The farmer caught a stork with the cranes — and the company you keep defines you

A farmer sowed a new field, but cranes came every day and ate the seed before it could sprout. The farmer set a net and waited. When the cranes came again, they flew into the net. When the farmer checked the catch, he found a stork among the cranes. The stork protested: 'I am not a crane. I am a stork. I eat no grain. I harm no farmer's field. I am innocent of the crime you are punishing.'

The farmer looked at the stork tangled in the net beside the cranes. 'You may be innocent,' he said, 'but you are caught with the guilty, and you will die with them. You chose your company when you flew with the cranes. The net does not distinguish between a thief and a traveller who keeps thieves company.' He killed the stork with the cranes.

The fable, attributed to Aesop and appearing in Phaedrus, is about accountability by association. The stork's defence — that his own actions were harmless — was factually correct but strategically irrelevant. He had aligned himself with the cranes, shared their feeding ground, adopted their timing and their route. To the farmer, the stork was a crane by behaviour, whatever his species said.