Pets; Fear Them!

An article in the Times of India ( New Delhi edition) today, reports that a 3 year old boy was eaten alive by a pig! That is just so freaky! The boy wandered into the playground when a herd of pigs took him away. When his mother went looking for him later, she saw a pig biting his torso! She tried to scare the pig by throwing stones at it but it turned on her. She then raised an alarm the locals gathered and chased away the animal but by then it had already eaten the upper part of the child's body!

This is so very terrifying! I always pictured pigs as cute little pink things from fairy tales. Not as flesh eating killers! Though a lot of ideas we have about the animal kingdom are totally incorrect and are put in our brains by the stories we read as kids. There are countless incidents where dogs have turned on their owners, mauled them, and more often than not, killed them. This seems to be especially common in mastiffs. And here we were all conditioned to be under the impression that dogs are a man's best friend and they protect our homes. I've seen a couple of videos where people who had pet snakes were attacked by them. One guy got bitten on the nose. Another was asphyxiated by his boa constrictor.

We should never forget the fact that all of these pets that we have are essentially wild animals. Their primary instinct is that of a killer, to hunt. And as such, they can never be totally domesticated. And ergo, never be completely safe.

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