Nature & Animals Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison is poking at a reflex that modern storytelling both flatters and exploits: our near-automatic sympathy for the hunted. He frames it as a collective habit - "we're always" - not a noble principle arrived at through ethics, but a default setting wired into how movies, myths, and news narratives get processed. The sentence moves like a tracking shot: chased, side, chased again. You can feel the momentum. By the time he lands on "rabbit or the fox", you're already running with them.

The subtext is slyly uncomfortable. Rabbits are innocent; foxes are famously not. Pairing them collapses the usual moral sorting and suggests that pursuit itself, not virtue, is what confers likability. The hounds might be doing what they were bred to do; they might even be "right". Jewison doesn't care. He’s pointing at how easily audiences confuse vulnerability with righteousness, and how quickly power - or even coordinated effort - reads as menace.

Contextually, it’s a director’s confession about the grammar of suspense: cinema is a machine that manufactures identification, and identification is easiest to build from fear and motion. The chase gives you a heartbeat to borrow. It also hints at Jewison’s broader humanism in films like In the Heat of the Night: align viewers with the exposed, the cornered, the socially outnumbered, and the moral argument arrives through feeling before it ever shows up as dialogue. The line doubles as a warning: if you always pick the prey, you can be manipulated - but you can also be awakened.