Most people think polar bears attractive animals, at least when not sharing space with one. Yet, ‘polar bears are, unquestionably, the world’s largest land predator,’ a popular magazine remarks. It’s the way some animals are.
Beasts of prey are called predators by extension. The Latin praedator was a ‘plunderer, pillager, robber’. But words don’t mean what their etymological forebears meant. In the reign of Elizabeth I, someone made a punning reference to Caesar as a tyrant, ‘no pretor but predator’. It was not until 1908 that natural historians began to speak of carnivores as predators. So Ed Miliband’s categorisation of businessmen like Sir Fred Godwin as predatory might seem to make them dashing and bold, like the polar bear, carnivorous by nature, not by ethical choice.
By 1969, the Harvard Business Review could say that ‘what rouses the appetite of the conglomerate predator is a company with a lower price/earnings ratio than its own’.
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