Eat the Rich

Wendy’s. Most of the animals were not shy. They’ve discovered that the round-footed noisy things on the roads do not claw or bite, and are not—on their outsides, anyway—tasty. We were able to drive to within tollbooth-change-tossing distance of some young lions lying on a sandbank at a water hole. “These are stupid young males,” said John in a tone that (he being as fiftyish as I) implied the unlikelihood of any other young male type. “They are hunting badly. A female would be behind the sand, not on top of it.” The lions didn’t seem to care. They didn’t seem to care about us, either. And they didn’t care about the half dozen other jeeps and vans full of tourists that, seeing us seeing something, eventually gathered around. A trip to the game lands of Tanzania isn’t a lonely, meditative journey. Everything I saw was also being ogled by dozens of other folks from out of town, and they were reeling off enough videotape to start a Blockbuster chain devoted solely to out-of-focus fauna. But the tourists pay money, and money is what it takes to keep the parks and preserves more or less unspoiled, and to buy the bullets to shoot poachers. If the animals of Africa aren’t worth more alive to rubberneckers than they’re worth dead to farmers, pastoralists, and rhino-horn erection peddlers, then that’s that for the Call of the Wild. (Besides, romantic as the idea may sound, how solitary do you want to be in the presence of stupid young lions?) One of the lions got up, walked a couple of steps away, took a leak, and— with no thought for the grace and style that Western-educated people so admire in African wildlife—lay down again in the piss. At the next water hole, we saw a pair of lions dozing in the midday heat. A herd of wildebeest surrounded them, evidently thirsty yet mindful of trespassing’s consequences. “But every now and then,” said John, “one of them forgets.” The male lion was crashed out on his back, immobile. The female was lying prone and panting hard. “They have just mated,” said John. “Lions mate every six minutes and then gradually decreasing until it’s every half hour, every hour, every few hours, and so on for seven days.” So the primitive economics of nature may have its compensations. John had a variety of information about the sex lives of animals. “Do you know why there are so few giraffes?” he asked at a moment when we had quite a few in sight. “They have no natural enemies,” John continued. “Their hooves are

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