You can take a beast out of the wild, but you can’t take the “wild” out of the beast.

That would seem to be the moral of this plainly-immoral tale.

Alas, poor Deasy.

She had a pet crocodile that she’d christened Mercy. Unfortunately, the beast seemed to have had no such quality because Mercy ate Deasy.

Deasy Tuwo, the head of a laboratory at a pearl farm in Minahasa in North Sulawesi, was killed by her enormous, 14-foot pet last Thursday, the authorities said.

“The 44-year-old’s badly mauled body was found by colleagues the following morning,” Hendrik Rundengan, from the local conservation agency, said.

“The indication is that she fell into the crocodile’s enclosure,” adding that the incident was still being investigated by police.

President Jokowi was more eloquent. “It’s sad to see that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a wild crocodile,” said the country’s head of state so sympathetically that it brought tears to the eyes of his people. 

Watching from the side-lines in Kuala Lumpur, RM – and I don’t mean Ringgit Malaysia – agreed and threw her not-inconsiderable weight behind a worldwide campaign that argued that all crocodiles should evolve into what God had intended in the first place – handbags or, its last offer, shoes. 

But was it as simple as a clear-cut case of Deasy meets Mercy; Deasy likes Mercy; Mercy eats Deasy?

The lab-head’s neighbours were incredulous, pointing out that the two seemed well, close.

Not close enough,  snorted the merciless Mercy which had been plotting this for a while now. That was why, the rascally reptile reasoned,  they needed to be, well, “closer.”

It was, the crocodile reflected with glee, the chance slip between “her cup and my lip” that did Deasy in. It was also why the rapacious reptile had quietly informed her close friend and ally Charity, a snapping turtle much beloved by Deasy, that she intended to have an old friend over for dinner “soon.”

You see, Mercy was no fool. She knew her legal onions as well as any other Indonesian shyster which was why the local legal fraternity extended her a professional courtesy becoming of any self-respecting reptile. 

She had seen the look in her owner’s eyes the day she went past 14 feet in length. It was a look of greed, the look that screamed “there but for the grace of Deasy goes a Birkin handbag worth US$250,000.” 

It was, thought the reptile with a shudder, the RM look.

Mercy had therefore begun carefully preparing her case. She put it out that she was a nice crocodile; a gentle giant and the sensitive sort of liberal who frowned on something as heartless as capital punishment. 

Such were the heart-warming anecdotes about the lovable croc that it divided the Indonesian people. Case in point: onions, for example, made Mercy cry which was a little known fact unbeknownst to many Indonesians. They sympathised because it made them cry too. 

Despite her claim of self-defence, the courts generally took a dim view of owner-gobbling pets. Charity stood turtle-fully by her and corroborated the onion angle but it was all in vain. 

Mercy was tried and sentenced to become shoes. Charity sobbed while  Faith and Hope were nowhere in evidence.

Mercy duly became shoes and was exported to the United States. And a rich American finally got his crocodile shoes.

But he’s suing because they don’t fit his croc.