Elephants & Mice

You've all probably seen Dumbo, and seen the cartoons where an elephant sees a mouse and goes running scared. I know I have. I also know that I have accepted as fact that elephants are afraid of mice. I never quite knew why they would be afraid of mice, but then again, I am a few hours short of my large mammal psychology degree from that online college in Belarus.

Be that as it may, there is a television show on Discovery channel that tackles things like "are elephants afraid of mice", "can a chicken destroy an airplane window" and "can you get electrocuted by peeing on the third rail of the subway". That show is Mythbusters. For those that haven't seen it, I would highly, highly recommend giving it a peak. It is entertaining and puts to rest many myths and urban legends, while confirming others. Over the Christmas they had an episode where they tried to set a Christmas tree on fire with just the tree lights. They couldn't get it to happen so they tried putting 25000 c9 lights (those are the big ones) and left then on for hours and hours, but never got hot enough to catch the tree on fire. But the ignited one little spark and WHOOSH! The tree was so dry by the time the stand-by firefights were able to move the 50 or so feet to the tree, it was gone.

At any rate, in this video the Mythbusters take on the myth of whether or not elephants are really afraid of mice. Take a look, you might be surprised.

Mouse v elephant
Uploaded by krupis