Whenever I see police departments getting orders of magnitude more funding than schools, I think of brood parasites.

The small bird here, is convinced the huge one is its baby.

The tiny warbler is fooled completely into perceiving the giant chonky cuckoo as its baby. It is hallucinating that the giant bird is its baby.

There's a few reasons for why this chonk bird is able to cast such a fairy glamor:

1. It has evolved to display just the right patterns in its eggs and feathers, to fool the host bird. Like adversarial AI stickers that convinces an AI that a banana is a dog.

2. It has *also* evolved a mafia to speed up this process. Host parents who don't care for their chonk baby, get visited by henchbirbs who'll throw their eggs out of the nest.

Between both pressures, the result is that these chonky birds can literally take up the whole nest, pushing the host bird's eggs right out. Towering over the exhausted mama bird smaller than its head.

Suppose the warbler could talk. How exactly would you explain that it has been cruelly fooled into sacrificing its own children for an imposter that is actually far bigger than it?

How exactly would the warbler react, when told that it's been starving itself in order to support a parasite that has literally starved its real children to death?

You'd shatter the poor thing's mind, if it realized the magnitude of how thoroughly it'd been fooled by a parasite.

$1,000,000 is 0.1% of $1,000,000,000.

You regularly hear of police departments with billion dollar budgets, and schools with budgets measured in literal tenths of a percent of that.

A cuckoo is only a few times larger than a warbler.

If it were to scale, the brood parasite would be 1,000 larger than the host.

A male cuckoo is 130g. To scale, it'd be 130kg, or the size of a large human or small lion.

To scale, it'd be more like if this bird were, instead of grooming the crocodile, utterly convinced the crocodile were its baby and starving itself trying to feed it.