Acting responsibly?

The papers are full of ‘Community spirit’, ‘Look after the elderly and so on’. Great, it is good to read but what is the reality in the UK? The supermarkets had set a time for elderly and the more vulnerable to shop for an hour, for instance Tesco has set aside Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9-10 am. I applaud the reasoning behind this. Full marks to the supermarket managers. Unfortunately they did forget one thing – the attitude of a good percentage of our wonderful British public. Don’t hoard, don’t panic buy, apparently are switches in our collective brains to do just that – panic buy and hoard as much as you can get away with. Special hours for the vulnerable? To hell with that, as you can see on some of the photos in the papers. Queues start forming way before opening times, snaking around corners for hundreds of yards. People are pathetic to the extreme. What worries me is that this will happen again and again, viruses will continue to crop up. It is the way nature responds to our human infringements and treatments of it. This is not unknown, it is not something we did not foresee, the scientists and doctors have said for a long time the way we go about living there will be a price to pay. And now we are beginning to pay it. If we keep treating animals, all animals, in fact all living things as food we will inevitably run into the same diseases they have. Apparently according to research, proper research, holding bats for food (in China) gave us Covid-19. Part of the rhino family of viruses that give us the colds, flu and other respiratory illnesses. Obviously other animals suffer colds and flu as well. It is no good humans thinking we are the masters, no we’re not, far from it. We are just as dependent on nature as every other living thing. So let’s start acting accordingly.