Many years ago, when I was a little boy, I had a pet dog. His name was Tippy, better known as "Tippy the Wonder Dog." Tippy chased cars on Seven Locks Road, disappeared for days on end when he found a dog in heat, fought with every dog in the neighborhood, and ate garbage out of trash cans. His behavior wasn't without consequences: he was hit by cars several times, somebody shot him, and the dog catcher got him on one of his romantic excursions. Why did Tippy do such things? Instinct. At one time in the past, his type of behavior made sense.

Maybe 100,000 years ago in what is now Southern France, Tippy's ancestors hung around our ancestors. Our ancestors would pile up in a group and attack raging wooly mammoths, bringing them down and getting a lot of meat. A couple of cave men (and some cave women too, I'll bet) got stomped and gored in the process, but overall that type of behavior was good for us. It brought in desperately needed food to the survivors. Tippy's wolf ancestors were busy chasing deer and stuff, biting at their heels to bring them down, fighting amongst one another for dominance, and of course mating with a passion. Also, they enjoyed left-over rancid mammoth meat our ancestors left in the caves.

Why is it important that wolves ate rotting meat? Because at that time it made sense. It was nourishment that could be obtained with little effort. Just follow some cave men around and sneak into their garbage piles. Years later, Tippy's cousins are still slinking around in our garbage piles, when they have no need to do so. Tippy got a smelly can of dog food every night, but he was still driven to tip over the neighbor's trash cans. Instinct drove him to do this when it made no sense whatsoever.

Today there aren't many raging wooly mammoths about, but we've found other things to pile onto. What kind of drive got men to participate in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg? How about Omaha Beach on D-Day? Common sense would say run and hide in both cases, but still many men went charging to their deaths. Darker things have happened as well because of mob psychology, such as lynchings in our country, and the rise of Nazis in Germany. It seems our ability to think goes out the window when mob behavior takes over.

More important to us right now is how we invest in stocks. There are a number of stocks we've all seen investors pile on like a bunch of crazed cave men on a raging wooly mammoth. Like those guys, some of these people get stomped and gored too. I watched one stock get hyped to 17 dollars a share on a "story," and drop steadily to a little over a dollar a share. I was one of the people who got gored on that one. We all bought on excitement, there was even a countdown on the message board until the market opened the next morning. It probably was the same excitement the night before a mammoth hunt. As with that mammoth hunt, the ability to think seemed to have stopped.

Later in life, I got another dog, Ghillie. Ghillie chased deer, rabbits, squirrels, and birds. Cars had no attraction to him; they didn't look at all like animals in the least bit. He ate garbage when he had the chance, but he didn't knock over neighbors' trash cans. While rotting meat was probably almost as tasty as putrid mammoth, he didn't consider it worth getting shot over. I don't know if he would have disappeared for days at a time over a dog in heat; that was easy to prevent (we had him fixed).

As people, we're a little bit luckier than Tippy the Wonder Dog. Unlike that hormonally imbalanced poodle, we can think. The next time you see everybody piling on a stock, remember, it's not a mammoth. While it would give you a thrill to throw your money at something worthless, and get gored in the process, it is totally unnecessary. It is much less expensive to go to a football game or baseball game. If you feel the need to lose money, just bet on the outcome.

I'm sure that this Fribble is full of Archeological, Zoological, and Psychological errors and inconsistencies. Please forgive my lack of science. My aim is to teach specifically about the need to make your own decisions. Evaluate the companies you invest in. Take responsibility for your own errors. Otherwise, you may find your life progressing like Tippy the Wonder Dog's. I'd rather act like Ghillie ... without the modifications, of course!