Our Job as the Dominant Species

A deeper argument sits underneath every safety rule in this book. Human beings are the dominant species on this planet. We did not earn that position through strength, speed, claws or armor. By those measures we are unremarkable, and against a large crocodilian we are hopelessly outmatched. We are dominant because of our minds: our intelligence, our capacity to plan, to cooperate, to imagine consequences and act on them. That is our entire advantage, and it changes the moral arithmetic entirely.

Because if our dominance comes from our intelligence, then the responsibility that comes with that dominance is ours too. The animals that share this planet, crocodilians the most ancient among them, were here long before us. Crocodilians’ lineage predates humanity by tens of millions of years. We are the newcomers. We are the ones with the power to wipe a species out, as we very nearly did to this one, and we are the only ones with the power to choose not to. No crocodilian can decide to coexist with us. Only we can decide to coexist with it.

Coexistence is the intelligent choice

Being croc wise, seen this way, is the practical, everyday form of a much bigger idea: that the smart species, the species that can foresee outcomes, has a duty to develop ways of living alongside the animals it could so easily destroy. When we keep our distance, obey the signs, build patrolled lagoons instead of demanding crocodilian-free rivers, and manage rather than exterminate, we are doing the thing that only an intelligent, moral species can do. We are choosing a world that still has crocodilians in it.

The reflex, after a death, is to say just cull them. It sounds simple. It is nothing of the kind. Culling crocodilians is dangerous, expensive work, hungry for manpower and time, and driving the population back down would gut an ecosystem these animals hold together. On top of that, it does not even work: remove crocodilians from an area and others move in to fill it, while the false sense of security left behind can get people killed. Reducing a species to the edge of survival again would also be unlawful, and rightly so. Just cull them is a brutish shortcut, reached for by people who cannot see another way. The intelligent answer is harder and better: change our behavior, not the existence of the animal. Keep ourselves safe and keep crocodilians alive. Those two goals are not in conflict. They are the same goal, pursued by a species grown up enough to hold both at once.

We are not dominant because we can destroy. We are dominant because we can choose, and, working together, choose to protect every one of these species rather than erase them.