As human civilization has spread itself out over the march of millennia, displacing wildlife as we go, we have found it advisable to strip the animal kingdom of its armies, to decommission its officers. Some of these erstwhile adversaries we have hunted to extinction, or nearly so. Others we relegate to zoos, confine in child-friendly safari parks. The balance we shunt to the margins as we clear the land for ourselves—erecting our own sprawling habitats on the ruins of theirs, naming our cul-de-sacs for whatever wilderness we dozed to pave them. Peer through news reports, though, and one can find pockets of resistance, as if some ancient animal instinct were furtively reasserting itself. Consider the kamikaze bobcat in Cottonwood, Arizona, that set out on a rampage one recent March evening, menacing a worker outside a Pizza Hut and then sauntering into a bar, sending patrons onto the pool table, mauling the one who dared to snap a picture on his phone. Or the frenzied otter in Vero Beach, Florida, at a waterfront golf community called Grand Harbor, that gnawed three residents, one of them while out on the links.
