Parable of the predictable path

Your journey takes you along a wooded path, or down an alleyway. The path is straight and does not fork. It is enclosed on both sides, either by undergrowth, or, if man made, wooden fencing. Either a bird of the glade or a domestic cat is positioned on the path ahead. Both bird and cat will register your approach towards them but each will respond to you according to the conventions of their own life-world. The bird will immediately fly down the path, as route of least resistance, and then land at what it considers a safe distance. As you continue on your way, the increasingly rattled bird will fly on again and settle again at about the same distance. This may occur several times with the bird demonstrating its rising perturbation. At last, issuing an urgent alarm call, it will relinquish the path and fly up into an overhanging tree. By contrast, the domesticated cat will exhibit a quite different set of behavioural patterns which are in conformity with its own life-world. Most often, it will evaluate your approach as a low-level threat and after observing you for a short while, it will turn and depart in a relaxed manner but at a faster pace than that at which you approach it. Thus, it will use ease of movement along the path to quickly extend its distance from you. At a convenient point, it will choose a safe vantage point to observe you as you pass by. That is to say, 'paths' are familiar structures within the feline life-world, and belong to subsets such as 'territorialised topographical features' and  'predator's basic fieldcraft strategies'. Cats are perfectly capable of quickly predicting the likely movement of an approaching human from their initial appearance on a path. By contrast, the bird has no conception of 'paths' and perceives them merely as elongated forest clearings - it is not prepared for the regularity of movement which paths confer on those who use them. This is why the bird is completely unfamiliar with your forward momentum as a pedestrian and cannot predict your continued steady advance towards it as if it were not there.  The bird is primed to respond to unexpected movements and thus has to work hard to overcome its category confusion when confronted by that which appears both as a regularised behaviour and as an embodied threat. 

Ears/Hear!