Animal Defense States designates the phylogenetically conserved repertoire of survival responses—orienting, cry for help, fight, flight, freeze, and shutdown—that organisms deploy when threat imminence escalates. Within the depth-psychology corpus, the term occupies a generative intersection between evolutionary neuroscience, trauma theory, and somatic psychotherapy. Nijenhuis draws the most sustained theoretical line, arguing that human dissociative and somatoform symptoms are homologous to the staged defensive response-sets documented in predator-prey research: pre-encounter wariness, post-encounter freezing, circa-strike explosive response, and recuperative withdrawal. Ogden translates this ethological framework into clinical procedure, treating each animal defense as an embodied state carrying its own emotional signature—panic with flight, rage with fight, helpless despair with shutdown—and devising sensorimotor exercises to restore flexible, chosen responsiveness in place of chronic defensive habits. LeDoux contributes the neural architecture, foregrounding defensive survival circuits that lower behavioral thresholds and impose species-specific response hierarchies, while insisting that conscious fear experience is a separable outcome rather than a cause of these circuits. Levine emphasizes the somatic completion of interrupted defenses as the royal road out of traumatic fixation. The central tension in the corpus concerns whether animal defense states are best understood as motivational causes of behavior or as consequences of survival-circuit activation—a dispute with direct implications for how therapists intervene with trauma-frozen clients.