What If Just One Prey-Animal Could Think

You, a human, can gaze into its eyes but you can never tell. It might look like the creature has 'awareness' but you can't ever be sure. It is a prey-animal, fodder for the more dominant animals, a prey-animal who is standing alone in a vast space, a wilderness where it can see threat from a distance so great that it has no trouble avoiding its murder. But it is slowly dying there. There is no nourishment there.

It can be male, it can be female. The question is this: it is a prey-animal, a creature there largely for the benefit, for the nourishment, of larger more beautiful animals; has it decided to absent itself; has it made a decision to deny the preying animals their satisfaction and to walk all this way to the centre of this plain where it will die of starvation, a creature disgusted by the gobblings of the dominant, a creature who perhaps uniquely rises above the supposedly dominant? A creature not moved to this place by fear, but moved by self-worth. Are a few prey-animals capable of simple thoughts? Is only one of them, at last, capable of just this one thought?