Eating Ants With Bear Grylls — the Secret to Prince George’s Success?
Grylls praised the ant-eating royal child for his “bravery.”
Imagine you’re an ant. (Though not an ant with Woody Allen’s voice; it’s problematic.) You’re going along about your business, walking in your little ant parade, looking for a crumb, when something blocks out the sun. Your ant heart (a non-heart pumping organ called a dorsal aorta) sinks. You’ve heard lore of the large beasts and their murderous appendages before, but this seems different. What’s that? No … it couldn’t be … is it … the pudgy little fingers of a royal child?
It flashes through your tiny ant brain; a scene in which your ant colony is invited to a royal celebration in your honor. Each of you is knighted with a miniature sword. You live out your days in a castle, feasting on all the crumbs your dorsal aorta desires. Though you generally consider yourself a fairly serious fellow, you let a small ant smile creep across your face. Could better days be ahead? You’re picked up by the child, sure you are on your way to the kingdom. And you are, indeed.
Just not the kingdom you anticipated.
“[Prince George] was down here, and just as we were chatting, a stream of ants went across his feet,” survivalist Bear Grylls said during a recent appearance on Good Morning Britain. “Him and me looked at them, he looked at me with those amazed wide eyes, and I said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to eat one.’ And he said, ‘Oh, really?’ And we ate.”
Yes, you (the ant) were eaten alive by Prince George, at the suggestion of Bear Grylls, a television personality. The brutal feast happened during the King’s Cup regatta on the Isle of Wight in 2019, making the child six years old at the time. “It was a privilege to give the future king his first ant,” Grylls said, and of course it must have been. “His eyes lit up, as they do with anyone when they’re out in the wild and they face a few fears and overcome them, so good for him. What a little hero.”
Bear Grylls won the regatta that day, and in his acceptance speech he gave the ant-eating baby a shout-out. “Prince George,” he said, “your first ant you ate today. That is a great moment. Well done, you.”
It’s occasions like this that force us to hope, against our own better judgement, that the kingdom of God is indeed a reality. I hope this ant has found peace, wherever his soul now resides. And I pray for the remaining ants of Cambridge, dwindling as I assume their population must be. May God bless your forsaken souls. And may your deaths be yummy for the prince.
