Why would a fire dragon still be afraid of torches?
I can understand that all animals would instinctively stay away from a fire, however for a fire breathing dragon to be warded off by torches seem puzzling to me. What could help explain such ironic behavior from a fire dragon?
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Fight fire with fire.
Remember, the fire-breathing dragon breathes fire for some reason. Even if the dragon doesn't realize that it breathes fire, the ability almost certainly evolved together with some particular set of behaviors. Most likely, this reason can be summed up as one or both of:
- Defense: Warding off another
- Offense: Attacking, to injure, drive off or kill another
If the dragon breathes fire in order to defend itself or someone it deems worth protecting (mate, offspring, ...), then for other dragons to have a fear of the fire of another reduces the risk of greater injuries. This is typical of aggressive behaviors: they are rituals that have evolved to increase the chance of both individuals living another day.
If the dragon breathes fire in order to attack others, then fire-breathing is a very aggressive or predatory behavior to which other dragons will very likely have evolved a response to either fight back, or flee. Fighting back increases the risk of injuries to all involved, and "fleeing" can easily be called "to be afraid" of whatever the individual flees in response to, even if there is no such intellectual response.
When, presumably a human, carries fire, then the human takes the place of the other dragon. Unless the dragon's default response to another fire-breathing dragon is to fight back, even if the dragon can tell the difference between a human and a dragon, the dragon may well fall back to trying to increase the distance to the fear-invoking stimuli: the fire. In which case a human, anthropomorphizing, is likely to call it "afraid of fire".
Fear is simply an evolved response to situations that have turned out to be dangerous, for which evolutionary pressure ensures a particular response that increases the chance of the individual not being injured or killed.
Find a way to explain why a dragon would be afraid of another dragon's fire, and it's very likely that the same mechanism would apply in the case of a human with a torch. Or, failing that, a flamethrower.
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Learned behaviour.
Like staking an elephant or Pavlov's dogs.
When the dragon was young and more fragile it had a bad experience with some trappers who thought it would be fun to hurt it with fire.
Mama dragon tracked it down, rescued it, and ate the trappers, but the image of the torches stuck with it.
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