Apparently the vast majority of common people seem to think the sudden appearance of a venomous or potentially dangerous animal is cause for reactive alarm, or killing.

If this were really true, you should be terrified every time you see a human being, because nothing is more dangerous or venomous than a technologically empowered idiot guided by nonsense and willing to attack its own intelligence and almost anything else that moves with arbitrary purpose and catastrophic force.

Perhaps more confusing are those who see such encounters as dire ‘omens’. Did it ever occur to them that an encounter with another living being is fundamentally an omen of wonder and discovery? That the rattlesnake or black widow is actually something astonishing and beautiful? That it might be an ‘omen’ of the profound benefit of mutual recognition?

Come on, humans! It’s another living being. You’re within the same cell. If your cellular constituents attacked each other, you’d explode before you could blink your eyes.

Put down the gun. Go sniff a flower or something.