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Religion, Practice and Science of Non-Violence
All these activities, the intention movements, the autonomic signals, and the displacement activities, become ritualised and together provide the animals with a comprehensive repartoire of threat signals. In most encounters they will be sufficient to resolve the dispute without the contestants coming to blows.
But if this system fails, as it often does under conditions of extreme crowding for example, then real fighting follows and the signals give way to the brutal mechanics of physical attack. Then, the teeth are used to bite and slash, the head and horns to butt and spear, the body to ram and push, the legs to kick and swipe, the hands to grasp and squeeze, and sometimes the tail to thrash and whip. Even so, it is extremely rare for one contestant to kill the other. Species that have evolved special killing techniques for dealing with their prey seldom employ these when fighting their own kind. As soon as the enemy has been sufficiently subdued and ceases to be a threat, it is ignored.
As soon as the loser realizes that his position has become untenable, he performs certain characteristic submissive displays indicating to the stronger animal that he is no longer a threat and does not intend to continue the fight; on the contrary, he is trying to mollify and appease the attacker so that he should spare him further damage. Such submissive displays, appea se the attacker and rapidly reduce his aggression, speeding up the settlement of the dispute.
Submissive displays operate in several ways. Basically they either switch off the signals that have been arousing the aggression, or they switch on other, positively non-aggressive signals. The first category, simply serve to calm the dominant animal down, the latter help by actively changing his mood into something else. The crudest form of submission is gross inactivity. Because aggression involves violent movement, a static pose automatically signals non-aggression. Frequently this is combined with crouching and cowering. Aggression involves expanding the body to its maximum size, and crouching reverses this and therefore acts as an appeasement. Facing away from the attacker also helps, being the opposite of the posture of frontal attack. Other threat opposites are also used: if a particular species threatens by lowering its head, then raising the head can become a valuable appeasement gesture; if an attacker erects its hair, then compressing it will serve as a
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