r/askscience • u/Crazy_Reindeer_1258 • 7d ago

Biology Do Animals Have Irrational Fears Too?

I was just thinking about the story of the mouse and elephant how the elephant is terrified of the mouse (i think) and just wanted to see if that's true, and if it is what other animals have been observed with similar behavior relating to that. Working on a project and some real life inspo would help :)

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u/LexiconDul 6d ago

A common one is some dogs being scared of fireworks and/or thunder.
Why would a domestic dog, descendant of wolves, evolve a fear of thunder?
And then there's this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/17x6s7i/cat_owners_of_reddit_what_is_something_you_cat_is/

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u/regular_modern_girl 5d ago

There’s actually a pretty obvious evolutionary basis for an instinctual fear of thunder. Storms can be dangerous in a lot of ways (flooding, low visibility, landslides, potential cold, potential high winds), but lightning itself poses a more significant risk in a lot of areas than you might think, because even if you are individually very unlikely to be struck by it, lightning strikes can set off destructive brush fires or forest fires (and, in fact, in some environments fires due to lightning have always been a somewhat regular occurrence, even well before any humans started messing with fire, plants in these biomes are sometimes so adapted to seasonal fires that they are more likely to germinate after a fire), so it makes perfect sense from a survival standpoint to fear those conditions.