Only humans fight to the death over matters of pure ideology

31 Mar 2025

Though they’re red in tooth and claw, animals don’t have enemies the way we do. Will we destroy ourselves?

‘Bringing a gun into a house / changes it,” begins Vicki Feaver’s poem The Gun. We are a warring species. In fact, we might go so far as to say that all life on Earth – plants and animals alike – engages in some form of battle, whether for space, food, political dominance, energy or the right to reproduce. But when it comes to brazen warfare, no species does it quite like humans.

Natural law

Take the cheetah, for example. Its sleek, lightweight body is built for speed, with a flexible spine that works like a spring, allowing it to stretch and contract as it runs. Its long tail serves as a counterbalance, helping it to navigate turns – often in a desperate chase against a springbok running to save its life.

The reasons for conflict are, of course, countless. Some tie directly to survival, like the fight for food, water and sex, whereas others are more abstract, like the spiritual battles of religions. The latter burned yesterday, are burning now, and if we don’t change course, will likely still be ablaze tomorrow.

What sets us apart (as a particularly confrontational species) is our ability to create weapons that extend beyond our physique – brass knuckles, knives, guns, nuclear warheads, etc.

We’ve reached the point where we don’t just fight each other, but have acquired the power to wipe ourselves off the face of the planet. We are today able to, utterly and with no return ticket in hand, send our warring selves back to God.

To be sure, everyone, whether they like it or not, eventually does develop weapons or some form of defence mechanism, some kind of safeguard. Birds evolve high-quality vision and insects counter with camouflage or mimicry. Camouflage is when a praying mantis ends up having a long, stick-like body and limbs, like the sticks and twigs of its habitat, and mimicry is when a creature ends up looking like another that is more dangerous and feared.

Initially, biologists thought the viceroy butterfly mimicked the toxic monarch butterfly, through what is called Batesian mimicry (a harmless animal evolving the visual traits of a harmful one), to scare off predators. Research revealed, however, that viceroy butterflies are poisonous as well, indicating a case of Müllerian mimicry, where two dangerous species share similar warning signs, benefiting both by teaching predators not to eat either, in what is known as collective deterrence.

This is kind of like Nato and the African Union, though the latter isn’t formally militant in nature.

Arms are everywhere in the animal and plant kingdoms: lions and wolves brandish claws and teeth for dominance and survival, snakes and spiders use venom as both an offensive and defensive tool, beetles and porcupines rely on armour and spikes for protection. We could go on and on. All this is innate, inherent and selected.

Beyond evolution

But with Homo sapiens, warfare has swelled beyond biology. It’s become artificial, shaped not by natural selection but by human ingenuity, driven sometimes by malevolence, carrying the struggle for survival into a new and ominous realm.

Who’s to say that human inventiveness, which today helps us fabricate hydrogen bombs, has not been inspired by natural selection, the way our common ancestor chimpanzees and bonobos picked up a femur lying about in the savanna and saw in it a knobkerrie? Certainly not me.

Evolution is to blame there as well. The constant fight for survival is what fuels whatever changes life may require in order to continue long enough to bear offspring: a means of escape, of hunting, of reproducing. That is, until we invent religion, or become consumed by tribalism, or rally behind political ideologies, or divide ourselves through economics and class struggles, or clash over race, culture or language…

We do not necessarily see the other as an enemy. Leopards don’t view impalas as foes. The two don’t fight over land, skin colour, gender privileges, or any of the things that so often preoccupy humans. Sure, leopards might clash with other leopards, and impalas might spar with one another over territory or sex privileges, but even these conflicts are part of the natural order and humans have them, too. They’re raw, instinctive and free from the complexities that humans inject into life. Take Homo sapiens out of the equation and the rest of the animal kingdom would be free of crusades, inquisitions and all the other squabbles.

War’s toll

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” begins one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, “That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.”

I don’t know if hope is all we’ve got left, but I know that if we don’t have at least that, we’re sunk and trapped, cornered and dying. Terrified individuals are capable of anything – capable, even, of pressing the red button.

Israel has once again unleashed its full military force on Gaza. The reasons behind the conflict are complex, but at the heart of it is a struggle over land and deeply rooted religious differences that stretch back for centuries.

The age-old tale of David and Goliath feels like it is playing out once more, broadcast on television screens across the globe. Jerusalem, a city claimed by both sides, stands as a symbol of the larger battle – two opposing beliefs, each rooted in their proper God, locked in perpetual conflict.

To Our Land by Mahmoud Darwish cries: “To our land, / and it is the one surrounded with torn hills, / the ambush of a new past / To our land, and it is a prize of war.”

War is sad. It’s so sad that even those who declare it, and the generals who carry it out, find it sad.

War is reckless, rarely necessary and incredibly painful, because “After every war / someone has to clean up. / Things won’t / straighten themselves up, after all. / Someone has to push the rubble / to the side of the road, / so the corpse-filled wagons / can pass.” (By Wisława Szymborska.)

Sometimes that rubble contains memories of a loved one or their belongings, which dwell forever in the minds of the bereft. DM

Rethabile Masilo is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho who lives in Paris, France.

Raising things

By Rethabile Masilo

As evening settles its dark wing on us
we lie inside another night till even that night
has nothing to say to us, till the crickets
are quiet outside and bats are out, piercing night
with their radar. There is no sound
other than that of hooves as the devil
goes by, on an evening stroll with his family.
This happens night after night in these suburbs
where evil likes to walk. I live in Qoaling. It is
my home. One night the devil and his family
didn’t clop by as usual, but smashed our door down
and trotted in, pierced Motlatsi’s lung with a horn,
ransacked the whole house looking for Ben,
and finally left without him. In the morning
the smell of sulphur still hung everywhere in the air,
inside the rooms. Anybody can raise hell,
where’s the one who can also raise the dead?

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Maverick Life

Natural law

Beyond evolution

War’s toll

Raising things