feynites:

prokopetz:

I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?

Sometimes I think we must seem like the old notions of the Fair Folk to city-dwelling animals.

Like we’re unpredictable, shiny, we operate by strange and unknowable laws sometimes, we can and do hunt and hurt them just for funzies, but… that fickleness goes both ways, and it really is, like, when all else is lost,spin the wheel of Human Weirdness and see if it lands on ‘benevolent’ today. Go to the Court of the Fairy Queen and say your right words and maybe, instead of getting turned into an equal volume of spiders, everything will be saved.