The Stork Caught With the Cranes

A farmer, tired of a flock of cranes repeatedly raiding his freshly sown field for grain, set a net across the field one evening and caught the entire flock at dawn as they descended to feed again. Among the captured birds was a single stork, who had merely been resting nearby and had wandered over out of simple curiosity, never once touching a grain of the farmer's seed himself.

As the furious farmer moved to wring the neck of each captured bird, the stork pleaded desperately for his own life, insisting with complete honesty that he was no crane at all, had eaten nothing from the field, and had done the farmer no harm whatsoever — surely, he argued, it would be unjust to punish an innocent bird alongside genuinely guilty thieves.

The farmer paused and considered his plea, then replied without much sympathy: "You may well be telling the truth about your own innocence, and I believe you never touched my grain. But I caught you in the company of thieves, feeding in the very same field at the very same time, and I have no way to tell an honest bystander from a guilty one once you've chosen to stand among them. You must share their fate, whatever your own intentions actually were." The lesson spread quickly among the birds of that region: the company you choose to stand beside speaks for you whether you intended it to or not, and innocence alone rarely protects you once you've been swept up in someone else's guilt.