MURDER OR FAIL

“They eat hare!” cried Wanjiru, a girlfriend, with some sort of tone I would only use if I found out that they eat each other. For a moment I was baffled. They eat them whole and raw? They eat them alive? No. They kill them, skin them and put them in a pot with some onions, just like we do. And yet this lady, bright enough to be given a job as a researcher, was astonished. Yes, my girlfriend and I were watching a documentary when that came up.

I am becoming increasingly depressed by how hard we are trying to insulate ourselves from the reality of the food chain and the wonders of the natural world. Not long ago, I was watching my favorite episode of the American show survivor. The starving contestants were given some chickens but couldn’t bring themselves to kill and pluck them. They were chickens for God’s sake. And chickens are basically vegetables. I am talking here about a bird that is so daft that it would operate normally with no head. Anyway, while they were deliberating about what should be done, the birds were eaten by a couple of monitor lizards.

Then I remembered the kind of nonsense I watched in the series of I’m a celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! The contestants, with their man-made lifestyles-and in some cases their manmade breasts-are absolutely lame when it comes to dealing with jungle wildlife. Do they really believe the producers would let them put their heads in a tank full of properly dangerous spiders? Of course not. So if they aren’t worried about being eaten or dyeing in screaming agony, what’s the problem?

When an animal dies, or a human for that matter, the stomach fills with methane gas sometimes the pressure becomes so great that the carcasses go off like a bomb. I’d like to think this can somehow be harnessed. Forgive my getting lavatorial, but the cows in Rift Valley produce over a million tones of methane yearly. Little facts I keep specifically for emergencies like this. It’s nice to think we can get meat from their legs, milk from their udders and most importantly, electricity from their bottoms. But one thing is for certain, in this day and era, people would be reluctant to switch on their lights at home if they thought the power was coming from Nyakoguya’s(my grandma’s favorite cow) farts.

I sincerely don’t understand this. Out there in the real world, away from the twenty-first-century supermarket/freezer/microwave chain of catering, there are insects which eat their partners after sex, there are turkey vultures that will vomit on you when threatened, there are cats that kill for fun and there are leopard seals that play aquatic tennis, using penguins as the ball.

So, in the scheme of things, slaughtering a hen isn’t one of those huge sins. If you don’t want to be party to the killing, that’s fine sweetheart. Be a vegetarian. But if you’re not going to eat meat, quit standing on tiptoe and shrieking when you find out how the chicken became a meal. Yes, if you are not ready to murder, stay hungry. If you are not ready to succeed, keep your cool. Don’t take risks. Yes, fear failure and fear.