“We are the apex predator in the animal kingdom. But aside from the few species we have bred to become dependents – mainly dogs – every other creature on earth fears us,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they boil an egg for breakfast. I’ve made a study of it. 

The conservatives wait till the water’s boiling before they put the egg in and hit the three-minute timer. 

I’m at the other end of the spectrum. My egg goes into the saucepan’s cold water and as it heats, I do the other stuff – slice the banana into the cereal, add the prunes, drop raisin bread into the toaster, and boil the jug for coffee. I just “know” when it’s perfectly done – firm outside, runny in the middle. 

Occasionally I get it exactly right… June 15, 2024 was a good one.  

However, this morning was a total disaster and it triggered a train of thought that has left me pale and sad.

There was a slight resistance when the knife struck the shell to lift the lid. But when I dipped the tiny spoon into the white, the yolk rose to cover it with some firmer stuff clinging. 

I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that I was eating an unfertilised potential baby chicken!

Thereafter, every spoonful was a struggle, even though I knew I was being absurdly precious. After all, we Australians consume 18.9 million eggs a day. I looked it up, that’s more than 262 eggs for each of us every year… and we barely give it a thought. But once you start that train it’s very hard to stop it. 

It struck me that we are the apex predator in the animal kingdom. But aside from the few species we have bred to become dependents – mainly dogs – every other creature on earth fears us. I reckon if we took the time to understand their language, we’d discover they actually hate us. And who could blame them?

We either eat them, cage them or kill them. And if you doubt it, ask any koala or kangaroo whose relatives have been ethnically cleansed or “culled”. Birds fly away from us. Whales try to pretend we don’t exist. It’s deeply unnerving. Who wants to belong to the most hated and feared species on the planet? 

It doesn’t stop there. We even do the same things to ourselves. It seems we have this race memory that the other branches of the hominid tree were our competitors for the relatively scarce food, water and caves to shelter in. We’re still at it; our tribes even invent angry gods who they say rule the entire shebang… for eternity!

We like to think we’ve come a long way towards understanding the world and the forces that coalesce to make it operate. We’re living much longer and more comfortably than we did 100,000 years ago. We can fly quite safely in the air and in space. We can see further back than ever before. 

But we’re only at the fringes of quantum mechanics; dark energy and dark matter confounds us, as does an accepted theory that combines gravity with the other forces at play.

We’re entranced by the concept of “first cause”.  But just because each one of us had a beginning – along with all the plants and creatures we see around us – it doesn’t mean that the multiverse had one. The visible universe maybe – in what we call the Big Bang – but there’s no more reason to posit a beginning to the larger entity than to accept that it always was.

That leaves us with a much more interesting challenge: how do we conduct ourselves to give a fair go to our homo-sapien compatriots and our fellow sentient creatures?

We have yet to find a formula that governs our behaviour towards each other. Just ask a battered wife, a brave Ukrainian or anyone in the Middle East. 

As for our sentient fellow travellers on planet Earth, every time we start the day’s journey by consuming an unfertilised potential baby chicken, we demonstrate how far that train has yet to travel.

robert@robertmacklin.com