Last night (or this morning at 1 am to be exact), I was watching national geographic. It was about lions hunting (they never get tired of that feline, don't they?) elephants, quite interesting but a little morbid. It showed a dying elephant on its last few breaths while the lions surround it. What surprised me most was that the lions did not even wait for it to die but already started feeding on it - they went for the most vulnerable part of the elephant, which was its anal region (OUCH!!). I am usually calm and collected while watching wildlife television, but this was just too much for me. It made me wonder about the similarities between human beings and beasts. We have a sense of morality that makes us kill before we eat anything. We are unlike animals in that sense. Also, we have pity for the young of animals but rather hunt the adults (who, incidentally, also provide more meat) - this is untrue of the animal world, where the hunters often take out the weakest and youngest of the herd. Yet once I got past that, I reflected on human history, and I realized that in some ways, we are worse than animals. In the wars that ravaged our history, Men fought and killed man, woman and child for no other reason than the pleasure of battle or the spoils of war. Men who cannot control their sexual urges rape young women, children and even their fellow men just to release the tension. In an anime I saw, a god was saying how humans are flawed - that our history is filled with pointless wars and yet we never learn from our mistakes but rather repeat it through more wars. At least an animal learns quickly through instinct when it makes a mistake, yet humans, even with our so-called superiority, continue repeating our mistakes - from large scale ones such as wars to small ones like individual carelessness. How then, are we any better than the animals that we study - they that kill for survival, while we kill for pleasure, greed and lust? Is it that we have a soul? A conscience? What use is this soul when we do heinous acts even with it? Man is truly beyond understanding... Except maybe God's. Of course what I am talking about is not a generalization of all human beings, but the actions of some, nay, MOST of us. Let us not judge a race by the actions of some, as it is easily the pattern these days - what with the war on terrorism. Some people do find refuge in faith and in enlightenment - even amidst war, peace is what they desire, and it is them that we must follow, they that promote peace rather than they that enforce silence.