Red in Tooth and Claw

This post is not for the faint of heart.

We have four cats. One of the four is an indoor/outdoor cat. He stays out at night. He hunts, a lot. He eats what he kills. He has been eating a lot of chipmunks lately.

The other day we found him having eaten almost all of a chipmunk's body except the head. In the little mouth of the head that was left, there was a large acorn. It was creepy.

Many people know me as a kind of naturalist, nature boy, environmentalist. I am certainly very keen about preserving and protecting habitats so animals and plants can be protected and cared for and preserved.

I have studied enough biology, entomology, and general animal behavior to know that “nature” is in fact brutal. It’s eat or be eaten. It is a tough world out there.

I was watching National Geographic the other day, watching a pride of lions taking down an adult water buffalo, starting to eat it even before it was dead. They even showed a group of lions eating another lion, a member of the same pride, for no apparent reason. I think in the same show I saw sharks ripping apart seals, crocodiles ripping apart zebras, and polar bears ripping into beluga whales.

OK, here is the reason for this post. Environmentalist that I am and will remain, there is something about the “natural” world that seems out of kilter to me, not quite right, not as it was or is supposed to be, not, well, natural.

Do we really think that the ideal universe has cats eating chipmunks and lions eating water buffalo? And what about parasitic wasps laying their eggs inside of other insects, and those eggs becoming larvae inside the other insect, and those larvae eating the other insect from the inside out? I mean, that scene in Alien, the first Alien, where the alien creature comes ripping out of the guy's stomach, well, that’s every day life in your back yard folks.

I think my instinctive feel, my feel that this is not quite right, is consistent with the first chapter of the Bible. There was no predation there. Animals could only eat plants. And God saw it, and it was very good.

Then something went wrong, and one consequence, in the Bible story, is that man and nature became “red in tooth and claw.”

I am NOT writing this to make an argument about creation and evolution. But the Christian vision of the “end of all things,” when God comes in his kingdom, seems to suggest that such predation will end. I realize that the language is symbolic, yet, it does say more than once that in the New Heaven and New Earth the lion will lie down with the lamb. I think there is more to that than a mere symbol of human peace.

And as much as I love nature “as it is,” I would be glad if all this blood and gore, all this hunting and killing, would come to an end.

I was driving up our road and stopped for a large hawk standing right in the middle of the road facing the other way. As I stopped, he swiveled his head to look back at me, and then turned back around to his business. There was a bird on the road, face up, wings pinned to the ground by the hawk's claws. I think the bird was a mourning dove. The hawk started systematically pulling away the chest feathers, releasing them into the breeze, where they glided gently away as a cloud. He did this for a bit and then you could see him pushing harder and twisting his head, and then holding his head back as to swallow. He turned and looked at me again. His beak was red. I don’t know if the bird was even dead yet.

The look had, “you’re next” all over it. I gave thanks that I was bigger than that hawk, because I think he would have pulled me out of my car and ripped me apart otherwise. As it was, he grabbed the body of the dove in his talons and flew off. It was an amazing sight. But still, is that how things are meant to be?

I wonder.