In Lesheba Wilderness, high up on the border of South Africa and Zimbabwe, lives a wildebeest who thinks he's a zebra. A few years ago, you could see him gazing out from the huddle of wildebeests into the tangle of zebra, longing, it seemed, to join that striped lot. So it seemed natural for him to switch allegiance with his instincts when, tail twitching, hooves stamping, he invited himself to stay with them.
For some reason, they accepted him and now he never looks toward the wildebeests the way he once did to the zebras.
The people who live around there don't seem bothered at all that this wild thing should be so confused. They've seen it all before, and withhold judgment on matters involving wild things. Yet I'm morbidly fascinated. Why--and how--could the wildebeest decide so securely that he was, like a transexual, born into the wrong body?
Animal Planet footage showed how, unbelievably, a lioness adopted a baby bok of some sort. She groomed it, shielded it from the sun, herded it gently back when it strayed too far. She couldn't feed it, of course, so we watched it grow thinner over the few days the camera followed. It was a mercy when, once she turned her back for just a moment, the dominant male lion snatched that baby. As nature intended, he devoured it. The staggered adoptive mother circled and cried for her baby, just beyond reach of her mate's claws.
The naturalist who followed this lioness through the course of a season told us that she adopted at least five more bok babies, losing them to starvation and predation before disappearing herself.
What's any of that got to do with me?
I'm confused.
