Fear of mice avoid a mouse, showing there may be some basis for this belief. It is not known why elephants should react in this way, though there are several theories. Regardless, elephantine murophobia remains the basis of various jokes and metaphors. The classical board game Dou Shou Qi has the Rat kill an Elephant: as multiple editions of the rule book mentions that the Rat would crawl into the Elephant's ears to gnaw into its brain: but this is considered to be a folk tale. Gertrude of Nivelles is the patron saint of murophobia, and is also invoked against rats and mice
Women's fear of crime and victimization rates. A 1998 study in Glasgow, Scotland, found a gender disparity in fear of crime levels smaller than what is generally accepted. The study also found that men and women with similar fear levels tended to use similar reasoning to explain their fear of crime or lack of fear, although men's and women's fear appeared in different situations (men tended to be more often fearful about property crime, whereas women were more fearful about violent crime). A 2010 Turkish study using a large nationwide sample confirmed that women expressed significantly higher levels of fear of crime than men.