Changing Behaviour?

(October, 08, Geneva, Sri Lanka Guardian) The photograph shows two lions eating an elephant calf. Though this may offend some, lions are instinctive killers who hunt and kill for food to feed themselves and their cubs. However, on the positive side, they do not engage in mass killing of other animals or their own kind! And, in the wild, lions do not exhibit aberrant behaviour such as males seeking to mate with other males. Despite their faults, we accept lions for what they are. We even call them the King of Beasts!

If we wanted to radically change the behaviour of lions, turn them into passive, harmless creatures like cows, how would it be achieved? Certainly sending them to school for years wouldn't seriously change their instinctive or learned behaviour. Sending them to Church would have about the same effect. Putting a pride of lions in a paddock with a herd of cattle wouldn't achieve much either except to quickly end the herd's existence. Probably the only way we could radically change the lion's behaviour would be to engage in dramatic genetic engineering. Of course, if we did manage to create a passive, harmless lion that was a herbivore, it could be argued that the creature would no longer be a lion.

Now, humans are instinctive killers too. They also hunt and kill other animals for food. But, unlike lions, they DO engage in the mass killing of other animals AND their own kind. As well, all too often, they engage in 'aberrant' behavior like murder, rape, incest, domestic violence, child molestation, drugs, unnatural sex, torture, etc. No amount of education, evolution, deductive or inductive reasoning, religion, inspiring blog posts, toilet training or expensive deodorants, etc, has lessened the aberrant behaviour of most humans or their instinct to kill.

The moral of my post? If we want to live in peace and harmony on earth the only way to achieve it that I can see is to carry out drastic genetic engineering on the entire human race, make us into another creature entirely!