system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Zootopia] Why do members of prey species have uncharacteristic forward-facing eyes?

In some instances, like with rabbits, this seems to be a species-wide feature. Other times, species are inconsistent. Bellwether has forward facing eyes while her sheep cohorts have wide-set eyes (and wide pupils). There are also plenty of prey species that appear to universally keep their wide-set eyes. What would pressure certain prey species, or select members of prey species, to evolve closely set eyes while still having the same herbivore diet and carnivore threats as their ancestors? The predator/prey truce seems too recent for that to be the reason for the change.
gpt
I think there's a heavy implication that we're not talking about "truce" as much as we're talking about a (taxonomic) Class-wide symbiosis. All of Mammalia has co-evolved to be intelligent. It's not that wolves and deer one day decided to set aside their differences and stop fighting, it's that wolves evolved into anthro wolves and deer evolved into anthro deer, and THOSE groups set aside their differences, because they were now all intelligent creatures able to co-exist.

There's clearly some heavy convergent evolution going on (genetic engineering is more plausible but that's neither here nor there), turning regular lower mammals into bipedal, sapient people with similar bodyplans and facial structures. So having eyes in the front of their head is no more arbitrary a similarity than the extremely large number of convergent traits that these species all, for some reason, share.

The most obvious explanations are:

1. At some point, an extremely successful and nigh-infinitely-large niche opened up that created massive selection across the entire class of mammalia towards humanoid characteristics, forward facing eyes included

2. All mammals were deliberately engineered into similar bodyplans by a progenitor species that wanted to create a massive variety of bipeds with human characteristics (humans probably did it in some monstrous trans-human furry genetic ascension before their society crumbled leaving only their horrifying manimals to inherit the earth). See Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Chase.

3. Horizontal Gene Transfer: Somehow the genetic material for humanoid traits spread throughout Animalia, *naturally.* A wildly adaptable retrovirus carrying human genetic material (or at least biped genetic material) spread across all of Animalia. After, of course, causing horrifying mutations across all of nature that killed most individuals who were infected, the survivors who integrated the DNA successfully and were not sterile ended up forming new lineages of animal-human hybrids which persist to this day.