In his famous book, King Solomon’s Ring, the great naturalist Konrad Lorenz describes the time he spent observing the behaviour of a family of shrews. Like you do. He observed that the shrews always took the same path around their territory, and after the first few times of cautiously sniffing their way along, they’d follow the path at a flat run, looking neither to left nor to right. At which point he wondered what would happen if there was a sudden change in their environment. So he removed a rock that the shrews had been in the habit of leaping over on their route. And…

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