Terrorists, affordance and the over-estimation of offence homogeneity

Indeed, a cat doesn’t simply assess a mouse, it assesses it as a prospective meal. But the
cat doesn’t assess all animals as prospective meals, only mice (Martinez, 2005:53).
This short quotation taken from the Guillermo Martinez novel, The Oxford Murders, wonderfully
illustrates ‘affordance’, the central concept of this book. The cat’s perception of the mouse as a
meal, ‘affords’ the cat a behavioural option of killing and eating it, presumably because the
mouse is not likely to fight back where other animals might. One can assume that the
‘affordance’ for the cat would undoubtedly be different if the mouse was two meters tall and
wielding a baseball bat. If the popular myth propagated by children’s stories is to be believed,
then may be this explains why elephants are scared of mice. It is they who perceive mice in such
an intimidating way!