Ha! Those recognition circuits are real. For us it was birds (quail). They were terrified of rolling balls -- basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, you name

Ha! Those recognition circuits are real. For us it was birds (quail). They were terrified of rolling balls -- basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, you name it, if they saw it roll they would make a special "emergency honk" and the entire group would freeze for the next minute. We had never seen that reaction before even though we raised them from eggs. They didn't ever do that as a reaction to people, they didn't do it in response to the neighborhood cat, and they didn't do it with explosions on TV (they quite liked those, actually). It was by far the strongest fear reaction we ever saw from them. It took us a while to figure out why: it was probably a bird-of-prey detection circuit looking for gliding motion.