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Life and death coexist with a unique ecological compactness. Nothing is wasted. First the lion dines, and then the hyena, and then the vulture, then the lesser specialists, insects and the like, until the carcass is picked utterly clean, and what is left, bones and horns, subside into the grass. It has been an African custom to take the dead out into the open and leave them unceremoniously for the hyenas.
What is the point of wild animals? If lions and leopards and rhinos and giraffes are merely decorative, or merely a nuisance, then the world will no more mourn them than it mourns the stegosaurus or the millions of buffalo that once wandered across the American plains. Is all animal life sacred? How would one react to the extinction of, say, the rattlesnake?
A farmer named Jim Trench was driving around his place near Mount Kenya one day in a rainstorm, showing the visitor the giraffes that share the land with his livestock. He remarked, "Africa would not be Africa without the wild animals."
There are parts of Africa that are less and less Africa every day. Kenya, for example, has the highest rate of population growth in the world (4%). Half of the country's people are under the age of 15. The Malthusian arithmetic ticks away. Progress: fewer infants die, old people live longer than before. The population will double by the year 2000, to 40 million, and then double again early in the 21st century. The human generations tumble out.
Those who live among the wild animals may be excused if they sometimes do not share the American's or the European's mystical enthusiasm for the beasts. Farmers like the Kikuyu, the Embu and the Meru regard the wild animals as dangerous and destructive nuisances. Crop-raiding baboons are esteemed among African farmers about as highly as the coyote is admired among West Texas ranchers. They are considered vermin. Elephants passing through a Kikuyu shamba (small farm) one night can wipe out a farmer's profit for a year. The law forbids killing them. If the elephants and giraffes and lions pay for themselves by bringing in the tourists and their dollars, if they prove their worth, then perhaps the governments of Africa will, before it is too late, organize the political will to protect them as a natural resource. But what do wild animals mean?
The wild animals fetch back at least 2 million years. They represent, we imagine, the first order of creation, and they are vividly marked with God's eccentric genius of design: life poured into pure forms, life unmitigated by complexities of consciousness, language, ethics, treachery, revulsion, reason, religion, premeditation or free will. A wild animal does not contradict its own nature, does not thwart itself, as man endlessly does. A wild animal never plays for the other side. The wild animals are a holiday from deliberation. They are sheer life. To behold a bright being that lives without thought is, to the complex, cross-grained human mind, profoundly liberating. And even if they had no effect upon the human mind, still the wild animals are life -- other life.
John Donne asked, "Was not the first man, by the desire of knowledge, corrupted even in the whitest integrity of nature?" The animals are a last glimpse of that shadowless life, previous to time and thought. They are a pure connection to the imagination of God.