Humans love to seperate ourselves from the animal kingdom. We minimize them and pretend they are not capable of anything. We convince ourselves that no one else is even remotely close so we can attempt to justify our often horrific treatment of non-human animals
(Or at least some subset of the population anyway)
It's mind boggling how much people (especially Christians and very especially Amish) look at animals as lowly, base creatures with no sense of anything whatsoever. Like they're complete automatons.
That's all well and good until there evolve predators that have complex brains and can think about how best to approach you such that you don't know they're there
If you think just running away from predators you see and otherwise putting absolutely no thought into the existence of predators is sufficient you would not last long in the wild lol
it looks like somebody in this story doesn't understand the difference between strategy and tactics, which definitely seems like quite an important distinction in this case