Escaping Violently

IN 1763, after yet another of their endless eighteenth century world wars, the British "acquired" India from France as a colonial "possession", as part of the peace treaty of what we in America called the "French and Indian War." In 1800, the ever vigilant British decided to start keeping track of how many people in India were killed by Tigers, since the number appeared, on the surface at least, to be, shall we say, rather substantial. Impoverished barefoot subsistance farmers living in small rural villages, hundreds of millions of potential human meals for Tigers, eaten by the thousands. By 1800, the British had a list of roughly three hundred thousand Tiger attackees. To this day, Tiger attacks continue in India, although at a much reduced rate. Its sort of accepted, in their culture, that the Tiger will prey and eat, someone, sometime... One can scarcely imagine the carnage prior to 1700, going back millions of years, humans being eaten by not only Tigers, but by heaven only knows how many other predators, huge animals far more powerful than we, bulls, bears, wolves, cats of all kinds, using humans as prey, by the millions. Our human time as prey has been much overlooked by us today, officially, even though it constitutes most of our history, and continues to this day, though fortunately greatly reduced. We don't think or write about it much, or teach it in school. But it survives in everything we do, really. It accounts for our persistent fear of one another, and other animals, for one thing. Humankind most likely invented fear and aggression, and both religion and war as methods of dealing with our status as prey, as a means of overcoming it, and becoming predators ourselves instead. Of all the animals to ever evolve on earth, only humans evolved from being prey, to being predators. We learned, after long years of scaveging the kills of other predators, how to defend ourselves, and how to hunt, then we proceeded to wipe out every other predatory animal on the planet. Pretty impressive. But today we are left with the violent residue of our primitive solution. Maybe on some other planet intelligent life will arise, or has arisen, which did not spend an enternal internship as prey, and thus didn't invent all the violent barbarism with which humans overcame it. It may well be that all the misery of our modern world was not inevitable, but rather, was a choice, a natural selection survival choice, among many choices. If only we had never been preyed upon so relentlessly by the rest of the animal kindgom, we might not have been so desperate as to invent barbaric religions (most religions conduct animal or human sacrifices) and barbaric violence. Just think of what we could have accomplished by now!