Observations on behaviour

One of the plethora of awesome things that I endeavor to get into whilst en brousse is "ponder time".  Its fun, just try to actively take in all that's been happening to you and look for patterns, nuance, riddles, or moments and behaviours that can be applied to larger ideas.  Well thanks to a little punk known by "Arnol" (he is the youth who fell asleep while petting my dog featured in my Instagram post recently) I've stumbled across an interesting observation on behavior.  Arnol visits my courtyard from time to time and he has the look of being much better cared for than the typical village youth due to the fact that he is a functionaire's child and with that package also comes a modicum of French which permits me to converse with his 5 year old self.  Well despite the fact that he is a functionaire child he still mingles with all the village children as they wander about village bringing the ruckus and doing whatever it is that they do to fill their days.  One of these practices is scouring the village with stones and slingshots in search one of the local species of lizards.  The village children collect these dead guys up and then scoot off to someone's cook fire and proceed to feast on the lizards.  Arnol never really sticks around for the cooking and feasting parts of this activity because he doesn't really have to, he gets reasonably well fed at home so he remains blissfully unaware of the true purpose of the lizard hunts, simply understanding it to be a fun game.  Well during my time in village I  have yet to discover any nefarious practices of these lizard brethren.  In fact, I encourage their existence in my courtyard because they gleefully eat the ample ant population that flocks to my garden beds.  I keep an open door policy on my courtyard during the day for the local kids because I'm usually tinkering with some sort of DIY drip irrigation system or planting new growing bags and they love to watch and help.  Often times they go into exports of delight at the sight of all my delicious edible lizards and I must quickly calm them down before they start hauling off stones all over the place in their efforts to kill them and I'd rather just share my bag of beans with them rather than watch them wreak havoc on what had previously been a perfectly orderly courtyard. Sometimes its just me and Arnol in the courtyard and I might be explaining how often to water the different plants when I see a hard look settle in his eye and following his line of site a see a harmless lizard slurping up ants on my wall.  He then informs me "je vais le tuer" and I ask him why he is going to kill it.  "Je dois le touer", oh now he must kill it.  Are you going to eat it? Blank look, shakes head "no".  Well why do you have to kill it, Arnol? Still doesn't know, "c'est comme ca".  Oh that's just how it is? Well Arnol, you cannot kill the lizard today.  It intrigues me as to why Arnol truly feels that he has to kill this lizard seeing that I have found no necessitated motive to kill this speedy lil beasties.  For instance we readily kill mice, they ruin food.  We hack snakes to pieces with machetes, they're poisonous.  I've seen an entire village flock together to beat a rabid dog to death with rocks before it could bite someone, but in a culture where they simply sho away large spiders rather than kill them since they are in fact harmless I can't quite piece together a motive for Arnol's bloodlust.  Every time it happens the best Arnol can come up with is that that is just how it is and I find that to be an interesting perspective.  It's an accidental glance into the possible origin and propagation of some of the more perplexing human behaviors found in the world today.  Behaviors that may have arisen to solve some ecological or adaptive need that have become so tightly woven into a cultural fabric that they are no longer understood or questioned in much the same way that Arnol so cheerfully aped the behaviors of his youthful village cohorts without bothering to ask why when they could have easily told him, they were hungry.  These types of practices are often times the results of bigger systematic pressures rather than the cause of general problems and trying to fix them as a problem in and of itself is like trying to fix a leak simply by wiping up the water on the ground.  When enacting policy or working to adjust human behavior on a grander scale it would behoove us to search carefully the sources before leaping to solutions.  Arnol's rate of lizard murder would be much more drastically affected, for instance, by creating a more food secure environment in village rather than enacting a ban on lizards killings.  It also wouldn't hurt, in our own daily lives, to ask ourselves what behaviors we have become comfortable with simply because that is how it is, we might just be surprised.