Territorial, aggressive, and unpredictable, the bison is a freight train that no one wants to stand in the way of. When provoked, the bison starts its own “countdown to launch.”
Nature keeps things honest.
Even the predators that live by preying on other living beings and that hunt by ambushing their prey don’t hide their violent intentions. Masking violent intentions, as well as inadvertently telegraphing them, is something that is unique to our human jungle.
In Nature, telegraphing is intentional, and it serves a compelling purpose.
On the edge of a violent encounter, creatures big and small don’t care about hiding their readiness to attack. On the contrary, they prefer to display their capacity to use violence to protect themselves and what’s theirs.
One such creature is the bison.
When triggered in some way, the bison displays a number of body language clues that indicate its readiness to launch a devastating assault that few would have the capacity to evade and survive after it begins.
Pawing the ground and lowering its head, the bison gets ready for its deadly charge.
Here are some takeaways that the bison wants to share with us:
- Violent intentions are hard to hide. When the one who is about to launch an attack is too preoccupied with how to deliver it, body movements become a loose cannon of a kind. Because they are hard to control unless all the focus is on them, some clues are bound to seep through the predator’s body language and reveal their preparation to launch an assault.
- A powerful attack calls for a powerful launch. To make the attack as powerful as possible, one must launch it from an optimal position. As the predator tries to set this position up before launching the assault, their body movements are bound to leak some clues about what they’re truly up to.
- The best time to respond to the assault is before its launch. As the assailant telegraphs their preparation to attack, you get precious seconds to do something about the impending assault. The pre-attack indicators telegraphed by the attacker’s body movements give you the last chance to avoid being caught off guard and respond to the impending assault on your own terms.
The bison teaches us just how devastating the assault can be if we stay oblivious to certain pre-attack indicators that most assailants end up telegraphing in their body language as they prepare to overwhelm us with their attack.
Let the spirit of the bison guide us as we stay attuned to what the attacker’s body movements telegraph to us during their countdown to launch.