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that we too would achieve the mastery of technology and physics we
ascribed to extraterrestrials. Today, perhaps because our belief in
technological deliverance has declined, we hear less about UFOs.
Could it be that illusory big cats also answer an unmet need? As our
lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and
diversity of nature have declined, as our physical challenges have
diminished to the point at which the greatest trial of strength and
ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts, could
these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?
Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark
corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be
delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken old genetic
memories of conflict and survival, memories which must incorporate
encounters - possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors
faced - with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish
for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare
back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind.
I suppose and I generalize, of course, but the reification of our inner
big cats is not the only phenomenon which hints at such yearnings.
Consider the widespread and otherwise inexplicable response to the
death of Raoul Moat. In 2010, Moat was discharged from Durham
Prison after serving a sentence for beating up a child. Armed with a
sawn-off shotgun and prompted perhaps by 'roid rage' - the explo-
sive, irrational anger experienced by body builders who take
steroids - he set out to settle imagined scores with his former girl-
friend and the police. He shot his ex-partner in the stomach and killed
her boyfriend, then blinded a policeman by blasting him in the face.
Officers from eight police forces mobilized to capture him, but he
evaded them for almost a week, living rough, sleeping in drains and
abandoned buildings. At the height of the search, 10 per cent of all the
available duty officers in England and Wales were deployed to hunt
him. Parts of Northumberland were evacuated. When at last he was
cornered, the stand-off lasted for six hours, before Moat shot himself
in the head.
He was, in other words, an unlikely hero: child-beater, murderer,
mutilator of unarmed people. Yet, long after his death, paeans to
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