Quotes & Sayings About Animal Predators

Animals are locked in a perpetual present. They can learn from recent events, but they are easily distracted by what is in front of their eyes. Slowly, over a great period of time, our ancestors overcame this basic animal weakness. By looking long enough at any object and refusing to be distracted - even for a few seconds - they could momentarily detach themselves from their immediate surroundings. In this way they could notice patterns, make generalizations, and think ahead. They had the mental distance to think and reflect, even on the smallest scale.
These early humans evolved the ability to detach and think as their primary advantage in the struggle to avoid predators and find food. It connected them to a reality other animals could not access. Thinking on this level was the single greatest turning point in all of evolution - the emergence of the conscious, reasoning mind. — Robert Greene

In the animal kingdom, lions, tigers and bears - the predators - have closely spaced eyes. Giraffes, rabbits, doves - the preyed upon - have eyes more widely spaced and oriented toward the sides of their heads, because they need their peripheral vision to survive. — Patricia Cornwell

She is still forming her conclusions but, above all, is convinced that their actions are borne of instinct: fixed patterns that take them to their source of food, to their safe havens, to their mates, and, ultimately, to their death, since their predators learn these patterns as surely as if they, too, had read Maud's book. — Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Human relationships with predators have always been thorny. Predators are the first creatures our kind purposely eradicates. Too often, people feel humans are and should be in control; we are enraged to discover this is not true. And when other creatures share our appetites and kill our livestock (often animals we were raising to kill, ourselves), we call them vandals and murderers ... Predators are the most persecuted creatures on Earth. — Sy Montgomery

If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don't mess with you much. What that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They're just like us: They're not getting done in by predators and famines, they're getting done in by each other. — Robert M. Sapolsky

No, child," Nona said. "We were victims of the faeries' pride and greed."
"Victims? Sorry, but most of you don't seem very victimish to me. What about hags, and fossegrims, and redcaps, and all the other sharp-toothed nasties" - I looked pointedly at the dragon - "in your group? I don't feel very bad for anything that's spent all those centuries preying on innocent people."
"It makes sense," Arianna said, her voice soft but thoughtful.
"What?"
"When you introduce an alien species into a new environment, it has to adapt or die out. And usually the way it adapts it by preying on the native species. Look at the dodo birds. They were fine until people came to their island with cats and dogs and pigs, then they became prey."
"You do realize you just compared our entire race to dodo birds."
She shrugged. "If they were never meant to be here in the first place, it's not their fault they had to become predators."
"Thank you, Animal Planet. — Kiersten White

Given the huge size of Aegirocassis and its very alien appearance, I assume most people would probably be terrified if they'd encounter it while swimming. However, contrary to almost all other anomalocaridids which were active predators, our animal would have been a very peaceful guy. — Benjamin Van Roy

Giraffes are completely tranquil - they have no predators as adults because there's not an animal in the jungle stupid enough to go for them. — Joanna Lumley

And when one kind of animal overruns an area to the point where many kinds of animal begin to starve, it's up to the predators to thin out the herds before there's nothing left for anyone. That's a simple truth whether you're talking about deer or humans. — Anne Bishop

This is the "burglar-alarm" theory of bioluminescence: by turning on its lights, an animal may create enough of a scene to draw the attention of its predator's predator, and thereby perhaps save itself. The corollary of the burglar-alarm theory is the minefield theory. It says the reason so many animals tend to hang motionless in the deep, even fish, is to avoid setting off light explosions that would expose them to their enemies - their predators or their prey. Life in the midwater, in this view, is a tense affair (though the denizens do not know it) in which everyone is waiting stealthily in the dark, moving slowly if at all, watching and waiting for someone to turn on a light and for something to happen. — Robert Kunzig

I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It was the first and only fight of his childhood, but it had taught him a valuable lesson about human nature, how people were just another species of animal, and like any animal, from the biggest predators, to the smallest scavengers, most human beings could only be pushed so far before they lashed out. — D.J. Molles

All creatures must learn that there exist predators. Without this knowing, a woman will be unable to negotiate safely within her own forest without being devoured. To understand the predator is to become a mature animal who is not vulnerable out of naivete, inexperience, or foolishness. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free ... It's a dangerous world out there, filled with predators ... What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage, or an uncertain life of freedom. — Scarlett Thomas