So long, Lolong. I know you probably would plead “not guilty” by virtue of your nature, but the reality lies in your killing a fisherman and a young girl—the details too gruesome to give.
Yes, you were a saltwater crocodile, and yes, you were the biggest in captivity at more than 21 feet long and weighing more than a ton. * But your species is thriving, and there just isn’t enough room for the two of us on this planet if you insist on going around eating my type. Couldn’t you have just kept your diet nonhuman? Couldn’t you have resisted that temptation to devour your human neighbors?
So, Lolong, sorry you died, but you entered the world of humans, and that, as you found out, can be stressful, very stressful. Put into captivity, you suffered the humiliation of someone’s poking you with a stick and posting it on social media, stoking the rage of the human crowd. And supposedly, you got a fungal infection on top of the stress imposed by your captivity.
But, Lolong, didn’t you bring your demise on yourself by killing that fisherman and biting the head off a child (Sorry, I said I wouldn’t dwell on any details)? After millions of years of pre-human existence, you crocodilians just haven’t adapted to us, the relative latecomers on the planet. But, you’ve had at least 200,000 years to find out that we are not to be toyed with when our dander is up, and killing one or two of us has consequences. Heck, haven’t you observed in your long life how we treat our own kind?
Sure, Lolong, you were just a hungry opportunist. You saw something that looked like food, so you snapped it up with jaws that crush with nature’s biggest bite force. And sure, it’s true that we humans can be a bit careless where we step in the wild, crossing the border of civilization and believing that we are sole owners of the planet and that “nothing can happen to me” because of our own size and strength.
So, Lolong, you crossed the line. And now you’ve paid with your life for your actions. Too bad you couldn’t emulate the high level of rationality we humans can exhibit. I mean, when did you ever see any humans foolishly risking their own deaths just because of some opportunity. It’s not as though there were parallels in the German invasions of WW I and WW II, in the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, where you once roamed, or in the many other invasions into the territory of innocents. It’s not as though we humans haven’t like you suffered our own deaths as a consequence of our actions. It’s not as though the Russians were at the time of your death threatening to invade the Ukraine, risking not only Ukrainian lives, but the lives of their own young people.
Now that I think about it, we humans are a bit like you, Lolong. I guess we just can’t keep to our own territory and can’t keep ourselves from devouring what we see.
*https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/biggest-ever-saltwater-crocodile-captivity-26260308 Image: AFP via Getty Images
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