Causes of Random Acts of Violence

If you think random acts of violence are more common now than in the past you are correct. 

Violence has often been a part of the human society, wars over territory and such have been a concern for thousands of years, but actual random acts of violence are a relatively new thing.

In studies done on rats and mice, John B. Calhoun noted that as the populations grew so too did the occurrence of random acts of violence.  He provided the animals with ample food and water, so he could eliminate "need" from the cause of violent outbreaks.  What he noted was that as populations grew the compassion the animals had for one and other shrunk.  They no longer acted the same towards one and other, even simple parenting skills declined.

The rats, or mice, were in near constant contact with each other and this caused them to devalue others of their kind more and more over time, leading to the increase in random acts of violence.

Humans have doubled their population in the last 40 years.  This has caused a huge strain on us socially as more and more people feel like life is a rat race and is less enjoyable overall.  More people than ever are living in cities, constantly rubbing shoulders with others.  In turn people feel lost and alone, and their subconscious cannot take the loss of identity.  People are, in general, less compassionate to strangers, and in some cases even resent them. 

In the past when people lived rurally or in smaller communities (and in areas where these smaller communities still exist) people still greet each other with a "hello" and they still make eye-contact, even with people they do not know.  In big cities people mentally distance themselves from others, they do not say "hi" to people they walk by on the street and avoid eye-contact.

We have already reached a point where random acts of violence are occurring, and are at a place where they seem to be quite common. 

As parents we must raise our children to be compassionate to others, but equally so if we have lots of children we need to take responsibility for the fact that we are just adding more of a burden to the problem.

More people = more stress.

Please Don't Kill the Wolf that Killed Me

Have you noticed that when a person in North America is attacked by a wolf (or any wild animal), not only does it make the news, but people form groups and go out with one purpose in mind: kill the wolf!  In fact we are more likely to kill one wildlife animal for being a risk, than we are likely to kill another human being who has killed several other humans...

It does not matter what the circumstances were, the intent is to kill the wolf. You can almost hear people chanting “Kill the Wolf, Kill the Wolf”. Heck, it could be a cougar or bear, for that matter. People just seem to want revenge on the animal, or to prevent it from killing more humans I suppose.

Oh and sharks too – never mind that getting attacked by a shark is pretty easy to avoid – stay out of their water and you won't get eaten!

Let us do some animal math; there are over 7 billion people in the world. There are only 55,000 Grizzly bears, 50,000 cougars, and 100,000 wolves (most of which are in Canada).

 

If a person decides to enter bear territory, and maybe even comes between a mother bear and her cubs, and gets hurt, we blame the bear, we kill the bear, we form mobs that go out looking for the bear and are not satisfied until it is dead.

We have already pushed wild species out of the best parts of the wilderness, which we have claimed for ourselves. We build developments around the best lakes, we plop cities in the river valleys that wildlife have migrated through for generations.

Now, I am not saying I want to go out and get eaten by a wolf, bear, or cougar, I am just saying that if that ends up being my fate, please do not blame the animal. I do not want a murderous mob of people going on a wolf killing rampage through the forest just because one wolf took my life. It should not be front page news either, it is not anymore news worthy than if I die of old age, and natural causes. If we think about it, death by a wolf should be considered a “natural cause”, what's more natural than nature?

As populations of humans continue to grow and expand in to what use to be wildlife territories, we can expect to see more problems with these animals, but are they really the problem, or is it us?