I love coming home to find them waiting at the door, doing that little paw-stomping dance of happiness that cats do sometimes. That never fails to make me smile.

if i go to the zoo and see a giant/dangerous predator, i’m thinking “that’s cool that i get to see this beast up close (also, it’s kind of sad that it’s in captivity, but is it’s life worse than in nature where other predators or lack of resources might… fuck, i’ve ruined the zoo again…)”

when i’m driving almost 80 miles an hour down the rural highway on my way to work and i see a deer, i’m slamming on my brakes, my heart is pumping, and i’m thinking “oh shit, that stupid fucker is gonna dart in front of my car because it’s startled, then it’s gonna freeze in front of me and we’re both gonna die.”

Now, if only I could train myself to say “Bravo!” as I do it…

http://www.audiocite.net/livres-audio-gratuits-charme/index.html#5

This result is interesting but not really surprising.  The amygdala is commonly thought to be all about fear/emotion, but it’s really more like a basic attention and behavior organization module for creatures whose brains evolved before the innovation of frontal cortex and other thinky bits.  Any stimulus likely to activate basic prey or predator-evasion behaviors will show up in the amygdala before it’s processed by any cortical neurons that aren’t doing primary sensory work.

It’s also interesting that most of the earliest prehistoric art focused on animals rather than humans (aside from the ones focused on the female body), from cave paintings to the shrine at Gobekli Tepe which may have been where humans first settled down and began doing agriculture 11,000 years ago…

FTA (No Joke): The [store's] regular house pets were joined by monkeys, tigers, a llama, exotic birds and even a small elephant called Little Audrey. [Owner] Bernie Hoffmann became famous for bringing Little Audrey and other animals on “Super Circus,” which aired in the 1950s.

Nice, Sean Rafferty gets his comment in right before me, leaving me look the fool.

Or, as my wife says about almost all talks on evolutionary psychology, “They’re going to find some way to blame this on tigers again.”  (Usually she’s correct, though sometimes they blame lions or snakes as the animal hiding in the bushes that’s going to jump out and kill you if you didn’t see it, leaving the over-twitchy apes that imagine tigers when they’re not actually around alive to be our ancestors.)

What is it? We can only guess. A pet store? A strip club? Some kind of crazy restaurant? We may never know.