With pupils dilating and the midbrain poised to flee, we share with other mammals what a new book calls “the holy shiver” of prey that has fallen into a predator’s line of sight.
Most of us live elevated lives, disconnected from the planet’s animals and the universe of microbes that live all around them and us. We transmit the virus by being warm-blooded hosts – vulnerable, as animals, to one another.
The pandemic has brought into grim focus our biological fragility, writes Daniel T. Blumstein in his new book, The Nature Of Fear, Survival Lessons From The Wild.
Blumstein, an ecologist at UCLA, studied how different animal populations apprehend and respond to warning stimuli in their environment (like the pawprints of a meat eater.)
Blumstein argues that for people as well as animals, fear is an evolutionary high wire act. To thrive and survive, animals need to be alert to danger but not too frightened so that their foraging, rest, and social relations are impaired or blocked.
Humans and animals have developed complex behaviors – running or slithering away, hiding, crying – to survive the world’s dangers and hazards. But, he says, we have a lot to learn about managing our response to danger.
In 2020, the politics, the pandemic, the anger all suggested that’s a timely, even urgent, thing for many of us to do.
Fear makes us more secure, says Blumstein, but at a cost. Birds expend precious energy by taking flight, leaving their food sources and safe habitats behind.
Among humans, fear is often understandable and justifiable response to sources of threat, but it can exact a high toll on health and productivity.
2020 was one of the most frightening years in American history, and almost everyone I know was drained, frightened, angry, distracted, sleepless, or terrified much of the year.
That much fear is unhealthy, especially if we aren’t always sure what to be afraid of.
Foolish animals don’t live long, found Blumstein, but overly nervous animals (and people) can suffer physical and emotional consequences of living in fear.
Across the animal kingdom, the experience of being afraid shares physical commonalities, including chemical pathways to the brain and muscular reflexes.
Terror, he says, makes wildlife of us all. Adrenalized, aroused, we share with other mammals the Heiliger Schauer, or “holy shiver” of prey that senses danger.
This is a book for the times, for sure. All around us, anger and violence, sickness and argument, manifest and unrelenting during the coronavirus pandemic. And the presidential campaign, crowned by the capitol attack.
I think we all felt the “holy shiver” of fear this year. But we all managed it in many different ways. Nothing really prepared us for a year like this.
It’s hard to know where the line falls between instinctive and biological fear and those acquired and taught by the culture – fear of bats and snakes, driving at night, running out of money, getting cancer, Republicans or Democrats, listening to Donald Trump’s cold rage.
Living with animals, I see Brumstein’s theory played out almost daily.
One woman wrote to me this week to say that Texas Senator Ted Cruz was the most frightening figure she had ever seen in her life. She sees his “beady eyes” in the bathroom mirror and has nightmares about him every day. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost relatives and friends due to the pandemic; it is invisible and lethal.
Animals have taught me a lot about managing fear.
Most of the sheep, for example, learn to have no fear of Fate or Zinnia; they ignore both dogs and go about their business. Kim, an Asian ewe, is afraid of everything that movies – the dogs, me, Zinnia, deer in the field, trucks on the road.
She is so busying scanning for danger; she often doesn’t get enough to eat or rest from lying in the sun. I doubt she will live to be old.
The donkeys have a keen sense of danger. They will flee instantly when human approaches have touched a cow, horse, or a strange dog. The donkeys sense a predator and run. But they practically laugh when a dog tries to move them or bark at them.
Kim’s lamb was stillborn, in part, I thought because she lives in terror. She can’t tell a real danger from no danger, and as a result, she doesn’t get the food and rest or socializing animals need. And there is nothing we can do about it.
I admit to thinking about the Progressives who can’t pause to take any comfort from Biden’s win or the Georgia victories. Their neural systems seem keyed to dangers ahead. There is no good or soothing news for them. And when something like the capitol attack occurs, their sense of danger is inflamed and ingrained.
I think politics has challenged many people to learn how to manage so much fear, presented to continuously. People on the left and right see Armageddon in election results – each believes a victory on the part of the other will destroy the Republic, damage them individually, take their rights away. Elections become much larger in meaning than the candidates themselves.
Losing is Apocalyptic. And thus frightening.
I think Blumstein’s book is the right book at the right time. We can’t be equally afraid of everything; we have to learn to decide what is really dangerous and what is the product of manipulation from political organizations or the intensity of new kinds of media, which offer nothing in the way of good news and are all around us all the time.
My own choice was to severely limit the amount of time I spend on social media or the so-called “news.” I look briefly in the morning, then not again until dinner, and then not after that. I never argue my beliefs on social media.
I made sure I read a range of different stories and books so that the pandemic and politics are not the only things in my head. I resolved that politics would not define me; I have a full and active life apart.
I monitor and manage the number of images that come into my head. I graze and rest just like healthy animals learn to do. And I make sure to interact with positive people who never speak to me about their fears of the future. I live in the now, the safest place for me to be.
Animals can’t help themselves, but we can. When the “holy shiver” comes,I stop and reset. I take it as a warning sign, a remember to be grateful, to keep perspective, to meditate, and focus on the good. It got me through