Animals respond to fearful situations

[Catherine]

Quote:I just do hope that if studies are made, they are made compassionately and intelligently, and aren't going to deliberately subject animals to manufactured stress situations in order to study their responses!

I worried about that. It isn't clear how they got their data. 

Animal that are trying to raise young in stressful, fearful situations have less success because the fear stops them from feeding the babies. If this is how creatures respond to stress and fear then this is bad news for species survival. The more endangered a species is the more we need them to succeed as parents.  If they are that endangered there is probably a reason. There are probably environmental stresses and habitat loss. This would reduce the chances of babies surviving.

I would think that having unhealthy babies would make the parents even more upset. At a certain point the cycle of fear feeds itself. We could lose species because we have made them too frightened to survive.