Between Species
Patterns of eye contact between non-human mammals and between humans and other mammals are also well documented.
Animals of many species, including dogs, often perceive eye contact as a threat. Many programs to prevent dog bites recommend avoiding direct eye contact with an unknown dog. According to a report in The New Zealand Medical Journal, maintaining eye contact is one reason young children may be more likely to fall victim to dog attacks.
In the 1990s, black bears returned to Maryland's Catoctin Mountain Park after a twenty-year absence. Park officials recommend that visitors avoid direct eye contact if a bear stands on its hind legs. Chimpanzees use eye contact to signal aggression in hostile encounters, and staring at them in a zoo can induce agitated behavior.
Read more about this topic: Eye Contact
Famous quotes containing the word species:
“A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat ... but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.”
—Anita Brookner (b. 1938)
“Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the “very best society” that this world can furnish, without the intolerable infliction of “dressing” to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)