Natural born prey, trained to kill

By Casey Stinnett, H&HM editor

Over the past few weeks the PBS program Nature has been running, or re-running, a documentary series about horses. In discussion of their evolution the narrator emphasizes the fact that in the wild horses are prey, not predators, and this goes a long way toward explaining their behavior in that horses are more than merely a little skittish at times — skittishness is at the core of their nature, and running away from danger is their only defense. 

What horses want more than anything else, the narrator explains, is to be safe. 

What they want second most is to run.

With interviews of racehorse trainers and horse-racing experts it is explained that when pushed to the limits of their physical abilities, that is, when run to the point they cannot inhale enough oxygen to sustain them, horses have a very different physiological response than do humans. Where a lack of oxygen would exhaust and fairly quickly expire a person, a comparable lack of oxygen and a blood-stream overloaded with carbon-dioxide makes a horse high.

That is why horses or so giddy after a race. They are high as kites and as happy as a horse can be.

Their bodies are also adapted to such intense runs so that short periods deprived of oxygen does them no harm.

However far back it was that our human ancestors lived in a state of nature, as our Founding Fathers liked to call it, our ancestors were also exclusively prey, at least for the first hundred thousand years or so, give or take twenty or thirty thousand years.

Where horses had only one natural means of self-defense, to run away, human beings had just two natural defenses — to run away, slowly compared to most fleeing animals, and to hide, but to hide without the benefit of any natural camouflage grown on their bodies.

Arguably, early human beings’ true means of self-defense against predators, was that they were clever. Humans have big imaginations, and some of us (not your editor) have a faculty for planning ahead. 

Imagination, planning and opposable thumbs together allowed human beings to survive their prolonged period of living off whatever they could gather of the fruits, grains and other foods the land provided.

Then, at some unknown point in pre-history, human beings learned how to kill. Instead of being merely gatherers, humans became hunter-gatherers, supplementing their diet of fruits and nuts with fish and small game.

Human cleverness paid off gangbusters once humans became predators. Say all you want about the invention of the wheel. That was nothing compared to the revolution in human lifestyle that must have been brought about by the invention of the pointy stick.

Their lives improved further with the knowledge of how to make flint points and fasten them on to the end of sticks. This was stuff of pure genius.

From that moment onward the entire history of mankind could easily be written on a theme of man’s improvement of his killing machines.

Sadly, mankind’s obsessive dedication to improving his methods and mechanisms for killing have been driven less by a desire to feed himself than by his blood-lust to kill others of his own kind.

Human beings, by the way, are one of only three species observed to murder its own kind for no apparent reason. The other two species in our company are rats and crows.

Over the past hundred thousand years, or so, humans have evolved from being nearly helpless prey into being the world’s supreme killers. We have killed more flora and fauna than all other animals combined. We have killed entire species. Only a giant meteor from space might have once extinguished more life on Earth than has man — so far.

Whenever any senseless or unusually brutal murders make news we hear again laments over the possible root causes, too many guns, guns in the wrong hands, poor police performance, too little mental healthcare, movies and video games that glorify violence.

All of these and more perhaps deserve some share of the blame, but none deserve to be called the “root cause.”

The root cause is this: We are killers.

We are killers and we have been since way back into our prehistoric past. We live today because we kill. The human race would very likely have died out long ago but for the human ability and willingness to kill for food and in self-defense. However, we are killers who learned to kill. We are not predators by nature. It is not instinctive, but overlaid upon our instinctive wariness as prey. By nature we run and hide from danger. We are only nurtured to kill. Once having acquired the knowledge and skills of predators and learned to use those aggressive skills for our own defense we have ever since lived as split personalities, as both predator and prey. As such, our fearfulness fuels our aggression, and our aggression in turn compounds our fears, and our inventive imaginations exaggerate both.

Like horses, what humans want more than anything else is to feel secure, to be safe among our own. Only, we try to achieve that sense of security by exercising ever increasing amounts of aggression, causing others to fear more and to respond in kind.

We need not kill each other, but a willingness of some to commit murder makes murderers out of us all. We learn to kill our own kind in self-defense, but then, as time goes own, motives become mixed and what we call defense becomes confused with what would better be understood as aggression. All of America has become a constant battleground, and in the midst of battle, the defense and aggression are often indistinguishable and morality is easily forgotten.

Complicating matters for us is that we believe our lies. We deny we are killers in general, despite all evidence to support the fact. We say we are peace-loving and gentle and would never think of hurting another living soul, except, we tell ourselves, unless we have to, in self-defense. But, should self-defense ever become necessary, well then, we say with proud defiance, we have readily on hand some very impressive killing machines to do the job.

And we tell ourselves that will solve the problem.

Go figure.