#being prey

[atomic-raven]

mistaking prey

“They can also mistake small children and pet dogs for prey.”

This phrase has always bothered me. People get offended when a wild animal predates (or attempts to attack and feed on) humans and their pets. Animals can eat each other and humans can eat animals, but we humans are exempt from being eaten. We are animals, too. We’re full of calories – if another living non-human creature has got to eat and they have no other option, I don’t blame it.

I mean, I’d rather people didn’t get hurt or eaten by anyone, human or animal, and yeah I’m going to protect kids and pets as best I can from being preyed upon and I’d be upset if they were injured or killed.  We aren’t special - we’ve simply evolved to be very good at NOT getting eaten by other animals regularly. So we aren’t used to seeing people get eaten by animals. But to say an animal “mistook” someone for prey – no, everything nutritionally valuable and compatible is prey, it’s not a mistake. I may only eat fillet mignon every couple of years but that doesn’t make it less of a snack to me - I’m not mistaking it for a meal.

[verolivotto]

“It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species. Horror movies and stories also reflect this deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: Horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood, and alien monsters eating humans. Horror and outrage usually greet stories of other species eating humans. Even being nibbled by leeches, sandflies, and mosquitoes can stir various levels of hysteria. 

This concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. The outrage we experience at the idea of a human being eaten is certainly not what we experience at the idea of animals as food. The idea of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey. We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we cannot imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end”. 

[popkiller]

It seems to me that in the human supremacist culture of the West there is a strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain. This denial that we ourselves are food for others is reflected in many aspects of our death and burial practices; the strong coffin, conventionally buried well below the level of soil fauna activity, and the slab over the grave to prevent any other thing from digging us up, keeps the Western human body from becoming food for other species.

"Being Prey" - Val Plumwood