The flight zone of an animal is the area surrounding the animal that will cause alarm and escape behavior when encroached upon. If a person enters the flight zone of an animal, the animal will move away. The size of the flight zone depends upon the tameness of the animal. Completely tame animals have no flight zone; that is, they will allow a person to approach and touch them. Wild, feral, and unbroken animals can have very large flight zones.
The flight zone is an important principle for herding, working, and mustering livestock. An animal can be stimulated to move simply by skirting its flight zone, and the animal will move in the desired direction if the correct side of the flight zone is invaded.
Confining a livestock animal in a crush (chute) or alley can make it feel more secure and thus reduce the size of the flight zone; however, it does not eliminate the flight zone. An animal in a cattle race or livestock alley that feels threatened may panic and injure itself or other animals.
Famous quotes containing the words flight and/or zone:
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)