Crocodile Morality: Don’t Eat Your Friends

Some time ago an unusual new article caught my attention. It was about some man in a far away, tropical county with a with a very friendly crocodile, which could be considered either a pet or a friend, although a 17 foot, 950 lb animal doesn’t really fit the definition of a pet.

While I had no doubt that had I jumped into that croc’s favorite river, it would have had me for lunch without the slightest hesitation, being big enough to snack on a full grown zebra, it was shown nuzzling the man who had found it as an injured baby and had taken care of it. It was clear these two vastly different creatures had bonded. This is just the most extreme version of many incidents of interspecies bonding I have seen,  but it was dramatic enough to make me pause, consider the implications and even do a radio piece about.

 Obviously, there is a fundamental and probably instinctive moral code at work here, probably the foundation of all interactions between living things, a animal kingdom prime directive, as it were. I think it is best summed up as, “Don’t eat your friends.”  After all, there is plenty to eat out there, but no creature, big or small, has all the friends it can use.

 Besides not eating your friends, I suspect that an extension of this code would be not letting someone else eat your friends. If I were to attack that man in front of his croc, I imagine my life expectancy would be about three seconds. Your friends are not your food, nor are they anyone else’s. You don’t let someone else harm them. It’s a “thou shall not kill your friends” rule.

 We humans, being more complex creatures, extend our personal selves into our possessions. Our homes, autos and other stuff are extensions of who we are, so the basic principle also extends to “don’t eat your friends’ stuff,” or maybe to a “don’t eat your friends’ livelihood” rule, or “thou shall not steal.”

 Humans are social animals, so by extension your tribe becomes your friends, so we don’t let others eat or harm our tribe. With civilization, “tribe” becomes “community.”  We’ve been trying to extend this idea to “nation,” but that’s a hard sell, being that our nation is so big and diverse. Still, an attack by another country, causes masses of people to enlist in the armed services, as our people are more our friends than their people are. Since we have the notion of us and them, we have rules against killing “us,” but not against killing “them.”

 With very little effort and imagination, we can derive our entire moral and legal code from this simple, basic principle, one that even crocodiles fully understand: Don’t eat your friends.