cowering

that is what most people do.  when attacks come most people will choose not to fight & will try to get away.  they will try to lock themselves in the cooler while the thieves go through the cash register, gun to head of cashier held hostage.  it is company policy, if the company has one, to not resist nor to come to the aid of the hostage when faced with the threat or presence of violence.  our social rules formalize and train us to respond with submission which is what most of us want to do anyway, deep down inside.

back up.  the broken animal lying there, thrashing, gradually slowing, it will be delicious.  the cat knows what the victim is going through.  the cat has felt pain.  the pain of the victim is irrelevant.  the victim is a mouse, say, or a bird.  maybe it does not eat animals, maybe it does.  life of peace for the vegetarians, the only enemies are bigger/smarter predator animals (or parasites, etc.)  further, the pain of the victim is part of the overall pleasurable scenario that will culminate in a really nice meal.

it is possible for corticated animals to separate out that pain causing function and obsess on it.  the function is i perform an action (athletic, social, etc.) and it creates pain with or without physical damage to the victim.  for the pain giver there is the indrawn breath and the expiration on the hit, however the hit is delivered.  for the victim the (untrained) indrawn breath  occurs at the moment of contact (the gasp), followed by the expiration at the scream or the collapse if that is what happens.  i do something, the result is pain in you.  then the cat sometimes goes nuts, bites on the mouse, shakes it, growls, shakes some more, then the mouse is dead & the cat is pawing it around, maybe striking again, dammit, thinks the cat, stop being dead, i want to play some more.

so most of us humans would prefer not to deal with that aspect of our essential selves.  we don't want to be victims but we don't want to engage our kill-&-eat components.  we'd prefer to not do that.  people who do get into that, we think they're wierd, we don't want to hang with them.  or else they engage their violent in culturally standardized ways (authorized or criminal) and we classify them a little differently as heros or villains.

schoolyard fight.  crowd gathers.  if pulled into the fight most of the watchers will immediately cave and become victims.  in the baboon troop they will immediately grovel & display inferior status.  a lot of sympathetic chemical activity going on in the crowd.  echos of the agons going on in the visual field.  victor & victim releasing chemicals like melodies to give us internal shifts of emotion and we are secondarily joyed as those evoked chemicals flow through our bodies.