A puma roams through Saxony-Anhalt: Why we deserve these dangerous animals

It's just like in the summer two years ago, when a "lion" was spotted in Kleinmachnow and terrified all of Berlin for days. Once again, there's a shaky video claiming to prove the existence of the real puma. Once again, experts are certain: the danger is real, along with a warning from the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance .

And another large-scale search operation, this time around the Braunsbedra Marina, complete with a police helicopter. "It's not a fake," says Sabine Faulstich, head of the public order department for the Saale district in Saxony-Anhalt . Residents are staying in their homes. People are looking around before getting out of their cars in front of the supermarket. You wouldn't want to be in their shoes, just like the parents with their children at the nearby campsite feel.

It's like those two summer nights in Berlin: As you took out the trash as the sun was setting, or rode your bike through the south of the city, you felt a new shiver down your spine, thinking that a lioness might be waiting for you in a dark corner or even on the street and attack you. The danger from the jungle, the queen of the beasts. Now the puma, whose origins and whereabouts are unknown.

The lioness didn't exist. It was just a wild boar . But what if the puma doesn't appear again? What if the people of Anhalt are left in the dark as to whether it is dead or has disappeared, whether it perhaps never existed, or whether it continues to wander unrecognized through the gardens and steppes of the Saalekreis? Perhaps it will reveal itself again, perhaps not. From one day to the next, we have once again made a leap into pre-modern times and Bible stories, in which wild animals and monsters played a perfectly natural role in everyday thought.

The animals represent the currently reanimated risk society

These animals, which suddenly appear repeatedly on streets, sneak through basements, or hide in bushes – the snakes, alligators, bears, lions, and pumas – are the perfect metaphor for our time, indeed, ultimately for the turning point in history itself. For they represent the currently revived risk society in which we find ourselves since the sociologist Ulrich Beck coined the term in the 1980s. In which epidemics strike the world out of nowhere, in which nuclear war is seriously discussed, with the climate catastrophe that wipes out all humankind forming the backdrop. Yes, we deserve these dangerous wild animals. For the world, including ours, is once again full of dangers.

It's the threat from the jungle, from a foreign culture. The grace of this natural being that frightens humans in their greatest ideal of coexistence, the invention of civilizations and cities. Will there finally be a new coexistence with animals, as many scientists have long called for? Or will we become even more afraid of the "other" creatures of this earth, the ravenous wolves, the snakes, and crocodiles that slither through our gardens. Incidentally, a leopard once stalked the area's fields in 2021. It had escaped from private captivity.