Latest Article from Darcy Mellsop - "Spiders and stuff"

"Spiders and stuff"

If a spider builds a web, and it’s not catching any bugs, the spider basically has two choices: Do nothing and learn to survive on nothing or; rebuild its web in another place.

I was talking with a friend recently, and we were talking about Avoidance and he put it to me that Avoidance is pretty common sense really, just don’t do stuff like walk down dark alleys. But is it really that simple? I mean, we know this already, and most act on this advice, but there is still a heck of a lot of violence about, so what’s going on?

If you are the bad guy waiting in the dark alley, and you are getting bored waiting as everyone is heeding the advice not to venture there, are you going to remain there or go hunting? And if you are hunting in a different environment, such as bars, clubs and streets – generally where people
are, would you use the same strategies as you would have used in the colloquial dark alley, or do the strategies change and adapt to the environment?

We know that they change. Yes, we can change the balance of probability of being in locations safer than others, but predators do roam and scope. Predators have many skills, which they train and honed, especially verbal skills such as the manipulation strategies I’ve exposed in previous columns.

Understand this, predators aren’t all around us, generally good people are - but predators are everywhere. Scoping and evaluating. Good Avoidance stems from acknowledging this.