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**sarasmid** · 01-19-2011, 04:38 PM

It makes perfect sense and is widely documented. Many animals are pretty tame and don't run from humans, this makes them easy to hunt because they just stand there and don't run away as a hunter creeps up on them.

Cite, please. "This is new and strange to me; I'll just assume it's safe and ignore it" is the dumbest survival instinct imaginable, except perhaps "Ooh, a bright, hot red light in the forest! I'd better lie down and go to sleep." Any wild animal that tamely walked up to strange animals would find itself very quickly removed from the population.

Try an experiment. Do you have a dog, or a friend with a dog? Get yourself a dinky little windup toy, crank it up and put it on the floor with the dog. What do you think will happen?

Spoiler: The dog will, nine times out of ten, react to the new organism by backing up and barking at it furiously. It has no reason to fear the stupid thing except that it is moving and making noise, and therefore a strange organism. After it has been doing its thing for a while, or if it winds down and stops, the dog will approach, very cautiously, and make timid sniffs to try and figure it out. This will work equally well for great danes and chihuahuas, except the chihuahua will bark a lot longer because it knows, deep in its neurotic soul, that it's too pathetic for anything to ever be really afraid of it.

If you try this with a cat, of course, the cat will simply pounce on it and try to kill it, because cats are hardwired to annihilate anything smaller or weaker than themselves. They're jerks that way. If my cat were bigger than me, it would murder me as soon as I moved too fast and to hell with affection, purely by instinct. But they certainly won't ignore it.

And that's with domesticated animals, creatures bred for docility who've rarely, if ever, faced a real threat in their lives. Wild animals will react in a similar but exaggerated way to novel creatures, as a general rule. Species which do not mistrust humans instinctively, like Allegheny cliff rats, are few and far between. Oh, and if we're talking about herd animals--like mammoths, in all likelihood--they'll learn to distrust humans pretty quickly when Ook-Ook and D'leh start bringing down their herdmates.

01-19-2011, 04:38 PM	#26
sarasmid Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 445 Senior Member	It makes perfect sense and is widely documented. Many animals are pretty tame and don't run from humans, this makes them easy to hunt because they just stand there and don't run away as a hunter creeps up on them. Cite, please. "This is new and strange to me; I'll just assume it's safe and ignore it" is the dumbest survival instinct imaginable, except perhaps "Ooh, a bright, hot red light in the forest! I'd better lie down and go to sleep." Any wild animal that tamely walked up to strange animals would find itself very quickly removed from the population. Try an experiment. Do you have a dog, or a friend with a dog? Get yourself a dinky little windup toy, crank it up and put it on the floor with the dog. What do you think will happen? Spoiler: The dog will, nine times out of ten, react to the new organism by backing up and barking at it furiously. It has no reason to fear the stupid thing except that it is moving and making noise, and therefore a strange organism. After it has been doing its thing for a while, or if it winds down and stops, the dog will approach, very cautiously, and make timid sniffs to try and figure it out. This will work equally well for great danes and chihuahuas, except the chihuahua will bark a lot longer because it knows, deep in its neurotic soul, that it's too pathetic for anything to ever be really afraid of it. If you try this with a cat, of course, the cat will simply pounce on it and try to kill it, because cats are hardwired to annihilate anything smaller or weaker than themselves. They're jerks that way. If my cat were bigger than me, it would murder me as soon as I moved too fast and to hell with affection, purely by instinct. But they certainly won't ignore it. And that's with domesticated animals, creatures bred for docility who've rarely, if ever, faced a real threat in their lives. Wild animals will react in a similar but exaggerated way to novel creatures, as a general rule. Species which do not mistrust humans instinctively, like Allegheny cliff rats, are few and far between. Oh, and if we're talking about herd animals--like mammoths, in all likelihood--they'll learn to distrust humans pretty quickly when Ook-Ook and D'leh start bringing down their herdmates.
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