"Animal behaviour" is not from animals.

Since the beginning of June, I have been tracking gruesome news items of inhuman acts perpetrated by people (in one state of derangement or the other), upon those close to them, people they supposedly love. In South Africa, we read recently about the Mpumalanga man who murdered his girlfriend because she ended their relationship. Then there is the police officer in Johannesburg who shot and killed his wife then shot and injured himself and his pregnant sister in law. Sixteen bullets were pumped into his sister in law who is now fighting for dear life in hospital. In today’s headlines there is another shocker, a seventeen year old Klerksdorp girl sold by her mother to a brothel owner in Cape Town.

Yes, you read correctly, her mother! What happened to the saying, “Blood is thicker than water?” That saying seems to be, “water under the bridge,” nowadays. Although I might be throwing around puns and clichés as I write this piece, the aim is not to be humorous but rather pour scorn yet again at the depths to which the human being has sunk. No one deserves to be abused, tortured or killed, but when it happens between siblings, parents and children or spouses, it is that much more horrific and impossible to comprehend. It really is a mystery why we seem to think that humans are superior to animals. Indeed that was the Almighty’s plan for us but boy, we sure have thrown that right back into his face!

As you read of mothers dumping newly born babies in dust bins, fathers raping their daughters and men shooting their wives and children in a fit of rage, do you ever pause and reflect on how this sick human behaviour contrasts with the caring, protective love that animals reserve for their kith and kin? That is why it always seems ridiculous for me to hear of such behaviour referred to as, "Animal behaviour." What an insult to the millions of animal species that live on this Earth!