*  This refers to Clever Panda which does not seem to be a copyrighted image or idea but seems to have risen organically and its paw prints are all over the web to become like a meme.

In a 23 February column in Politicsweb, Andrew Donaldson suggested that to save the Rhino from the depredations caused by the Chinese quack remedy industry, we should just reclassify them as Pandas – an eminently innovative approach.  At least the Rhino is hornier than the Panda so breeding back their numbers should be a doddle.   Andrew’s sentiment prompted today’s whimsical cartoon.

Unfortunately, the facts on the ground are not whimsy.  In the decade, 2011 to 2020, about 6800 Rhino were slaughtered at a rate of just under 2 per day.

One of the reasons for the dramatic rise of zooicidal killings, from insignificant numbers prior to 2007, was the advent to the throne by the ANC’s very own Rhino, the horny, thick-skinned and throwback Zuma who was allowed to preside over the country without adult supervision.  Replacing the successful Scorpions with the ineffectual Hawks, the general hollowing out of the Police, together with the very important division of Crime Intelligence and repurposing of the State Security for his own ends, gave carte blanche to parasitic poachers.

In general, the blame should also be laid at the door of the ANC and their brother liberation movements in neighbouring countries whom they refuse to criticise.  The steadily worsening economic conditions in the region and South Africa in particular and the concomitant increasing unemployment has led people to take desperate measures – poaching is one of those.

Many approaches have been tried – like dehorning – but with limited success.  Perhaps Andrew Donaldson is right and we have to think out the box – Priscilla has.

The Phantom of the Opera was a novel written by Gaston Leroux in 1910 and made into a hit musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber in 1986.  It concerns the behind-the-scenes machinations and manipulations of a badly scarred and elusive man in the bowels of the Paris Opera House.  I thought it is a reasonable metaphor of the delusional Mr Putin who wishes to direct and control the world according to his perverse and scarred world view from the labyrinth of his subterranean mind.

Putin directed and starred in his own stage production of lies and bombast on the 18^th of March in the packed World Cup stadium in Moscow and his crowd was definitely bigger than Trump’s even if many had to be coerced or bussed in.  I’m not sure his lies were bigger though and the jury is still out on the question of whose ego is bigger.  Where Putin beats Trump hands down, though, is in his Machiavellian nature.  As Churchill once said about a fellow politician, “He took off his face to reveal his mask.”

Things didn’t end well for the Phantom and hopefully so too for his re-incarnation.

By now, most of the world must have seen the bizarre images of Vladimir seriously social distancing from everyone else, and that’s Putin it mildly.  Even that Young Un with the bad haircut is not as wacky as this.  It first came to my attention when the diminutive fighting cock and Napoleon wannabe from France, Micron, flew to Russia for talks with the pathological Putin just prior to his misguided invasion of Ukraine.  The ostensible reason for the extreme separation was that the Micron had refused to take a Russian PCR test.  I would have too.  He didn’t trust the Russians not to put a little Novichok on the swab or to use his DNA to develop a Micron specific drug that would turn his guts into Macaroni with lots of tomato sauce leaking out.  But it seems that Micron wasn’t the only person to be treated this way.  We have since seen him interacting with his Generals across even greater distances.  This almost comical behaviour along with his bloating in the last five years has led Western commentators to divine various things about him.

1.  This is a wiener waggling contest of my table is bigger than yours.  Given this 5’ 6” cardboard cut-out hero’s penchant for heroic poses, his ego problem is a very real one and he seems to have satisfied it by bullying his smaller neighbours – Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine.  (This is one of my theories and not punted by more reputable commentators.)

2.  He is suffering from paranoid dementia.  His irrational behaviour and incoherent justifications could indicate dementia.  As for the paranoid aspect, every Russian leader since the Revolution has lived in fear for their lives.  After a falling out, Trotsky escaped to Mexico where he survived two assassination attempts before finally succumbing to an assassin who attempted to perform a full-frontal lobotomy with an ice-pick in 1940.  Using an ice pick as a weapon in Mexico is typical of the NKVD’s and, later, the KGB’s lack of subtlety.  At home, Stalin solved his problem by routinely shooting members of his inner circle, all except for the butcher, Beria, his head of the security police.  Beria didn’t survive Nikita Khrushchev though when he was judicially executed in 1953.  The rest of the leaders seemed to have survived more or less intact, but as Shakespeare put it, ‘uneasy is the head that wears a crown’.  However, dissidents, defectors and, more lately, opposition leaders have continued to feel the Russian predilection for using poisons to settle a different point of view.  Novichok is the current poison of choice but dioxin is a perennial favourite.

3.  Some have floated the idea that Putin is suffering from a ‘roid rage problem.  His current bloating does suggest that he has abused steroids to make himself seem more manly without spending hours in the gym.

4.  Still others suggest that he might be under treatment for an undisclosed condition which has left his immune system seriously compromised.  His only immunity left, is the immunity to criticism and rationality.

But none of these are a reason for hope.  Take the case of Mugabe.  Irrespective of the rumours of his imminent demise that ran the gamut of medical textbooks, he was like an Energizer bunny for the next 30 years except for the odd catnap during meetings.  Until the very end he continued to stick it to Grace and his people.

Take your pick of the above, but I have a more prosaic answer – being short and suffering from the full range of associated complexes, Putin fears and despises long Covid and his poison scientists probably determined that 20ft (6m) is a minimum safe distance.