Science Quote by Loren Eiseley

Eiseley slips a scalpel under our self-image and lets the air out with one clean metaphor. “Like the herd animals we are” isn’t a casual insult; it’s a demotion. The scientist’s voice matters here: he’s not moralizing from a pulpit so much as reporting from the field, treating human social behavior as something you could watch at the edge of camp the way you’d watch elk bunch and bristle. The line is coldly intimate, the kind of observation that stings because it feels embarrassingly accurate.

“Sniff warily” does a lot of work. It makes prejudice visceral and automatic, a reflex before it becomes an argument. We don’t begin with ideology; we begin with suspicion, with the animal’s sensory check for threat. That turns social exclusion into an evolutionary habit: a survival mechanism that can misfire in modern life, where the “strange one” is more likely to be a neighbor with a different accent than a predator.

The subtext is a warning about how quickly the group pretends its fear is reason. Herd logic produces a tidy story: difference equals danger, conformity equals safety. Eiseley, writing in the shadow of mid-century mass movements and the bureaucratic cruelty they enabled, is alert to how communities outsource conscience to instinct and crowd cues. The line doesn’t let the reader stand outside the herd, either. “We are” is the trapdoor. It implicates the speaker, the audience, the lab coat, the whole species.

Intent-wise, it’s a call to notice the first impulse before it hardens into policy, gossip, or violence: the sniff that precedes the bite.