Wasp…!

Some years ago I was at the WOMAD (World of Music and Dance) festival in Reading with friends. It was a baking hot weekend of reasonable music and questionable food and a priority for just about everyone was water. Luckily we had camped a few hundred meters from a standpipe and we took turns lugging large plastic bottles of water from pipe to tent.

During one of my chores I was standing in line, waiting my turn, when a wasp descended from a brilliant blue sky and settled on the pipe ahead of me. Immediately a small group of girls started screaming in unison: Kill it, Kill it….!

I couldn’t help speaking up for the poor creature. Leave it alone I said. It’s just as hot and thirsty as the rest of us and just wants something to drink. Sure enough the insect gulped some water from the running tap, cleaned its antennae and flew off into the heated air. See, I said, no need to kill it. The line moved on and we all got the water we needed.

It got me thinking. Why is it, I wonder, that the default setting for humans when we meet something we either don’t understand or are fearful off is to kill it? The wasp, in this case, was harming no one and more than likely posed no threat. Yet the children in front of me and probably some of the adults too would have preferred it dead.

I’m sure that this ‘default setting’ probably helped our species to become so dominant on this planet. But if we look at what such an attitude has produced its clear to see that killing anything without a good reason threatens us all. The question is: Are we, as a species, capable of stopping the killing? To be honest I don’t think we are. I think that killing is probably ‘hardwired’ into our natures – after all it is one of the things that we do really well. We have pushed and continue to push many of our fellow creatures to extinction though few realise that our own survival is not exactly assured. We are more than capable of ending our dominion over the Earth either deliberately or by accident. However, maybe if we stopped killing most of the things that cross our paths we would increase our chances of survival too.