Animal Sciences Commons^™

Fear And Loathing On The Landscape: What Can Foraging Theory Tell Us About Vigilance And Fear?, Burt P. Kotler, Joel S. Brown

Animal Sentience

We discuss fear and vigilance from the perspective of foraging theory. Rather than focusing on proximate indicators of fear, we suggest that fear is an adaptation for assigning a cost to activities that incur a risk of injury or death. We use theory to provide definitions for fear and vigilance and then use that theory to compare them. We agree that there are limits to the reliability of vigilance as an indicator of fear, but we arrive at this conclusion differently.