[Party Elephant]

Originally Posted by driveway

The number of people in the world gets me, as well as the number of other animals.

Like recently I saw something about the population of European bison rebounding well from near extinction to over 4,000 animals. And I thought "oh that's good." And then I thought, "if only 4000 people turned up to an NHL game, that would be horrible."

We, as a species, regularly and happily gather in numbers that utterly dwarf the total number of individuals in this whole species. A 4000 person concert is 'pretty intimate.' 4000 bison is enough to not be endangered anymore!

And then I started thinking about other animals. So the saddledome holds 19,000 people, and it doesn't feel that weird to see all 19,000 together at once. But if you saw 19,000 cats all in the same place, at the same time? You'd freak right out. You'd think some crazy biblical ghostbusters #### was going down.

Hell, if you saw 20 cats in one place, you'd think - damn, that's a lot of cats! But if you saw only 20 people at the Ship and Anchor you'd think it was almost eerily quiet. Put 20 cats in there, though and suddenly its "full" of cats. Or like, flamingos. Put 20 flamingos in the Ship and Anchor pub and everyone is going to freak out about how many flamingos are there. But we're perfectly happy to cram in there with 250 other humans.

People are weird.

Herd animals vs solitary animals?