RICHARD FREEMAN: The Mob has Spoken - Crocodiles are the new Paedophiles?

Crocodiles, more exactly man-eating crocodiles have been in the news lately. Recently, an Australian girl was killed by a crocodile whilst swimming in a lagoon in the Black Jungle Conservation Reserve. This is a wildlife reserve known to be inhabited by crocodiles. Who's fault is this, the crocodile for being a crocodile? Or the people for being stupid enough to swim in an area which is supposedly strictly access controlled?

As far as we are concerned, to allow one's eleven year old child, together with other children to wander, and worse to swim, in a place whose very existence is to conserve potentially lethal predators is nothing less than child abuse.

But the public don't see that.

Recently an Indo-Pacific crocodile, estimated to be a titanic thirty feet long killed a girl. She was on her way to a floating school on the Agusan Marsh in the Philippines. The reaction of the public was both hysterical and stupid, recalling the torch-bearing mobs of peasants in Hammer films.

Below are some of the actual comments as they appeared on the Sky News website.

In reaction to exactly this story, I achieved success for the first time, aftsr many efforts, in getting a newspaper letter published, in the Metro, calling for deliberate extermination of all the human predator anmals. Humans don't deserve to be called an intelligent species until we can be morally decisive enough over something so simple and obvious, as the right of self-defence to wipe out our own predators. The anger I feel at this not already having been a priority policy for centuries, is all-consuming beyond belief. It is murder, including of children, for stupid selfish Western conservationists who don't have to live in any danger themselves, to go around raising money to actually protect these monsters. Posted By:Maurice Frank

this is a sick attack whether its natural or not if it was ur lil girl and this happend you would be sayin something diffrent my opinion is that i would blow the whole river up to piesces and find that ******* crock and send it back to hell. Posted By: adil

i think they should kil all the crocadille exept for ones in enclosers they are dangeros and have killed to many children Posted By: laura

The spellings have been left as they were. These morons can't even string a sentance together. Whenever I think I can't despise the general public any more, the dim-witted self-serving idiots prove me wrong. It is semi-literate morons who should be eradicated, not crocodiles. They do far more harm to the progression of the human race.

The crocodile was only following its instincts as a predator. It's an animal not a pedophile (as the hysteria around it might make you think). If we kill off all potentially dangerous animals, then ecosystems will collapse even faster than they are already doing. If the crocodile was indeed thirty feet long, then it is a global treasure. Very few of this size are still around. It should be preserved at all costs.

Animals kill for food. Only humans and chimpanzees kill for spite. People who live cheek by jowl with dangerous animals, need to take precautions not kill all the predators. What a bland little world we would live in if every crocodile, shark, python, wolf, bear and big-cat were exterminated.

As we take up more land and kill off more prey species there will be more attacks. We cannot expect animals to live on fresh air! It is the 21st Century, and surely the appaling notion, fed by misinterpretation of religious tracts, that we are somehow 'better' than other animals, or that other animals exist only for man's use, should have been forgotten years ago.