(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 27 December 2012, Cape Town, South Africa, Srimad Bhagavatam 8.6.39)
One living being is food for another. So that is a very brutal design, basically intense! And you may think, as a human being, you are not subjected to it in the same way as animals are, like a bird when it drinks water. When we drink water, we don’t look (around) all the time but the bird does have to look because when it is breakfast time for the bird; he is not sure if he is going to have breakfast or if he is the going to be breakfast – that is a consideration in bird existence.
So in animal existence, it is very brutal and direct whereas in human existence, generally speaking, we are not too worried about that. Most of us are not so worried about being eaten. There is a slight risk that a shark gets through a net and swipes you off your surf board. There is a slight risk that when you go to the lion park and you decide to get your picture taken by the lions – 999 out of 1000 times nothing happens because those lions are tamed, lazy and overfed. But it could happen, 1 in a 1000, that one lion, with one nail, zips you open and bites off your head! That is a possibility but not so likely. Then I guess, it comes back in modern forms. I think all these predators have now re-incarnated in the form of hijackers and so on. So the African karma still continues with that element of risk but okay it is kind of minimized and not so much in the forefront.
