#no SIR YOU CANNOT PET THE RATTLESNAKE

[heyclickadee]

There’s this binary set of attitudes I occasionally come across when talking to people who rarely come across wild animals any bigger or more varied than a robin or a squirrel.

On the one end, you’ll get people who think any carnivorous animal bigger than a fox is just itching to murder every living thing that comes across its path—especially the humans. I beta-read a story written by this guy who had grown up in suburban England. He had one chapter where his protagonist had to fight lions, another where he had to fight wolves, another where he had to fight a bear. And each time the animals really were just out to kill because the writer saw “kill” as an automatic action these animals would take; they came at this guy’s protagonist in CoD-esque waves just because.

I actually came across the same thing a lot while working at a state park; people would come up to me incensed that we allowed bobcats (yes, they would complain about the bobcats) and rattlesnakes in the park. Didn’t we know those things attacked people?

Pushing the idea that the state park staff needed to make sure *checks notes* animals were not present in their natural habitat in what was basically a nature preserve…well, yes, animal attacks do happen, and they can be dangerous or even deadly, but they usually happen for a specific reason. Humans are big, kinda weird animals, and there are not that many predators left that see us as prey (though they do exist). Hiking in some (some) parts of North America you’re a lot more likely to be attacked by a large herbivore like a moose than a large predator like a mountain lion (it’s still not that likely, but even so). Something like a rattlesnake isn’t going to going to attack you because it’s wired to kill.

The other side of this I’ll come across sometimes is that all animals are harmless, misunderstood puppies who want scritches. It’s maybe more common in the internet, but it bleeds over into real life sometimes. You get people trying to pet bears and bison. And I get it—we’re just human. We try to pack bond with everything and bears and the like really are just so damn fluffy.

But that’s really just the opposite end of the same misunderstanding. Barring an outlier in personality, wild animals aren’t murder machines, but they aren’t harmless, either. They’re just animals trying to live. Many animals—from insects and arthropods to big mammals—will attack if pressed by the right circumstances.

A prairie rattlesnake, for example, is rarely be actively aggressive. They’re shy, we’re large and more or less impossible for them to eat, biting us for no reason is a waste of energy—they rattle to get predators and larger animals to back off before they have to—and they’d just as soon leave us alone. That’s not the same thing as saying a prairie rattlesnake poses no danger; they do. Get in a rattlesnake’s face or step on it by accident, and it will bite you, because you’re a threat and it’s trying to stay alive.

I don’t know. Something something about not replacing the idea that wildlife is out for murder with the idea that wildlife is fully domesticated. Something about understanding, distance, and respect.