Steve Irwin would have known very well, how dangerous a wounded animal is.

For all his daring, he was actually a very careful man, which made his sudden death some days ago all the more shocking and tragic. His margin of safety came from his love of wildlife: he knew the animals he filmed…he studied their ways carefully. You have to figure he knew the risks of getting stung when he approached that group of stingrays. But as anyone will tell you, getting a sudden spike just right through the heart like that was a one chance in a million thing. In retrospect it would probably have been the one in a million thing that got him, if anything was going to…because he was a careful man around dangerous animals.

And….he might have even seen this coming too…upsetting as it would still have been to him…

SYDNEY, Australia —At least 10 stingrays have been killed since "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin was fatally injured by one of the fish, an official said yesterday, prompting a spokesman for the late TV star’s animal charity to urge people not take revenge on the animals.

Irwin died last week after a stingray barb pierced his chest as he recorded a show off the Great Barrier Reef.

Stingray bodies since have been discovered on two beaches in Queensland state on Australia’s eastern coast. Two were discovered yesterday with their tails lopped off, state fisheries department official Wayne Sumpton said.

Sumpton said fishermen who inadvertently catch the diamond-shaped rays sometimes cut off their tails to avoid being stung, but the practice is uncommon. Stingrays often are caught in fishing nets by mistake and should be returned to the sea, Sumpton said.

Michael Hornby, the executive director of Irwin’s Wildlife Warriors conservation group, said he was concerned the rays were being hunted and killed in retaliation for Irwin’s death.

He said killing stingrays was "not what Steve was about.”

"We are disgusted and disappointed that people would take this sort of action to hurt wildlife," he said. 

Now…this is perfectly pointless. They’re stingrays for Christ’s sake. They don’t know. The ray that killed Irwin was simply and doggedly reacting to what it probably saw as a threat. They’ll do that. They’re animals. The ray was probably just defending it’s own, just behaving like you would expect one to behave when it perceives a threat.

And yet…so do we.

Natural selection doesn’t sweep away the old to create the new. It builds the new right on top of the old. So the human line got the expanded brain cortex. So we were blessed with a capacity for forward looking rationality. The ancient passions move within us, the old tides pull and tug at us, and yet we can think. We can reason. We can choose our course. It has given us a great advantage over all the other creatures on this good earth in the struggle for survival.  And it has given us great power.  Power which we loose utterly, when the old passions well up suddenly within us, and turn us away from what we are, to what we once were. I know some folks just hate hearing this but we all need to face it…we must face it…squarely: We are human. We are primates. We are mammals. And…we are predators.

The wounded animal is in all of us. To reach a calming hand out to it, stroke it gently out of its rage, we must first acknowledge it. Or it’ll drag us right back into the wilderness we walked out of, time and again.