By now you've probably all heard about the lions who saved a young girl from her captors in Ethiopia. What you may not have read, at the tail end (yuk, yuk) of the story:
Kidnapping young girls has long been part of the marriage custom in Ethiopia. The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia are by abduction, practiced in rural areas where most of the country's 71 million people live.
The first Roman women were, according to legend, abducted from the Sabines, so we, as the cultural descendants of that act, can't necessarily be totally surprized that such things happen. But a story like this does point out the enormous cultural differences between our world and theirs. Is it any wonder that a large percentage of the world's inhabitants regards western civilization as evil?
Peace,
Tor
Categories: animals
