“We got out of the food chain”

Today’s Guardian has an extract from George Monbiot’s latest book Feral. Writing about the large number of mysterious big cat sightings in the UK Monbiot concludes:

Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories that must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.

There is something rather unappealing about the sentence “They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead.” On this one I am with Louis CK, there are certain advantages to being out of the food chain, living unwild lives.