Obstacles to Peace Between Man and Beast
Pictures like the one on the cover of this magazine are a delight to children. Adults too are often attracted to such a scene.
Why do humans react this way? Is genuine peace between man and even the most ferocious beast just a childish dream? Or will it become a reality?
Man an Obstacle
A big obstacle to such peace is man himself. An ancient proverb says: “Man has dominated man to his injury.” (Ecclesiastes 8:9) And man’s history of working injury to his own kind is reflected in his treatment of animals.
For example, numerous wild beasts were captured and made to fight in the arenas of ancient Rome. In 106 C.E., the Roman emperor Trajan reportedly staged games in which 10,000 gladiators and 11,000 beasts were slain to satisfy the bloodlust of sadistic spectators.
True, that particular type of entertainment is not fashionable today. But the growing list of extinct and endangered species testifies that something is wrong with man’s treatment of wild creatures. As the human population explodes, the habitat of wild animals shrinks. And because of human greed, there is demand for exotic animal skins, horns, and tusks. Some experts fear that the only specimens of most large species will eventually be confined to zoos.
Man-Eaters
Another obstacle to peace may appear to be some wild beasts themselves. In Africa and Asia, it is not unusual to read reports of wild beasts that have attacked and killed humans. The Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats states that members of the cat family “probably account for close on 1000 deaths annually.” In India alone, tigers kill more than 50 people each year. Some leopards in that country have also become man-eaters.
In his book Dangerous to Man, Roger Caras explains that leopards sometimes turn to man-eating after scavenging dead human bodies in the wake of disease epidemics. Such epidemics, he explains, have often been “followed by months of terror as leopards indulged their new taste for human flesh and started killing.”
But Caras observes that disease epidemics do not account for all leopard attacks. Another cause is the animal’s excitability, especially when it is near children.
During the years 1918-26, one leopard in India killed 125 humans, as reported by Colonel J. Corbett in his book The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. Decades later, man-eating leopards killed at least 82 people in the district of Bhagalpur.
A game ranger in Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) related how he spent five months in 1950 trying without success to shoot a man-eating leopard that terrorized people around the village of Ruponda. Eventually, after killing 18 children, it was trapped by an African villager. Another leopard killed 26 women and children in the village of Masaguru.
Then there is the African lion. When it turns to eating humans, the victims are often adult men. “In my twenty-three years in the Game Department,” writes C. Ionides in his book Mambas and Man-Eaters, “I shot over forty lions, the majority of which were man-eaters, while the remainder were either on their way to becoming man-eaters or were stock-raiders.” According to Ionides, lions become a menace to humans when man drastically reduces their usual prey.
Earth-Wide Peace Foretold
In spite of such obstacles to peace between man and beast, the Bible states: “Every species of wild beast . . . is to be tamed and has been tamed by humankind.”—James 3:7.
The Bible foretells at Ezekiel 34:25: “I [God] will conclude with them a covenant of peace, and I shall certainly cause the injurious wild beast to cease out of the land, and they will actually dwell in the wilderness in security and sleep in the forests.”
Are such Bible prophecies just an unrealistic dream? Before rejecting the prospect of earth-wide peace between man and beast, consider some indications pointing to the truthfulness of what the Bible says. Some amazing examples of harmony between caring humans and potentially dangerous beasts have been documented.