Predation Quotes

“Most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep.

But there’s a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn’t predation. It’s protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.”
― Barry Eisler, Livia Lone

“George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful...”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of the success and failure on the two sides is very different. The two sides are 'trying' to do very different things. [Predators] are trying to eat [prey]. [Prey] are not trying to eat [predators], they are trying to avoid being eaten by [predators].
From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more [likely] to generate highly complex weapons systems.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“You can watch a swan catch a fish and have no sadness. You may understand that this expression of you has died so that this other expression of you may live. There is balance and acceptance. Every moment of life is lived with an intensity and presence that is reverential.”
― Elizabeth Eiler, Swift and Brave: Sacred Souls of Animals

“There's only one difference between slaughter and laughter and that's an s. It's all two sides of one thing and you got to make sure you're on the laughing side.”
― Ana Salote, Oy Yew

“Afterward, as we walk down Congress Street toward my apartment, the man says, “Men like that know how to pick the right ones, you know? They’re real predators. They know how to scan a herd and select the weak.”

As he says that, I see a scene of me, fifteen and wild-eyed, separated from my parents, running in a panicked gait across a tundra landscape while Strane sprints after me, gathering me in his arms without breaking stride. An ocean roars in my ears, blocking out the rest of the man’s thoughts on the film, and I think, Maybe that’s all it was. I was an obvious target. He chose me not because I was special, but because he was hungry and I was easy.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.”
― T.K. Naliaka

“I eat you, life; you make me living eat.

- The Word”
― William Kean Seymour, The Cats of Rome: New and Selected Poems

“Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.”
― Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

“It is worth noting that we are strongly biased to not appreciate the true horror of predation, since most victims of predation are non-human animals, and most of us do not feel remotely the same when seeing a non-human animal get eaten alive compared to when we see the same fate befall a human, even if the suffering is the same, or indeed greater, in the non-human case. Thus, to appreciate the true horror of predation, it may be necessary to see a human get eaten alive by predators, and then try to generalize the resulting feelings of horror to the non-human victims of predation (and it should be noted that human deaths due to predation are not, in fact, a rarity; for example, tigers alone are estimated to have killed more than 373,000 people between 1800 and 2009, Nyhus et al., 2010, pp. 132-135).”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Aggressive women sometimes "go after the shy and introverted guys," picking them as prime partners precisely because such guys, whom Avila calls "more tender and good-hearted" than standard-issue men, seem easier to manipulate.”
― Anneli Rufus, Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto