We've been successful with the primitive response to big cats: pretty much wipe them out, which was some kind of evolutionary triumph, one might suggest.
David Baron says we should try to scare the big cats out of our back yards. Trouble is, they're not scaring so easily any more, and the kind of vengeance spoken of in this article would not, and should not be tolerated--towards animals or people.
Quote:
Big cats present an interesting problem for primitive man. If you have big cats in the area you or your loved ones might end up being eaten for lunch. The trouble is, once you get good enough to be able to kill the occasional cat you still don’t seem to accomplish much. Managing to kill a cat buys you a temporary respite, but then it just gets replaced by another big cat which moves into the newly vacated territory. So trying to fight the cats would seem about as useful as what the liberals hold about fighting terrorism, which is that it’s always been and always will be, and trying to reduce it is futile. Fighting cats probably seemed that way for a long time.
Yet cats can be fought, and we’ve mostly eliminated them as a potential threat of any statistical significance. But until your cat killing abilities are good enough to pretty much wipe them out, which wasn’t until fairly recently, merely killing the cat isn’t the most productive strategy to follow. What would be a better solution would be to keep your local cats alive to defend their territory from intruders, while also making them very, very afraid of your tribe of humans. If you can teach them the lesson to stay away from you and yours, while also keeping the other cats away from you and yours, then you’ve got the ideal solution. You’re no longer game for them, and a large pressure is removed from your tribe.
The question is now how to get a large predator terrified of people.
bastardsword: Vengeance |
So what will our next evolutionary advancement be vis-a-vis big cats?
Does anyone else think big cats, and wild animals in general, are a driver of evolutionary development in humans?
Does anyone else think spiritual development is part of evolutionary development?
See where I'm going?