Monkeypox, Covid and the trouble with our species

I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking back this week through the vast underground vaults at Spectator HQ I see that centuries ago in April 2020 I explained the problem with us humans as a species. As I said back then, someone always shags a monkey. There are almost eight billion of us on this planet today, and the likelihood that we’re all going to make judicious decisions all the time is vanishingly small. The mating decisions of the species alone are notoriously prone to trial and error. And the entire future of our species rides perpetually along this cliff edge.

Last month I read in the Indian press of four men arrested by police in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Their crime? Going on footage collected from their mobile phones, the men, in their thirties and forties, stand accused of gang-raping, killing, cooking and eating a rare monitor lizard in one of India’s most protected nature reserves.

I found the headline on this article to be of the kind that draws you in. So I read on. At one stage I learned from the forest officer Vishal Mali that the four culprits seemed to have committed their crime for fun. There was, we were reassured, ‘no religious or black magic agenda’. On balance, I think it would have been more comforting if there had been. If the men had been acting under the delusion that raping a monitor lizard would give them better teeth or larger penises then at least we could have put it down to one of those superstitions that can be argued out of our species over the course of centuries. But these men did it for pleasure. What are the survival chances of a species that does such things, I wonder.

We have only just begun to come out of the wretched Covid era, and the world still seems none the wiser over whether the cause of that two-year-long misery was a bat-eating Chinese man or a perfectly innocent leak from a top-secret bioweapons lab.