The Rabbit Who Feared the Sky Was Falling

A nervous rabbit, resting beneath a tree, was startled awake by a loud thud beside him — merely a ripe fruit falling from the branches above — but in his half-asleep panic, he became instantly convinced the sky itself was breaking apart and falling to earth.

He ran in blind terror, and a second rabbit, seeing him flee, asked what was wrong. "The sky is falling!" the first rabbit gasped, without stopping to check. Believing him instantly, the second rabbit ran too, and soon a third, a fourth, and dozens more animals joined the panicked stampede — deer, boars, even a herd of elephants, none of them pausing to verify the claim, each simply trusting the fear of the animal running beside them.

A wise lion, watching thousands of animals flee blindly across the forest, finally planted himself in their path and called for silence, tracing the panic calmly back through each animal to its original source — the first startled rabbit. Returning together to the very spot where it began, the lion found only the fallen fruit and the truth beneath the whole crisis, and the entire forest, thoroughly embarrassed, learned that a single unverified fear, passed along without question, can nearly stampede an entire world into chaos.