Urbanised Squirrels Attack

I recently took a walk in Greenwich Park to take pictures. I had bought some Chinese food at the market and was looking for a nice spot to have a picnic. While strolling through the park I found a very isolated and bleak area, the grass was yellow and dead and the trees had no leaves. I picked up the camera to take pictures when I saw a few squirrels. 

I approached a squirrel perched on a tree and lifted my camera. Usually squirrels will scatter off when something is pointed directly at them but this one looked back at me curiously. Two more showed up and appeared to climb up a tree next to me to get a better look. A fourth one now started to sneak towards me carefully and just when I was about to take a picture it suddenly jumped on me and crawled up all the way to my thigh before I managed to shake it off. Suddenly the two squirrels in the tree jumped down towards me as well. In order to get a better look at what was going on I turned and went a few steps back, only to realize that I was being followed by five very determined squirrels.

I left the area, avoiding trees and walking through open fields in order to avoid any other curious squirrels. They followed me through the open field for what must have been well over 300 meters, stopping when I turned to look and continuing when I turned back to walk. I had never experienced such aggressive behaviour from small critters, and I started thinking about how they're environment must have affected them for behaving the way they did.

Curious about the experience, I began to research the urbanization of critters and how living in a crowded, man-made environment affects them. According to researcher Tommy Parker of the University of Missouri-Columbia (http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/969 - visited on March 25th 2009) squirrels behave very much like humans in crowded areas, getting pushy and aggressive, as opposed to they're defensive nature. It is not normal for a squirrel to attack a creature over twenty times its own size but this is what living in a man-made environment has made them. Century old instincts can therefore be overridden in mere years, making a critter which lives off collecting and storing food a predator, attacking and hunting other creatures. 

I don't know the context of this video, but behaviour like this is in no way natural for a squirrel under any circumstances: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ADeaQ_N-M

In Mountain View, California, squirrel attacks have become frequent enough for the authorities to put up warning signs, cautioning park visitors to stay away from squirrels due to their aggressive nature. http://cbs5.com/pets/sqirrels.cuesta.park.2.447602.html

I find this shift in natural hierarchy very interesting. How small defensive critters have become a threat to humans under certain circumstances, who by mere physical capability and difference in size could easily defend themselves. However it would be completely unacceptable to do such a thing in our day and age. At the same time, the new conditioning habitat creating the aggressive behaviour in the first place is man-made, suggesting an interesting paradox - humans have conditioned tiny creatures to become aggressive predators in an urban environment and at the same time have conditioned themselves not to harm these small creatures, leaving themselves open to attack.