It is not a case of being implacably opposed to hunting. Aside from the fact that it is hypocritical to rail against it if one is willing to eat meat and wear leather, there are compelling economic and conservation arguments to be made for it.

Nevertheless, it is likely that many hunters – a statistically significant number, maybe even a majority, were they willing to expose themselves to scientific scrutiny – have small winkies. Really teeny ones and, one suspects, more often than not lacking in the necessary hydraulics.

After all, commercial hunting has more to do with indulging atavistic appetites and showing off to other men than it has to do with filling the pot. Rich men who mount trophies on their mansion walls after potting them from the back of a truck, more than likely don’t mount much else.

So it is particularly pleasing when, just occasionally, the Darwinian process is revealed and an obviously stagnant human gene pool allows the lesser species to come out on top.

There is, for example, the local idiot who went last week went fishing off Umhlanga and drove his new 4x4 twin-cab bakkie onto the beach. This was in defiance of the ban on beach driving, because of the damage it does to the dunes and the marine ecology. But many 4x4 freaks ignore the ban, since convenience is far more important than the survival of rare turtle species.

After some time spent depleting further the already parlously low fish stocks off the East coast, he returned to to find the bakkie would not start. While he ran around like a chicken without a head (or if you prefer, flopped about like a fish without a head) the tide came in and swept out the 4x4.

For the next six hours he watched helplessly as it churned and mangled the bakkie, eventually spitting it back onto the beach, completely destroyed. Ag, shame man. What a bummer.

Then there is the tale of the party of happy hunters in the American Deep South. Armed with with automatic rifles, they hired an aeroplane for a low-level straffing raid of some local wildlife.

In their state of extreme excitement, as notoriously happens when men are sexually aroused, the blood short-circuited straight to their winkies. With their brains crucially deprived of oxygen, it was just a matter of time before a particularly enthusiastic burst of combined automatic rifle fire shot off much of the one wing, whereupon the plan crashed with several fatalities.

This might be an urban myth, since my Internet search has turned up no confirmation, but the person who recounted it is adamant that it is true. One can only hope so.

The recent discovery of Gliese 581, a planet with Earth-like conditions, sparked much speculation as to whether it had intelligent life. But it is the incidence of intelligent life on Earth itself that remains a more crucially unresolved issue.

There is lots of brain activity among people but real intelligence is a rare phenomenon. A cursory read of any newspaper proves the point.

Some years back the European Union banned feeding of animal parts and bone meal to any farmed animals. It followed the culling of millions of cattle when it was proved that Mad Cow Disease – which in turn caused a human brain-wasting condition – resulted from the cattle being fed animal parts.

The ban is unpopular with EU farmers, who complain about the cost of replacing slaughterhouse offal with vegetable protein. So this week the EU officials backed off and decided that “despite some health reservations” it would again allow pig meat to be fed to chickens, and chicken meat to pigs.

One awaits Nature’s revenge with glee. Perhaps this time round it would make sense before culling the mad chickens and pigs, to cull the mad EU bureaucrats.

Jaundiced Eye column, 9 June 2007