Other rodents are very different. The Arctic shrew is a solitary creature. Try keeping one in a cage, and it’ll be doing just fine. Put two in a cage together, however, and one will die. We don’t know through exactly what means the weak shrew dies. We see no sign of one shrew attacking the other. We just see one shrew soon dead, perhaps from psychic shrew beams.
Since we don’t observe just how the shrew dies in another’s presence, you might say this vulnerability labels shrews as terminal introverts, rather than killers. But let’s be honest: Is there really such a difference between those two groups? You know what they say about the quiet ones.
Australian Horses and Cows
We’re always talking about Australia as a place of deadly animals. It’s the land of spiders and snakes and sharks, and the home of the deadly bunyip. When Australia’s professional death actuaries tallied up exactly what kills whom, they found that kangaroos outkill all those creatures, killing five or six people each year. But at the very top of the list, ahead of even the boxing kangaroo, are horses and cows. Australian horses and cows kill the most, and they do so for one simple reason: They’ve had enough.
If we seriously had to explain why cows and horses kill so many people, we’d have to go into how many people work so closely with horses and cows compared to any other animal. When even a tiny percentage of cows see red, many humans become mush.
The real takeaway from that Aussie leaderboard is that many seemingly deadly animals don’t kill much of anyone. Spiders? One guy dying by spider bite in 2016 was Australia’s first death by spider in decades — if a spider really did kill him, which was never certain. We have antivenom now. So, the really brave among you won’t go to Australia and rub your genitals directly on a spider’s nest, as has been proven safe. Instead, try punching a cow, right in the snout. Then flee. Flee, and don’t stop.
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