KEY POINTS:
In a week of financial apocalypse, tax-cut wrangling and election campaigning, only one news item has managed to occupy my attention entirely.
The story of the little boy who broke into the Alice Springs reptile centre to kill a swathe of animals and feed them to the zoo's resident croc was totally riveting.
That in itself is unsurprising - awful things usually are completely compelling. Reams have been written already about the pull of blood and gore. There's no surprise in being fascinated by acts of violence and wanton destruction. I'm confident that in asserting my own interest in unsavoury events, I'm merely underlining my membership in the human family.
There were a number of aspects to this story, however, that made for singularly diverting reading.
The carnage alone was impressive, firstly. Thirteen animals in all were slaughtered in the massacre, which claimed representatives from a number of lizard species including bearded dragons, thorny devils and a 20-year-old, much beloved Spencers goanna.
The extremely young age of the perpetrator was another noteworthy detail. Acts of depravity are never so hair-raising as when they are committed by children, as anyone who has ever shivered at the sight of little Damian Thorn on his tricycle or read Iain Banks' brilliant, brutal novel The Wasp Factory will attest.
The fact that this wholesale slaughter of captive animals was carried out by a 7- year-old will inevitably have alarm bells ringing all over. Acts of cruelty towards defenceless animals are by now well-publicised evidence of a disturbed personality and a signpost towards deepening pathologies further down the track.
The grainy security footage of a small boy clambering over barricades to fling the corpse of a lizard to a waiting crocodile is chilling for a number of reasons. There's the spooky half-light in which it was shot, the hulking form of the submerged croc, the splash as the poor dead animal hits the water and is snatched up in the salty's jaws.
The boy's face is blurred out in the versions of the video I've watched, but zoo guards who saw the original have described the boy as having an entirely blank expression, which, if true, must surely be the most frightening part of all.
Newspapers from the Daily Mail to the Hindu told the same story. The killing spree, the feeding of "Terry" the 3.35m, 200kg saltwater croc, the zookeepers' horror and outrage at the ghastly spectacle that greeted them when they arrived the next morning.
"How could a boy do this?" cried the headline on Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
Well might one wonder. What stands out from this boy's killing spree is the calculated decision not only to bludgeon the lizards to death, but to feed the remains to the crocodile on site. The killing alone could perhaps be explained as a frenzy, a surrender to an uncontrollable instinct.
Feeding the animals to Terry, however, suggests a calculated sort of savagery that has obviously been percolating over time. Zoos challenge the natural order of life in the wild by keeping predators segregated from their prey. Purposely subverting this system by feeding some captive animals to another is the highest form of sadism, made all the worse by the grim, ironic humour inherent in allowing nature to take its course. Terry is a crocodile, which means he would probably eat whatever was thrown at him; be it a bleeding goanna or an old boot.
At the risk of parroting the Telegraph's plaintive tone, what sort of 7- year-old is cunning enough and amoral enough to hit on the notion of making a cat's paw of a crocodile? What sort of child is reckless enough to break into a zoo at night, and so destructive that he does so only to kill the animals inside? "Quite a nasty 7-year-old," was how the zoo director described the boy.
By all accounts, this child comes from a family with a history of violence. No surprises there. I'm normally pretty optimistic about the average punter's capacity for change and growth through life, but it doesn't take a degree in psychology to bet this is a pretty disturbed kid we're dealing with. A disturbed child who will, like as not, grow up into a disturbed adult in time.
There's little to do but hand-wring in a case like this. Or wonder, perhaps, if it mightn't be a better idea to adopt out the lizards and use zoos for a certain sort of incorrigible person instead?
