Cows stare at you when you drive by. But when you get out of your truck they flee in terror.
Their big eyes belie an intelligence that is not there. If it were, they’d eat us instead of being tasty burgers.
I have sympathy for the cows since living is tough. Wandering through the desert looking for food and water can’t be easy.
At least they don’t know the future. Maybe that’s their consolation and their curse.
Know the future and you can plan to avoid it. Be oblivious and you can act in the now with little worry for tomorrow.
It is a conundrum of worrying thought.
But the cows don’t worry about that future. They just watch you drive by looking at you with their strangely curious eyes thinking mammalian thoughts that seem to be pondering, “Wow…that thing sure is odd lookin’. I mean I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it. Crazy…”
Perhaps the assumption animals don’t worry is a misconception. How can anyone really know what other living mammals think, unless the subject speaks exactly what they think. Scientists can study brain matter, but what is going on inside that brain matter, thoughts etc, is a mystery. And animals are studied, and what they are thinking is subjectively identified by researchers, but it is a human trying to use behaviour to identify what the animals are thinking. And now my brain hurts from trying to explain what I mean.