Years ago. I was staying with a friend at his parents' house, in the countryside. The family kept a Rottweiler, a huge beast, which, as they proudly boasted, fought boars during the night in the garden. As usual when I am traveling, I had a rash on my feet. They were all bloody, toes and heels. When I got outside, for breakfast, the dog rushed at me and started licking my feet. My friend laughed: "She is cleaning your wounds." I was petrified. I could not move, nor scream. I felt the harsh wet tongue of the beast on my skin. Then the father came down. He looked at the dog and at my feet. He said, to me, as if I were somehow responsible for what was happening: "Don't let her do that, she will get used to the taste of your blood."

The Aquarium of Paris keeps two albino alligators from Mississippi. Apparently, they are very rare. Like most of us, I am shy of cold-blooded beasts, snakes, crocodiles, even frogs. The contact of cold, slightly humid skin seems to me particularly disgusting. The faces of these beasts also have something enigmatic. They don't even express aggressiveness. They just look cold and mean, though indifferent to you, and patient. As if they knew they'd get you in the end: they have all the time in the world.

The albino alligators are perfectly white, of course. They lie motionless, their jaws peeking just above the water. You cannot mistake them for a branch, since they are all white, except for their eyes, which are a light pink color. You would only see them pop open when the beast jumps at you.

If I were to meet an alligator in the open (which I would rather not), I would definitely choose the usual greenish, yellow-eyed kind. I am not sure why. Maybe it is a question of habit. I am not particularly bothered by white dogs, or albino rabbits. In fact, instinctively, I feel that black dogs are scarier than others. So why do albino alligators bother me? For some reason, it seems a bizarre perversion of nature to produce alligators the color of jellyfish.

In 1985, the anthropologist Val Plumwood was caught by a crocodile. She was paddling the river to reach an archeological site in Australia, when the crocodile capsized her canoe. Crocodiles do not eat you alive; they bring you underwater, drown you, and then, when you are dead, they eat you quietly. However, the anthropologist was stronger than the beast. It brought her under but she came up, twice, and the beast gave up. She survived. She says it changed her vision, her vision of the ecosystem and the place of the human inside the ecosystem.

The concept of human identity positions humans outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it: animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. … Large predators like lions and crocodiles present an important test for us. An ecosystem's ability to support large predators is a mark of its ecological integrity. Crocodiles and other creatures that can take human life also present a test of our acceptance of our ecological identity. When they're allowed to live freely, these creatures indicate our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to recognize ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the food chain, eaten as well as eater. (“Being Prey”)

My first reaction was of wonder. For I felt I had spent my life being prey. It just takes a Rottweiler for me to feel like “being prey.” And I know it is not just me. We have all felt “prey,” walking in the forest when we hear strange noises behind a bush, or in nightmares, when strange crabs are chasing us, or in the eye of a fellow human as economic prey, sexual prey. However, thinking about it, I now feel the anthropologist is right: our “being prey,” in our imaginary fear, is not the same as being edible, like various other edibles.

I am uneasy with dogs. Dogs feel it. If there is a dog in the wild, wandering on the beach for instance, it will run towards me as soon as it sees me, or get a whiff of me in the wind. But I know it is not going to eat me because it is hungry. We have another kind of relation. The very fact that I am convinced that it will choose me among all the people walking on the beach proves that our relation is not that of carnivore to its food.

Lacan notes somewhere that it is a fantasy to be reduced to a pure object for the Other, and an impossible fantasy, for it cannot be lived. It could be that the immersion into language renders impossible our “being prey” in the sense of Val Plumwood. There would be no turning back, no returning to a state of nature where humans would be edible among other edibles.

In any case, our phobias are of a different type. They are extra-ordinary, supra-natural, and lift the object of fear outside the realm of nature.