Is it wrong for a toad to eat a bat? Does it subvert the Great Chain of Being? This is a question we must consider as a group, before it is too late. A cane toad in Peru has very nearly swallowed a bat whole and entire:

This greedy critter was busted mid-meal snacking on a hapless bat he’d plucked out of the air just seconds earlier.
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Peruvian park ranger Yufani Olaya spotted the ravenous cane toad feasting on the tiny beast in Cerros de Amotape national park.

Looking like a bizarre animal hybrid, the toad appeared to have a lengthy tongue and giant ears coming out of his head.

Olaya snapped the pic just before the toad gave up on trying to swallow the critter whole and let it fly free.

Charles Linkem, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, said that as cane toads don’t have teeth then it would have tried to crush and swallow its prey

I have written extensively on this topic in the past and will now quote myself at length:

Last month I received a tip that promised video footage of a pelican eating a pigeon; the source was reliable and the footage was produced. Upon further investigation, I discovered an entire series of videos on YouTube dedicated exclusively to documenting the pigeon-consumption process (it is horrifying and borderline unwatchable, but also incredible). This is at least understandable. Large birds can and do eat other birds; they are both denizens of the sky. It is right and natural that they should inhabit different rungs on the same food chain. But for a fish to seek to prey above its rightful station bodes ill. At the time, I did not believe that a video of a bird being eaten, however bizarrely, to be newsworthy; how innocent I was then.

It is decisively and definitively wrong for a fish to eat a bird. It is unsettling and cannibalistic for a pelican to eat another bird, although perhaps not wrong in the strictest sense of the term. But how do the toad and the bat relate to one another? Which should be the predator and which the prey?

Normally, this question could be resolved simply by asking which one of them is capable of flight. Creatures that are capable of flight may eat things that swim on the sea or writhe on the dirt; this is their right as our betters. But a bat does not fly, exactly. A bat wobbles. A bat flings itself from place to place. A bat sleeps in a cave, rather than in a tree. A bat cannot be said to soar majestically. No one finds a bat’s nest and takes photos of the pale blue eggs inside. The bat does not toil during the day; as a creature of the night we can perhaps be said to have no loyalty to it. A bat, like a toad, is a villain. Yet bats are mammals like ourselves. Surely we cannot allow a reptile or an amphibian to harm a mammal.

Not to go on all fours. Are we not Men?

But a toad is a sneak and a liar. A toad hides in the mud. A toad pretends to be mud, in order to commit murder on unsuspecting beasts. A toad has no teeth and cannot chew like an honest killer; a toad crushes its victims like the evil car-smasher in The Brave Little Toaster. Does the toad have the right to snatch even a bat from its rightful place in the sky? What would come next? The chicks of a flightless bird?

This particular bat escaped its particular death. This time. But it will happen again. No toad is content to return to grubs and fish-eggs after it realizes it can hunt the beasts of the air. The question must be answered, and soon.

[Image via Flickr Creative Commons]