To be sure, I agree that wild animals, even small ones, should be treated with respect and given space. I did not mean to imply that humans should go around picking fights with geese. Anything can happen in a fight, and I certainly agree with you that fighting a goose without a compelling reason would be imprudent. And at any rate, it would be unkind. You can be stronger than something without mistreating it. I don't mean my assessment of the danger humans and geese pose to each other as a sort of challenge -- it's just what I frankly think on the topic. Either way, of course we should respect and be kind to geese.

Where we stand on the respective odds of different humans versus different geese in different arenas, it's actually orthogonal to my original point -- that different groups of geese vary in their courage around humans, and that there are extreme outliers who are doing a lot more than "cutting it close" -- they're betting the humans will give them space. Or perhaps I saw something rare and was simply channelling Snow White that day. ;)

The more general point is that animal behavior need not always be thought of as the solution to an optimization problem. Whether you believe that's true or not in an ultimate sense, in an immediate sense, it is obvious that their personalities and experience come into play too, and that sometimes they make bad decisions.