Past Present Future animal

Ideas of temporality seem to be underpinning a lot of our thinking around the poem, and again, I'm connecting this to W.J.T Mitchell's thinking. For him, the image of the animal is connected to futurity - animals go before us in the hunt, in evolution, as subjects of experimentation. In other words animals have the capacity to predict the future. Or they are the future? In a recent lecture at the Royal Society of Arts he talked about early cave drawings as augury - images of the hunt were drawn out to invoke a picture/scenario (cin-ario?) of what was about to take place. Perhaps Mandelstam's image of the age as a beast which looks back, forward and at the present can be related to some of these ideas?