Monkeypox, Covid and the trouble with our species

I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking back this week through the vast underground vaults at Spectator HQ I see that centuries ago in April 2020 I explained the problem with us humans as a species. As I said back then, someone always shags a monkey. There are almost eight billion of us on this planet today, and the likelihood that we’re all going to make judicious decisions all the time is vanishingly small. The mating decisions of the species alone are notoriously prone to trial and error. And the entire future of our species rides perpetually along this cliff edge.

Last month I read in the Indian press of four men arrested by police in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Their crime? Going on footage collected from their mobile phones, the men, in their thirties and forties, stand accused of gang-raping, killing, cooking and eating a rare monitor lizard in one of India’s most protected nature reserves.