“It would be unwise to pet him”

“It would be unwise to pet him” is the warning at the end of a hypothetical passage about humanity’s earliest ancestor. In Reynard Thompson’s account, the image makes a pointed distinction between the power to impose laws and the prudence required when confronting violence—an idea that frames the novel’s questions about criminal law, human nature, and the limits of judgment.

Source and Imagined Encounter

The passage appears as an epigraph to Part One and is attributed to Reynard Thompson’s A General Theory of Human Violence (1921). It asks the reader to imagine traveling back in time to meet “Adam,” described as a short, luxuriantly furred proto-man, newly bipedal and foraging on the African savannah roughly three million years ago. The encounter is deliberately fanciful, but its details give the argument a concrete figure: a creature poised between animal ancestry and human law.

Law and Prudence

Thompson’s imagined observers may pronounce whatever laws they choose for this “clever little creature,” yet the passage immediately qualifies that legal authority. The final caution is not that law cannot be made, but that lawmaking does not make physical closeness safe. The gap between declaring rules and managing danger establishes a tension between legal abstraction and the practical uncertainty of violence.

Function in the Novel

Placed before the narrative begins, the epigraph supplies a compact interpretive frame rather than a plot event. Its warning resonates with the novel’s scrutiny of criminal law: legal categories can name conduct and assign responsibility, but they do not erase the unease surrounding violent human behavior. By turning that unease into the image of a dangerous ancestor whom one should not pet, the line makes caution—not confident mastery—the first principle of the book’s inquiry.