KEY POINTS:
A line needs to be drawn in the sand. It needs to be drawn in the sand right now and luckily I know exactly which bit of sand it needs to be drawn in.
Baylys Beach, near Dargaville. For it was upon Baylys Beach, just recently, that a yellow-bellied sea snake (pelamis platurus) was found. Alive.
It's quite important that word, "alive", because (a) usually when they wash up on our beaches they are dead and (b) when they are alive - as this one is - the yellow-bellied sea snake, a member of the cobra family of snakes, is one of the most poisonous snakes in the world.
You come across one of these suckers and it decides to sink its fangs into you, baby that's it for you in this world. Have a nice after-life.
So the snake with the name that makes it sound like it's from a bad Western movie ("that's right, you yellow-bellied snake, I'm calling you yellow-bellied on account of the yellowness of your belly") is whisked away from Baylys Beach and off to Kelly Tarlton's where it is revived and is wintering over in a fish tank.
(As an aside, wouldn't that be the worst job you could possibly get on your first day in your new job: "right, Morris, as you're the newbie here at Kelly Tarlton's we've decided that you should be the one who gives mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the extremely poisonous snake - off you go.")
Now the bit that really got to me with the TV news coverage of this reptilian arrival was not so much that the snake was found in the first place, but that once it has recovered from the ordeal of waking up and finding itself in New Zealand, the plan is to put it back in the sea.
Yep, when the yellow-bellied sea snake is better, we're going to take it off to warmer waters and let it loose. Okay, I am all for saving animals.
I agree, as the single-most ecologically destructive species on this planet we owe it to Mother Earth to do all we can to give something back. But do we have to save every animal on the planet?
Do we really need to save the ones that can kill us any time they feel like it? Take the great white shark (carcharodon carcharias), for instance.
To some people this is one of the most endangered among the many ocean-dwelling species and it needs to be protected and saved from extinction.
To me it is a killing machine and anything that lessens the chance of me being eaten by one off Onetangi Beach is okay in my book. It's all about drawing lines in the sand, as far as I'm concerned. Cute and harmless animals I feel we should save in abundance.
The monarch butterfly (danaus plexippus), for instance, should be saved a lot. Even animals that are cute but can actually harm you, like the giant panda (ailuropoda melanoleuca) - which pretty much has the market cornered on both animal cuteness and endangeredness - I am in favour of saving because the Cuteness Factor is way ahead of the Threat-to-Me Factor.
Then we start getting into much greyer areas in the cuteness versus threat stakes. The polar bear (ursus maritimus), for example, scores major cuteness points as a cub but it grows into a killing machine of almost unparalleled ferocity.
It also lives a long way away and, therefore, is highly unlikely to wade ashore at Baylys Beach. So go the polar bear. Live long and prosper. Which brings us back to our friend the yellow-bellied sea snake, which did turn up, very much ashore and (kind of) alive. Should we save it?
Or should we say "hey, you dirty yellow-bellied killing machine, you messed with the wrong species when you tangled with homo sapiens sapiens, the species so dangerous we named ourselves twice" and waste the little sucker?
Perhaps the best way to deal with such a conundrum; to find out where the line in the sand really lies, is to ask ourselves what would happen if one of us washed ashore at whatever the snake-world equivalent is of Baylys Beach.
Would the snakes take us to the snake-world equivalent of Kelly Tarlton's and save our asses? Or would they recoil in horror and say "this species is a killing machine - kill it before it kills us"?
Think carefully on this because how you answer says a lot about us, as a species. Then rent Snakes on a Plane and ask yourself the question again.
Actually no, don't do that because it swings the argument too much in favour of the snakes.
- NZ HERALD
