As I was writing the latest chapter of my book, The Children Of Wolves, while sitting in my family’s home outside Colchester, I overheard the news speaking of a fatal tiger attack at a Yorkshire zoo. I looked up the gruesome footage, mercifully edited. In it I watched as a young man, who was clearly mentally impaired or intoxicated in some manner, sat on the ground as an almost equally confused Siberian tiger – the largest of all the big cats – attempted to find a way to attack a body shape it had never before encountered as prey, and most particularly one that didn’t run away.

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The man proceeded to tell off the tiger in the finger-wagging manner of an affronted passenger at an airline check-in desk. It may have been this that allowed the tiger to discern that on bipeds, as we say in anatomy, the ventral actually is the anterior, and so the underside of the throat – the universal feline target of choice – is held vertically.

Soon after that discovery, the man was dead.

The human response was almost as disturbing as the footage. Across social media and that equally fetid undergrowth of the comments section of published media, self-proclaimed-animal lovers and self-appointed experts were celebrating the death of a human being because of his own stupidity. Environmentalism seems increasingly to have become a........

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