Tents protect against predators mostly by hiding visual sign of the occupant.

Evidence

Modern tents rely on long, bowed poles to support them, and when these are snapped the design truly fails. The patchwork of foul-smelling fabric and string we’d salvaged was not very convincing. Also, I can attest from experience that any sense of security you derive from a tent comes from the visual barrier of fabric. Animals on the outside can both hear you and smell you, tucked away in your nylon shell. The only thing they can’t do is see you. A predator has no way to know that the shell you’ve erected is less than a millimeter thick, and for this reason tents really do protect you from most things that go bump in the night (unless, of course, that thing is so huge, like an elephant or hippo, that it squashes you by accident). — Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evolution of Battle, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the book’s earlier treatment of visual, auditory, and olfactory cues in predator detection — camouflage vs. concealment. — connects to: Unseen visitors leave prisoners without fear of exposure — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 682
• SEED: An essay angle: what the thin fabric of a tent reveals about how all ‘shelter’ from predators is really about disrupting a single sensory channel.