Flocks of cyclists
This'll be a short, silly post, but I felt compelled to write it.
There's a park near me where I go for runs that's also very popular with the cyclists. We'll all get up, early in the morning, me with my running shoes and them with their bikes, and we'll start doing circuits of the road around the park.
The cyclists are all part of their own, smaller groups, and they travel round in their pelotons, overtaking each other and navigating the odd car or motorbike.
Another unfortunate group of people circling the park at this time are the people looking to steal the cyclists' bikes. They often travel in pairs on mopeds and will flank lone cyclists and gradually run them off the road, then force them to hand over their pride and joy with the threat of violence. It's frankly disgusting and horrifying, and I feel so angry that these people think they can get away with it. Some of these bikes are worth thousands of pounds and are not easily replaceable. The police need to step up their game and actually patrol this park to catch the thieves because nothing will change until they start getting punished for it.
Anyway, the thought I had was that this is all oddly reminiscent of animals in the wild? It's sort of like the cyclists travel as a flock (of birds, maybe, or wildebeest?) to protect each other from predators (the moped thieves), and it's the lone cyclist that gets picked off from the group and targeted.
Maybe there's some deeper comparison to be made about humanity always trying to distance itself from nature and other animals, only to end up behaving in the same ways as it.