmares (watch this video of a huge croc with a warthog in its jaws). Luckily crocs are less easily kept in cages in suburban homes long enough for them to grow big enough to kill a human. But that doesn’t stop people from coming to them!
The Guardian recently reported the story of a man from New Zealand who was trapped on Governor island, off the northern coast of west-Australia, by a six metre crocodile. The man, known only as ‘Ryan’, had been exploring the island, having been dropped off by boat. Upon realising he was running low on supplies, he took to his 2.5m canoe in the hope of paddling the 4km back to the mainland. Every time he took to the water, however, the giant saltwater crocodile he had had his eye on, would follow suit, supposedly ‘chasing’ the intrepid explorer, and preventing him from making any headway toward civilisation. This scenario continued for two weeks, as the man was continually prevented from leaving by the presence of the enormous predator, until finally someone in a boat spotted him by chance and came to his rescue. Desperate for water, the would-be kayaker was given a cold beer by his saviour (now that’s an Australian move if I’ve ever heard of one), and taken to the mainland (read about a more measured Australian adventure here).
This story does two things for me. Firstly it reminds me of this:
Secondly it makes the same point made by the example of the Canadian children-killing python, but in the opposite way. People should remember that if it weren’t for our intelligence, evolution would shamefacedly turn away at the mention of our species. It would shuffle its feet, mumble a bit, and if pressed would begrudgingly admit that it had totally failed in arriving at Homo sapiens. We are slow, we are weak, we can barely swim, we can’t fly, and we can’t burrow or survive underground. Luckily for us we are smart enough in most cases to remove ourselves from positions of threat, or fortify ourselves sufficiently to deal with that threat (see just one such attempt in these shark attack mitigating wetsuits). Until, that is, “into-the-wild” syndrome kicks in and we entertain notions of our awesomeness to the point that we end up on an island off the coast of Australia, being outwitted by a toothy dinosaur.
