Fox or tiger:
who scared
the animals?

The full narration of the video.

The animals bolt. The fox says they fear him, and the tiger believes it. This story comes from a Chinese book written over two thousand years ago. A tiger catches a fox. The fox says: "Heaven made me king of the beasts. Eat me, and you defy Heaven."

"Don't believe me? Walk behind me and see." So they walk into the forest, fox first. Deer, boar, rabbits, all of them run. The tiger is stunned. It thinks they fear the fox, and lets the fox go.

So who were they afraid of? The tiger behind, of course. Animals spot danger by size, by shape, and by smell. Studies find that deer turn alert, or even steer away, when they smell a big predator's urine.

When a cat weighing hundreds of pounds walks by, the whole forest can smell it. Still, the story isn't all wrong. Rabbits really do fear foxes. Foxes eat rabbits. So as the pair walked by, the rabbits feared both, and the deer feared only one.

You may have seen this at school. You walk down the hall just ahead of your homeroom teacher, and every noisy classroom goes quiet. They fear the teacher. But you, out in front, feel pretty powerful.

Here's the fun part. In nature, there's a little bird that really lives this way. In the mountains of Arizona lives a hummingbird not much bigger than your thumb. Its eggs have one big enemy: jays. Jays hunt for nests and eat the eggs.

But jays fear hawks. Hawks catch jays. So the hummingbird builds its nest below a hawk's nest. Near a hawk, jays only dare to feed up high. Below the hawk's nest, a space opens up with no jays. It's shaped like a cone.

Count them up. Near hawks, about 46 nests out of 100 raised their chicks. Far from hawks, only 9. Don't hawks eat hummingbirds? They're too small and too fast. Hawks hardly bother. This has a name: a protective nesting association. You build your home next to a tough neighbor, and let it keep your enemies away.

The hawk is the tiger. The hummingbird is the fox. But the hummingbird fools no one. It just picks the right neighbor. Back to the story. Long ago, someone told it to the King of Chu. He said: the northern states don't fear your minister. They fear the army of the king behind him.

So the idiom means scaring people with someone else's power. But the most confused one in the story is the tiger. Every day it watches animals run, and never once thinks that it's the reason. As a kid, whose name did you drop to scare someone off?