Among the planet’s major predator species, only humans nurture their own prey. While other predators coldly stalk their victims before they ravage them, we humans — we modern humans — prefer to spend time with them and win their trust before we slay them and masticate their flesh. This practice has many virtues and efficiencies. It saves us the tiring trouble of the chase and allows us to slaughter our unsuspecting quarry at our convenience, at any pace and in any quantity. But perhaps its greatest benefit to humans — our befriending and then betraying, at scale, the fauna we find most digestible — is the moral benefit. It lets us regard ourselves as civilized, as something higher and more refined than fanged, rapacious monsters craving blood.

The cougar, or puma, or mountain lion — the culprit in a spectacular, violent incident which we will examine further down — takes a rather more …