Nature’s Most Murderous Mammal

Never turn your back on a meerkat.

Monkeys kill their own kind, as do lions, a few bat species and long-tailed chinchillas. But the bloodiest, most homicidal of more than 1,000 species surveyed is the meerkat.

It turned out that, at about 1 in 5 meerkat deaths due to intraspecies slaying, the little African carnivores stood at the head of the violent class.

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Kind of casts some doubt on the premise that humankinds’ violent tendencies can be resolved by empathetic nurture. In your face George Lakoff!