While it is true that rape, torture and murder are more commonplace in the animal kingdom than they are in human civilization, our fellow creatures almost always seem to have some kind of evolutionary justification for their actions — one that we Homo sapiens lack.
Cats, for instance, are known to toy with small birds and rodents before finally killing them. Although it is easy to conclude that this makes the popular pet a born sadist, some zoologists have proposed that exhausting prey is the safest way of catching them. Similarly, it’s tempting to describe the way African lions and bottlenose dolphins — large, social mammals — commit infanticide (the killing of young offspring), as possibly psychopathic. Interestingly, experts suspect that these creatures are in fact doing themselves a favor; by killing offspring, adult males are making their female partners available to mate again.
These behaviors, which initially may seem symptomatic of some sinister psychological defect, turn out to be nothing more than different examples of the kind of selfishness that evolution is full of.
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Regardless of whether the academic community is talking about humans or animals, however, the underlying conviction guiding the conversation — that every action, no matter how upsetting or implacable, must have a logical explanation — is one and the same.
