Don’t get reference. Except from the fog something about Heinlein, who I haven’t read in over 40 years, and I don’t know why…
ETA: Kipling?..Kim! Right?
Close. It’s from The Jungle Book.
That’s because we’re no longer raising our riding horses for brains and tractability. Just looks.
Or houses are terrified of umbrellas. I think umbrellas are their natural enemies in the wild.
Yes, a feral umbrella on the loose in your house can do untold damage. You especially need to keep them away from windows and water beds and light fixtures. In multi-story office buildings, you need to keep them away from elevator buttons (particularly the cheap plastic ones), which umbrellas will attack and destroy as fast as they can be replaced.
(ETA: Not kidding. Evans Hall, the math/compsci building at U. C. Berkeley, had perpetually broken elevator buttons back when the building was new. It took me a long time to figure out why: People carrying umbrellas would poke the buttons with their umbrellas. I suspect they’ve long since been replaced by metal buttons.)
Yes, new-born [del]houses[/del] horses are, by default, a-skeered of everything but Mommy Horse. Throughout their lives, everything that they are ever not afraid of, they had to learn to not be afraid of. A large part of horse training consist of teaching them not to be afraid of things.
And the Heinlein?
From Just So Stories ?
OK, I feel a whoosh. But it was some young girl-who-grows-up or something. Damn–in a different type of thread in GQ I’d have 20 cites already…
Well, since this balloon went over like a brick, maybe the thread Why are people afraid of spiders? may be of interest.
It also was the most surprising thread I’ve ever seen in SD, and may be unique. But that’s for ATMB.
Genesis 3:15
I don’t see any recent studies on the primate/snake thing, but two or three years ago there were a lot of articles on it. Most of the studies aren’t very convincing, though, and seem to be a major over-interpretation of a few observations.
The cat and cucumber videos all over Youtube are hysterically funny. After watching them I was tempted to try it on my cat. I suspect that the shape of the cucumber is triggering the cat’s innate fear of snakes. But then I noticed that she likes to flop down next to our greyhounds and play with their tails, so I suspect she’s not a snake-phobic cat.
There was a news piece last month about a kid and a dog playing in the yard, when a rattlesnake popped into the scene. The dog immediately attacked the snake, got bit, and spent a good bit of time recovering under the attention of a vet. The newshounds and/or family members immediately spun it as a case of the dog heroically/selflessly protecting the kid from danger; I think it’s more likely the dog just had an instinctive predatory fascination and didn’t quite grasp the danger to himself (let alone to the kid).