six pond meadow

Conditioning is a very powerful brainwashing tool that can take a long time to overcome. Maybe that explains why some people are afraid to go outside the margins, especially when it pertains to adopting social media? Methinks ‘lack of experience’ is too weak of an explanation. Perhaps it’s a ‘cold war mentality’ that has been making it hard for some people to see the world outside their comfort zones? Bambi might hold the key to this question.

20 years ago after the Berlin Wall fell, wildlife biologists from the West German side of the Iron Curtain bordering the former Czechoslovakia tracked a group of red deer via electronic collars. Their objective was to see whether or not migration patterns in the Green Belt, Europe’s largest protected conservation area, had changed with the disappearance of the high electric fence and barbed wire that was once part of the fortified border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

What they found was startling: Herds of red deer roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border but most of them mysteriously — usually the females — turn around when they approach it. What makes this a curious thing is the fact that the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence ever being there — they simply turn back because that’s just part of the “traditional trails” that have been burnished into their collective memory and passed on through the generations.

But according to zoologist Pavel Sustr, there are signs that cross-border traffic may be picking up.

“Our data showed that the animals behaved very traditionally,” he says. “The former border was in the minds of the animals. But some of the young animals are searching for new territory. They are more and more deleting the border behavior that was there before.”

Opportunities abound: If young deer like Bambi can cross the “border” beyond their minds’ eyes, the older ones need to follow suit and take heed in the new society that awaits. Surely, they’ll grow abundantly in more ways than one.