A few years ago a man i knew, Steve, had a business taking school pictures and selling the photo packages. Steve wanted to know where his best market was and what his biggest moneymaking packages were... so he hired a marketing firm to do survey's, compile the data, and make suggestions. Steve was told his best market was schools with a graduating class of less than 100, and then his next best market was a graduating class of less than 250, and then 400 and anything after that was what they considered just "production photography". So, Steve went and did a little research and found all the schools in the south with typical graduating classes of 100 or less first, did his school pictures sales routine, and then spent his time with larger schools. Interestingly enough, Steve found that in the schools with graduating classes of 100 or less, he typically sold the high dollar picture packages! And he also found that the larger the graduating class, the smaller the picture packages...and when he took pictures and sold packages to schools with larger than 400 students graduating, they almost always picked the $19.95 special. Being an inquisitive fellow, Steve went back to the marketing firm and asked the question: why. Their reply was that in the smaller schools most students had a circle of friends that was typically almost everyone in the graduating class..they all knew each other and the parents knew each other and everyone wanted everyone else to have pictures, and the larger the school, the smaller the circle of friends got, and in the really large highschools, most kids had a circle of close friends around 3 on the average. They also told him of a government study done back in the 60's with rats. The study had been done at a university and the students had put 1 rat in 1 square foot of space...the rat was fine, 3 rats in 3 sq. ft. of space, rats were fine, 10 rats in 10 sq. ft. of space, and they were fine...but when they got out around 100+ rats in an equal sq. ft. area, there came fighting and total chaos, even some deaths...and it wasn't fighting over females or food, it was JUST TOO MANY RATS IN ONE SPOT! Could it be there are simply too many people in one spot sometimes?
Yes.
I watched a film in High School science, years ago, that demostrated a few rats in cages. Food, water, and space were ample. However, as the rats reproduced and food, water, and space decreased, the violence, which was previously almost non-existent, shot up.
I move out ot the city 5 years ago.
I live in the woods, in one of the least populated states in the US.
I'm much calmer.
The kids were fighting because there were too many rats in the school? Or because they wanted their picture taken.
Maybe they wanted their picture taken with a rat, and were upset because they couldn't?