The Animal Did Not Read This Advice

Popular safety notes like one universal rule: do not run, make eye contact, make yourself look big, or drop to the ground. Animals of different species are under no obligation to read a human script the same way.

The advice “never run” can be right when you meet certain predators and dangerous in other situations. The reaction depends on the species, the distance, the presence of young, food and the behaviour of the particular animal.

So you need to know the rules for the region and the species in advance.

The universal part is shorter:

• do not approach a wild animal;
• do not feed it;
• do not corner it;
• leave it a way out;
• do not buy a photograph with distance;
• keep your pets under control;
• follow the instructions of local services.

If an animal comes towards you on its own, that is not necessarily trust. It may be sick, used to people, or interested in food.

Provoking an animal by trying to catch it — a tiger especially — is not a safety method.

Domestic dogs differ too. Faced with a threat it is better not to make sudden movements, not to loom over the animal, not to stare into its eyes, and to increase the distance gradually. But a situation may call for different actions, and local training is more useful than a universal paragraph.

An animal is under no obligation to understand our intentions correctly. It does not even know they were good.

The most common mistake is treating an animal’s calm as permission to approach. A deer in a park is not running away not because it trusts you but because it has judged the distance to be sufficient. A step forward changes that judgement, and it is the animal that changes it, not the person with the phone. The shot people close the distance for usually differs in no way from one taken three metres further back, except in the circumstances under which it is later shown.

The second mistake is the habit of transferring experience with your own dog to someone else’s. A pet knows specific people and specific situations, not the species “human” in general. Your dog gives you no qualification with the strange dog behind the fence.