Wayne wrote:
"We have the capacity to empathize with our prey. That would be a major disadvantage to most any omnivore or carnivore - can you imagine if a cheetah could feel sorry for its food?"

You assume facts not in evidence. I see no reason why a cheetah could not experience the same emotion as a human (not that I am saying they do) and still decide that it must eat to survive.

We day murder is wrong and yet sanction killing every day of the year: war, police, etc.

Perhaps an empathetic cheetah would just be swift to the kill and make sure its bite was clean and on the mark. Which is precisely what they do.

Again, I am not saying they have these emotions, but rather that if they did I don't see it leading to anything different than what we actually observe in the wild.

DA Morgan