amygdala — blog — Anne Benvenuti

Fear. It’s there, just waiting to get you!

At Halloween in the US, everything we fear gets lumped together with our dead ancestors. A night that once reminded us to recognize that those who have passed before us might still be with us has now become a generalized expression of fear. In our ripe imaginations, peeled grapes become the texture of eyeballs without a head, cold spaghetti might be someone’s dead brain or guts, the sound of rusty hinges makes our skin crawl as we anticipate something dangerous coming for us, and banging doors make us jump out of our skin.

It's amazingly easy to frighten us humans. . . . But the experience of basic fear, the anxious and deeply uncomfortable arousal in our bodies, the intense desire to escape, is something we share with all mammals.

animal family, animal studies, anthrozoology, human-animal relationsAnne BenvenutiOctober 27, 2017fear, affective brain systems, Jaak Panksepp, Halloween, amygdala, whales, White Fang, PTSD, imagining fearComment

Rage! When Someone Gets Angry, the Play is Over

Last week, I wrote about the fact that all young mammals play, and that a typical play session ends after about twenty minutes, when someone gets mad or someone gets hurt. That's what happened when I played with this Siberian silver fox—yes, this one, photographed by my nephew Thom. After a careful approach that the fox received happily, and some moments of very gentle communion between me and her, I'd advanced to teasing and flicking my fingers in the "now you see it, now you don't" way. The mood shifted suddenly, and before I could say sorry, my middle finger knuckle had been sliced to the bone by some very sharp little teeth. This is how it goes.

human-animal relations, animal sanctuary, animal family, anthrozoologyAnne BenvenutiSeptember 24, 2017animal play, animal studies, amygdala, fight or flight, jaak panksepp, affective brain systems, understanding across speciesComment