This is definitely true for dogs/canids, eye contact is a signal of dominance and/or aggression. It’s common advice to soften your glance if you’re approaching an unfamiliar or potentially aggressive dog. It’s also helpful to make more direct eye contact when establishing you’re in charge when training them.

I’ve also noticed with many birds that they prefer indirect attention. This includes not just eye contact, but pointing a camera (or really anything) in their direction. Which unfortunately means I have very little photographic evidence of the many times I’ve had birds just hanging around being pleasant companions for a while.

The birds around here don't stick around long enough to let me earn their trust, but I can get pretty close to the deer, rabbits, and squirrels just by pointing the camera off to my side so I'm standing perpendicular and appear to be focused on stuff on the ground instead of them.

Oh damn I meant to mention rabbits! At least the ones around me don’t even mind if I point a camera at them so long as I’m looking another way. So I have lots of good blurry or poorly aimed rabbit photos. They really do seem to believe that if they go totally still nothing can see them until proven otherwise. And maybe they’re right, I almost always have to tell my pup “there’s a bun!” And even then it’s usually after I’ve directed her chase before she sees the fleeing things.

You see a rabbit mostly against the grass or bush it's hiding around. A dog sees it against all the scattered terrain behind it. It's amazing how much difference an extra 4-5 feet of height makes for picking thigs out of a background.

This is a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I actively try to get my pup to see the buns around her and she stops seeing them when they stand still even if she had already seen them. She’s a very smart pup, but has a distinct bunny blindness!

> unlike strange people

and ... like ... non-strange people?

Every bird I've interacted with prefers when I look at it from one side, or barring that, closing an eye; I think two eyes on it screams "predator"

Preference for eye contact varies with culture (among other factors). While people in a place like USA might regard a person who avoids eye contact as sneaky or untrustworthy, people in a place like Japan are more likely to regard direct eye contact as a sign that they are distrusted by the person.

I have read this somewhere, not sure where, but by someone very much in touch with nature. He called it the "lost car keys" approach. Always approach animals as if looking for your car keys on the ground: avoiding eye contact, and not in a straight line.

(I volunteer at a Raptor conservancy). Totally. Making eye contact with a big predator generally means either ‘I want to eat you’ or ‘I want to make love to you’. But you also have to maintain situational awareness, to avoid getting a clout on the head from some big talons