Fantastically said, and something to which all of us, through our common genetic and evolutionary lineage, can appreciate on one level or another.

Given the evolutionary success of mountain lions versus humans when the two come into close conflict, I'd think that they'd be the ones to feel a twinge.

Yeah, that mountain lion could probably carve up a lone, unarmed person, given the advantage of surprise, without much trouble. That would work once or twice.

The problem is, humans are not only the top predator on the planet, but also pack animals. If you're a mountain lion and you start munching on humans, you've got pretty good odds that the next time you go out in search of some tasty humans, you're going to eat a spear or something. Yeah, a mountain lion's got sharp claws on each of four feet and can sprint 40 miles per hour. That's pretty impressive, in one sense.

However, humans have:

• Long had a "claw" (spear, or more primitive things like stones) that can reach hundreds of feet and physical adaptation to allow throwing it.

• Can (when in good shape, which to be fair most of us on Reddit probably are not) run just about anything else on earth to ground in endurance. We humans sink heat extremely well from our hairless, thin bodies, and don't overheat during continued existence. Our complicated, awkward balancing on our spine has given us a relentless, tireless, horribly efficient run that can run a horse or deer to earth in exhaustion if need be. We aren't very impressive sprinters, sure. But we don't need to be, because there's nothing that we need to sprint to catch — once we start running after it, it's ours. And there's nothing that we need to be fast enough to run away from, because anything that starts preying on humans winds up very dead in short order, due in part to the other points:

• if threatened with something that is dangerous to a single human, can (and do) band together in sufficient numbers to bring down whatever is threatening them. If you kill and eat a couple mountain lions as a human, no problem. You just have to deal with dealing with each individual mountain lion. If a mountain lion tries to bring down a human, it may be able to get away with it the first time or two, but after that, it's going to have a pack of very dangerous armed humans coming after it that are far in excess of what it can deal with, and which have much greater endurance than it does.

• And of course, that's not even taking into account that brain that you've got (beyond very basic tool use and the ability to operate in a pack).

Most animals stay well away from people, and that's for good reason. It's because their great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers did, and a lot of their great-granduncles and great-grandaunts did not and didn't survive to pass on their genes.

If a bear or a tiger starts eating humans, it will be killed by other humans in short order. All part of natural (or artificial, depending upon how you want to look at it) selection.

If you look at guides for how to deal with mountain lions, they tell you to stand up, to raise your arms, not to bend over on all fours — basically, to look as much like a human as possible.

All right, yeah, there are still some things that are almost certainly vestiges of some past where humans were threatened by something dangerous to them. The movement of the legs of spiders, particularly large ones, triggers a strong, visceral reaction in a lot of people, for example. But it's a pretty good bet that that unique, fluid, human two-legged stride, those long arms, free to wave around high above the ground, that hairless body... that probably generates an even greater visceral "oh no no stay well away" reaction in most animals. It took thousands of years, but animals have developed a damned good sense that humans are very bad news.