You Are Not a Prey Animal

Predators, like cats and owls, have eyes that look straight ahead. The position of their eyes allows for binocular or stereoscopic vision, and depth-perception. They can focus, aim true, and pounce. 

By contrast, prey animals, like cattle and sheep, have eyes on the sides of their heads. They’re often nearly blind to trouble right in front of them, while being disproportionately afraid of discontinuities in the landscape around them. A bulldozer barreling right toward a cow might agitate her less than, say, a hat on a fence.

In Thinking in Pictures, the early and radical first-person account of being autistic, Temple Grandin describes the ability of cows, with their hypersensitivity to predators, to scan a landscape for infinitesimal idiosyncrasies even while they graze. These little oddities suggest that danger is nigh. But prey animals get a lot of false positives and spend much of their time in fear, even as they fail to apprehend urgent threats.

I’ve come to think that, given a shift in social or political conditions, we all can slip into seeing ourselves as prey.