The Book of Animal Ignorance Read online

  Another Quite Interesting Book

  The Book of Animal Ignorance

  John Mitchinson

  John Lloyd

  Designed and illustrated by

  Ted Dewan

  Contents

  Foreword by Stephen Fry

  Forepaw by Alan Davies

  Introduction

  Aardvark

  Albatross

  Anglerfish

  Ant

  Armadillo

  Badger

  Bat

  Bear

  Beaver

  Bee

  Beetle

  Binturong

  Bison

  Box Jellyfish

  Butterfly

  Cane Toad

  Capercaillie

  Cat

  Catfish

  Cheetah

  Chimpanzee

  Cicada

  Comb Jelly

  Coral

  Cow

  Crane

  Dog

  Dolphin

  Donkey

  Eagle

  Echidna

  Eel

  Elephant

  Ferret

  Flea

  Fly

  Fossa

  Fox

  Frog

  Giant Tortoise

  Gibbon

  Giraffe

  Goat

  Goose

  Gorilla

  Hedgehog

  Hoatzin

  Horse

  Human

  Hummingbird

  Hyena

  Kangaroo

  Koala

  Komodo Dragon

  Leech

  Lion

  Lizard

  Lobster

  Louse

  Mite

  Mole

  Monkey

  Moose

  Mouse

  Naked Mole Rat

  Octopus

  Owl

  Pangolin

  Parrot

  Pearl Oyster

  Penguin

  Pig

  Pigeon

  Platypus

  Porcupine

  Quoll

  Rabbit

  Raccoon

  Rat

  Salamander

  Scorpion

  Sea Cow

  Sea Cucumber

  Seal

  Shark

  Sheep

  Snake

  Spider

  Starfish

  Tapir

  Tardigrade

  Termite

  Toad

  Tuatara

  Walrus

  Wasp

  Whale

  Woodlouse

  Woodpecker

  Worm

  Tailpiece

  Foreword

  Stephen Fry

  Animals are the oats in the QI muesli, the basic black frock in our wardrobe, the baseline to our phat phunky dub. If you cannot be entranced, amused and astonished by the animal kingdom then QI has no use for you nor you, no doubt, for us.

  Animals have this in common with each other: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves. A tree frog (so far as we can ascertain) doesn’t wake up in the morning feeling guilty that it was a bad tree-frog the night before, nor does it spend any time wishing it were a wallaby or a crane-fly. It just gets on with the business of being a tree-frog, a job it does supremely well. We humans, well … we are never content, always guilty, and rarely that good at being what nature asked us to be – Homo sapiens.

  There is much to be learned from the animals. Much to be learned about them, of course, but much, much more to be learned about ourselves: our limits, our lonely uniqueness as a species and, I would add, our greatness. The fact that we care with unreciprocated fervour about woodlice, woodpeckers and wolverines is to our credit. I cannot subscribe to this modern idea that we should feel guilty about our role on earth, or inferior for having evolved a (self-)conscious mind. This is just Genesis wrapped up in new, even more sanctimonious clothes. The old religion and the new orthodoxy both claim we have guardianship over the earth and a ‘moral’ responsibility for its destiny. Well, fine. But I will not apologise for committing the crime of being born any more than a marmot or a mosquito should. And between them, those two have been responsible for more death and upheaval than all human wars.

  In the end, whatever weird and unfathomable purposes there might be to existence, to whichever theory of the development of life you might subscribe, we all have to face the fact that there is no entirely satisfactory explanation for the oddities and extremities of the zoological world. Nothing in nature seems to follow a fixed predictable law, not the number of penises on an insect, not the need for a chicken to have a head. I suppose they all have in common the melancholy fact that they have been impersonated, with the use of nothing more than a mop of hair, expressive hands and a pair of big brown eyes, by Mr Alan Davies.

  Forepaw

  Alan Davies

  My ignorance of animals is legendary.

  I know two dogs quite well. One is my dad’s the other is my step-mum’s. Both these dogs are idiots. I know my sister’s cat quite well as she is actually my cat but I gave her to my sister to look after for a fortnight in 1993. I have two goldfish, one named Brian after Brian Dowling out of TV’s Big Brother and the other named Bill after Bill Bailey, the legendary materialist-hippy comedian from the West Country who has many animals of different kinds. Bill gave me Bill to keep in my pond when he was having the builders in to move his pond 20 feet up the garden (money well spent). Bill and Brian (the fish) get on very well. Bill and Brian the television personalities have, to the best of my knowledge, never met. I can only speculate on how their relationship would unfold. Amicably at first but I suspect they may baulk at being asked to spend five years together in a 6-foot x 6-foot pond as their fishy counterparts have. I don’t know what sex the fish are but even if they are opposites they will not be able to have babies because the moment they lay any eggs they will eat them. In the wild they forget where they’ve put them, so the tiny Nemos have a fighting chance. In captivity they will inevitably come across them and simply forget they have laid and fertilised them. This is not because they were drunk at the time but because goldfish have a famously short memory. Or is that a modern myth the QI folk would publicly shame me for believing? Probably. My ignorance of animals is only extended by a refusal to eat them. Although I did eat meat throughout my childhood and remember lamb in particular as being bloody delicious. Jeremy Clarkson turned to me during a recording of QI one night and said pityingly: ‘You’re a vegetablist aren’t you?’ QI’s creator and senior boffin, John Lloyd, on learning that I would eat a prawn but on no account a mammal, simply shook his head and whispered, ‘Extraordinary.’ I don’t know why I won’t eat them, it just seems so unnecessary. Fish I do eat because they were here long before we were and they’ll be here long after we’ve gone. No, that’s not it. It’s because they are cold-blooded and don’t have a nervous system like mammals so they don’t feel pain. Who knows if that’s true? Selfishly, I eat seafood because it’s hard to get decent veggie food in restaurants. Except Indian restaurants. Or Thai. Or Vietnamese. That’s why those Asian cuisines really float my boat. Delicious food and nothing died.

  Unfortunately, of course, in many parts of Asia, they do eat dogs. And I like dogs even though both the dogs I know are idiots …

  Introduction

  John Mitchinson & John Lloyd

  Animals know things we don’t. You may think this is pretty obvious, but in a book about ‘animal ignorance’ it’s important to point out who it is that’s ignorant here. Spend a little time in the company of animals, even the ones st
retched out on the bottom of your bed, and you’ll start to see the world differently. Look into their eyes and try to think what they’re thinking. It’s impossible, of course, which is what makes it so compelling. Whatever else we discover, however close we come to understanding the inner workings of the universe, we’ll never, ever know what it feels like to live life as a cat, still less an ant, or a starfish.

  Animals have fired our imaginations like nothing else, not God, not the weather, not other humans. From the first moment we discovered we could daub shapes on cave walls, we’ve been painting, writing and thinking about them. The magical rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples, their creations myths and healing practices are all one long dialogue with the animal kingdom. To take on the power of an animal – the sight of an eagle, the speed of an antelope, the strength of a lion – these were the original superpowers. Most animals are still tirelessly exercising the same skills they’ve done for millennia. As a species, we’re very new kids on a very old block.

  The original inspiration for this book was the medieval bestiaries. These were the most popular and influential books after the Bible itself. In them you’d be amazed to discover that weasels conceived through their ears, that bees were born from dead oxen and that a goat’s blood was hot enough to dissolve diamonds. And scattered among the myths about real animals was ‘real’ information about mythical beasts – centaurs, unicorns, dragons, manticores. Only rarely did bestiaries contain facts based on actual observation of nature. But nobody seemed to mind, the stories were too good to miss and anyway the real point was to teach human beings how to behave. What we liked was the idea of a collection of animals that didn’t leave you disappointed, as zoos so often do: a modern bestiary, based on zoological fact. After all, European eels swimming back and forth to Bermuda, octopuses’ arms that crawl for a month after they’ve been severed, mites so small they live inside a bee’s throat, or eight-legged water bears that can stay in a state of suspended animation for a century – these are even more outlandish than the wildest fantasies of the bestiary writers. They just happen to be true.

  So, here are a hundred animals, some supposedly familiar, some definitely obscure, all of them, without exception, quite interesting. We might easily have called it The Book of Animal Engineering. Ted Dewan trained as an engineer and, as his brilliant drawings show, how animals work is almost as mind-altering as how they behave. But this is not a workshop manual. Nor is it a reference book, or an animal rights polemic; it’s a menagerie, an armchair safari. It teaches only one unambiguous truth: that the word ‘natural’ is meaningless. Animal strategies for feeding, reproducing or just getting about are so madly various, so utterly, gloriously perverse that you end up believing that absolutely anything is possible.

  And that’s the point. Animals cheer us up. They don’t need us to patronise them, or to speak for them. But after studying them in such detail, it’s impossible not to feel they deserve our respect. The great American naturalist Henry Beston once wrote: ‘In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.’

  So come down to the waterhole of ignorance and wallow with us for a while.

  The missing link between animals

  and the real human being

  is most likely

  ourselves.

  KONRAD LORENZ

  Austrian zoologist and animal psychologist

  Aardvark

  Ancient, odd and out on its own

  Aardvarks are the last survivors of a primitive group of mammals that have lived in Africa since the dinosaurs. They were originally classified alongside anteaters and armadillos in the order Edentata (‘no teeth’), but they are not remotely related, having evolved on different land masses.

  In fact, aardvarks don’t have any close relatives: they are the only mammal species that boasts an entire order to itself. Tubulidentata means ‘tube-toothed’ and aardvark teeth are completely different from those of any other animal. They are twenty flat-topped pegs, made up of hexagonal tubes, right at the back of their mouths. Instead of enamel, they are are covered with cementum, the stuff that is normally inside teeth. Like rodents’ teeth, they never stop growing.

  The aardvark has a primitive ‘designed by committee’ look to it: the nose of an anteater, the ears of a donkey, the feet of a rabbit and the tail of a giant rat. But don’t be fooled: it has outlasted many other species because it does one thing supremely well. It is a termite-eating machine.

  As soon as darkness falls it leaves its burrow and applies its snout to the ground, snuffling in huge zigzags across the savannah in search of mounds to crack open and lick clean. It can cover 30 miles and hoover up over 10 pints of termites in a single evening. The aardvark nose contains more bones and scent receptors than that of any other mammal. Its ears can pick up the tiniest of underground movements and its powerful claws tear open mounds that would blunt a pickaxe. Aardvarks are strong: they can grow to the size of a rugby forward and dig a burrow faster than six men using shovels. Their thick skin protects them from termite bites and as the long, sticky tongue reels in supper, they can close their nostrils at will, to stop the insects running up inside.

  They have also built up a remarkably beneficial relationship with a plant known as the ‘aardvark cucumber’ that grows its fruits underground. Aardvarks dig them up and eat them when water is scarce, then bury their seed-laden droppings, ensuring the plants’ survival. The San (bushmen) of the Kalahari call the fruit ‘aardvark dung’.

  Humans and hyenas are the only predators that will attack a fighting-fit aardvark. Despite its solitary, reclusive nature, a cornered aardvark is a formidable foe, slashing with its claws, kicking its legs, and executing high-speed forward somersaults.

  TERMITE TAKEAWAY

  Aardvarks are hunted for meat and leather: aardvark is Afrikaans for ‘earth pig’ and they are said to taste like gamey pork. They are also called ‘ant bears’ but their Latin name, Orycteropus afer, means ‘African digger-foot’. The bushmen believe that aardvarks have supernatural powers because they are literally ‘in touch’ with the underworld.

  ‘To aardvark’ is US college slang for sexual intercourse (i.e. rootling around in dark places with a long thin part of the body).

  This elusive nocturnal animal probably only became known in the English-speaking world because it is so close to the start of the dictionary. It very nearly didn’t make it. Aardvark, the fourth noun listed in the 1928 Oxford English Dictionary, owes its inclusion to the editor James Murray, who overrode his assistant’s opinion that the word was ‘too technical’.

  Albatross

  Flying non-stop for a decade

  There are twenty species of albatross from the gull-sized Sooty to the vast Wandering albatross (Diomedes exulans, or ‘albatross in exile’), with its record 11-foot wingspan. They fly further and for longer than any other family of birds. Satellite tracking reveals that some albatrosses fly around the entire planet in less than two months and can soar for six days without flapping their wings. Rather than soaring high up in the thermals like birds of prey, they keep close to the surface of the sea, using the lift generated by wind from waves. The most energetic part of any albatross flight is take-off: it is the only time the bird needs to flap its wings vigorously.