What jackasses humans can be
Of course the jackass penguin’s donkey-like call has just been declared akin to human speech. That makes sense. It would reflect the human mind in all its inanity, illustrated lately in a variety of enraging ways.
I once woke in Australia to a cackle of kookaburras, an unsettling experience. They sound like humans driven mad, as well they might be, on a continent where Europeans’ track record is one of ceaseless cruelty towards other life forms, exploited in tourist knickknacks but otherwise not taken seriously enough.
The term Ugly Australians was coined for a reason, not just for underarm bowling.
As if the catastrophic bushfires weren’t sufficient threat to koalas, a private landowner has bowled a eucalyptus forest full of them elsewhere, dying with and without babies on their backs. The loggers had to have seen the animals, but went ahead anyway.
An army of volunteers, national treasures in other words, is working with injured and displaced koalas, giving the impression it’s nobody’s real job to protect them. Yet I would have thought there was money in their survival, in tourism of course, since money is the only benchmark of clever thinking in the world’s current cycle of madness.
Logging is the villain in the Amazon, too, where native people, plants and creatures are slaughtered as fast as they’re discovered in what we’re told are the lungs of the Earth. There should be international agreements over the preservation of forests and wildernesses wherever they remain, but the current crop of world leaders doesn’t inspire hope.
In Mexico two guardians of monarch butterflies have been killed in the past couple of weeks. There’s a sinister link with logging there as well.
Every year millions of monarchs fly to the remote Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site, in Mexico for winter. They cluster there in the treetops before migrating north again when winter’s over.
I would marvel at such a wonder. I marvel when even a solitary monarch swoops into my garden. But loggers, landowners and indigenous people see them as a hindrance to short-term goals, and climate change threatens the butterflies too.
What a hindrance beauty is to human plans. I’m also revolted by the dehorning of rhinos in Africa in an effort to stop poachers. Chinese believe that their ground-up horns cure various complaints, including erectile dysfunction. And so the great beasts lumber toward extinction, rewarding poachers for their cruelty, and comforting worried men when there are more effective and cheaper remedies.
So much for our treatment of wild creatures. In contrast, I hesitate to call the fashion world airheaded, but it had a burst of foolishness a bit over a year ago that was clearly offensive to other humans in ways that made you marvel, not in a good way.
Prada recalled blackface figurines, small monkey-like accessories, that its designers must have imagined were a charming novelty. A year after the first complaint, Miuccia Prada, whom I have always admired, will now get sensitivity training as part of a settlement with the New York City Commission on Human Rights.
Gucci recalled a blackface sweater. Katy Perry recalled blackface high-heeled shoes she must have thought were witty, and Adidas caused yet more offence by producing all-white sneakers for Black History Month. H&M, not to be outdone, used a black child, as well as white children, in an ad wearing a sweater with the wording, ‘‘Coolest Monkey In The Jungle’’. They apologised. Duh.
Check out the call of the jackass penguin, as intelligent a commentator as any. We humans well deserve its loony, hollow laugh. It is, of course, endangered.