Many people, clever and stupid, have expressed opinions and theories about the differences between humans and animals. Up to about 30 years ago I didn’t have a notion about the subject because I didn’t know much about animals apart from a few silly dogs, clever cats, very clever rats on board my old schooner and the fish that I had caught at sea. Only the fish could be called wild animals as rats on a ship need humans to stay alive.

Then, my wife and I bought a farm in South Africa and I had to start to take up the most difficult job I had ever undertaken… farming. I admire anyone who can make a living by working a farm, any other job compared to farming is easy, straightforward. Suffice to say this is a subject I don’t want to go into now, the truth is that I did not turn out to be a successful farmer. But, I learned to get to know a great many animals and learned a lot from their behaviour.

When you hear expressions like ‘stupid cow’ or ‘filthy pig’ you can be sure that these epithets rather describe the utterer than the animal. There are no stupid cows and if you don’t lock up a pig in a box twice his size, they keep their quarters clean and organised. Stupid bulls are easy to find, like many human males their brains are kept in their gonads. You must not forget that these are animals that have been conditioned by humans and must have lost a lot of their original intellectual acumen. Of course I also came into contact with a lot of wild animals, from tiny mice to good sized buck and lots of birds.

After 15 years I gave up farming as it became time to earn some money but we managed to keep on living in the country side and kept in contact with the abundant wild life around the houses we lived in. The biological notions I had picked up during my studies as a marine biologist helped me to understand part of the behaviour of all this wildlife and so I have no difficulty in stating that there are no stupid wild animals. Would they be stupid they would be dead. Apart from grazing animals, they don’t spend much time in collecting food and they have plenty of time for play and to be happy. Most of the domestic animals are pretty smart also, only the dog can be called stupid but his close association with humans explains that.

All the emotions and reasoning that govern human behaviour are partaken by the animals I see around me, from the tiniest inch long birds that live mostly in the bush but at times burst out laughing and fly straight up to a hundred meters, to forty tons whales that have their calves in front of the house where we live. Some unwitting fellows who call themselves biologists with plenty of letters behind their name, pretend to know that animals have no sense of self, meaning they are unaware that they are living, that they are instinctive bits of living matter. I suppose these poor sods have more often their empty heads in a church than out in the veld or at sea.

Animals have a lot of fun. We have a family of mongoose living right next to the house under a big bush and they at times have games with a company of partridges, francolins that frequently visit us. A young mongoose pretends to catch a bird, the bird pretends to be scared and then the attacker gets clouted by a barrage of wings and has his nose scratched by a powerful francolin foot. The play last as long as an hour at times. I won’t go on telling animal stories, enough to say that one emotion I rarely witness is misery and that sentiment is always caused by humans, hit by a car, shot or poisoned.

Getting back to the difference between animals and humans, animals invent as many things that promote their existence as do humans but I won’t go into details, the internet is there if you don’t believe me. But… one human invention never got into their smart heads… Religion, the belief in a super animal god.

Would I be able to convey to an overflying seagull, a lazing whale, or a trotting mongoose the notion of a super gull, whale or mongoose that govern their lives and to whom tribute is due, they would first laugh their heads of and then tell me that now, at last, they understood why we were such bad-tempered, incomprehensible animals and they were right to stay away from us. The notion of a superior being is as foreign to animals as it is accepted my most of humanity. I think this belief must have come about maybe 40 000 years ago when humans were still hunters but had started already to reduce the animal population. Some handicapped tribe member who was no use for the hunt, possibly an artist, started an idea that depicting an animal in a dark cave might make the hunt more expedient. As the idea grew it was evident that the painter’s importance became paramount and from artist he graduated to priest and from that moment he could invent the most impossible fancies that ultimately resulted in a religion. Once a caste of priests came about, the gods they invented became more and more difficult to understand for mere mortals, only priests could translate between god and men and in this way became as powerful as the practical hunting leaders who turned into kings when the hunting days were over and agricultural slavery took over.

Anyway, humanity has been saddled with all kind of religions for thousands of years, as if humans needed that added stimulus to their natural belligerence to remain at a permanent war status. It looked that after WW2 enthusiasm for Christianity was slacking, in Europe a lot of churches were standing empty, some were turned into antique shops, nightclubs, a lot were bulldozed or just tumbled down. But as Christianity seemed to be fading the Arabs’ religion received a great shot in the arm from brand new petrodollars. Their god, allah, had had the foresight to plant his believers on top of a lake of oil. Although the arabs themselves didn’t have a clue about that fact until the christians showed them and when they had learned how to get the oil out of their sandy ground, the christians were kicked out.

Then, the biggest amount of money the world had ever seen started rolling into a cast of self-made arab royalty and a race of people that had been without any consequence since the crusades, lit a brand new crusade fire. Saoudite Arabia began exporting the followers of Mohammed’s religion, muslims, into Europe, at any cost. Cost did not matter at all, christians were giving them bags of money for the oil allah had put under their arses. These arabs knew all about camels but when they were let in to Europe by idiot social politicians that knowledge was not vital for european welfare. Thanks to european politicians that love to throw other people’s money around they were given houses, money, even passports that they could sell for a good price. Western Europe and the UK were obliged to borrow more and more money on taxpayers backs to keep this muslim lot alive while the Saoudite kingdom gleefully cashed in the petrodollars while getting rid of the most useless part of their population. Islam started to become a serious threat in Europe and no one realised the danger.

I saw it happening in Bordeaux, a well to do old city with more international ties than most French towns. Cours Victor Hugo used to be a fine avenue with lovely stone built apartment houses and excellent shops. I used to go there to buy wine making equipment because in that avenue you could find anything you needed. Towards the end of the seventies my friend from the wine business told me, ”Monsieur Nick, I’m closing shop, ces salopards d’arabes steal anything that is not bolted down and you can forget about the cops.” True enough, for the last few years when I went to that once lovely ‘quartier’ I carried a big knife on me as token of my trust towards the arab chappies loitering about.

Today we can see clearly how religion can lead a population totally berserk. From North Africa to Afghanistan the followers of Mohammed, aided by vast amount of petrodollars can murder as much as they like, and ‘like’ they do, even your sister’s head must be cut off if she looks at a blond bloke. Hundreds of schoolgirls are abducted by religious maniacs to be raped and then flogged into slavery. Buyers? Go look in Saoudite Arabia.

And what do our christian, western civilisation leaders do?  They become increasingly more stupid. Remember that tsunami that buggered up a nuclear power station in Japan? It freaked the German boss, Frau Merkel, into condemning all nuclear power in her Vaterland and go on subsidising bloody windmills and solar panels. Japan is bit of real estate  on top of a volcano, those power stations should have been built on vast ocean going barges, moored a good distance from the shore. But Germany sits on a very stable geological formation and what happened in Japan cannot happen within thousands of years in Germany. Yet, this ignorant woman, with a few words, reduced the welfare of her people by a considerable margin.

The bloody pope also gets into the act, “Capitalism is bad,” he says, “socialism is good. Money must be spread out.” Here is the boss of the biggest thieving religious society of the last two thousand years trying to educate the last of his remaining followers. A society that has bred the largest bunch of paedophilic priests ever, causing untold misery and child cadavers. A society where life was so miserable that only the invention of a here-after life in heaven kept the ignorant believers paying the pope. Allah had to do one better, he promised the fellows that they could fuck 72 virgins, what the ladies could hope for was not specified, maybe allah could turn them into virgins seeing there was great demand for them.

In America, the empire that invented the petrodollar and considered gold as crap, things are going the old Roman way. The wily roman chiefs, not having paper money, slowly replaced the gold in their coins with copper and tin and for a few centuries managed to cheat their citizens. Then the Barbarians destroyed Rome, hélas, not the Vatican. The black fellow who is now the American chief is doing the same thing in a different manner. Seeing that paper money does not guarantee gold payment anymore, if he needs more money he just prints the bloody stuff. The amazing thing is that he believes that the stuff has intrinsic value while owing the rest of the world about 70 trillions of those bits of paper. I admit, once beyond a few thousands I don’t understand those figures, the president neither is my guess.

He also believes that slavery was bad, although it has been around for a long time, at least 10 000 years. Most of the slaves were black Africans and apparently never did a thing to stop the trade since the Egyptian empires. I think the Brits were more or less responsible to stop the slave trade around 1820. I don’t know why they bothered, if people let themselves be turned into slaves for thousands of years, possibly they thought it was better than being on the dole. Today a whole bunch of countries yammer their excuses for having had slaves on their territory they should rather listen to Alex Haley, black American author of ‘Roots’. He visited Uganda and surrounding countries and when he watched thousands of black corpses floating down a large river in black Africa, he tapped himself on the shoulder, so happy he was that his great granddaddy had been caught as a slave in the previous century.

However, great surprises will still be forthcoming from America, apart from being the most indebted country in the world it now appears to have the most oil and gas as well as more of the stuff is now pumped there than comes out of Saoudite Arabia. The damage that is being created by the fellow in the White House and his swindling cronies might be diminished by private enterprise that boosts technology.