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’. Here the predator was a big company gobbling up a smaller one. But in the meantime predatory acquired a connotation of unsporting behaviour. Rapaciousness was applied to the sex-war, so that by the 1930s it was possible to write of ‘the roving and predatory eyes of most men’.
At the same time, one kind of predatory business behaviour adopted a sneaking, guileful strategy to a rival. Predatory pricing drove weaker competitors out of business by undercutting the price at which they might make a profit. It was as if a polar bear set about eating voles just to spite the Arctic foxes.
Recently Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, said he had found such behaviour among electricity companies. ‘It’s not fair that big energy companies can push their prices up for the vast majority of their customers, who do not switch, while introducing cut-throat offers for new customers that stop small firms entering the market,’ he said. ‘That looks like predatory pricing to me.’
We also have the slightly awkward verb predate. It’s a pity we’d lost the neater word that the translator Philemon Holland tried to introduce into English in the 17th century: pread. Mr Miliband might like to try it out.
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