"... painting the animal kingdom with our artificial ethical brush denies us the astonishing diversity of life, in all its blood-drinking, sibling-eating, corpse-shagging glory. We need not be afraid of these behaviors - they are not here to instruct us.... Despite what we may think, we are not the center of the animal universe."
Over the close to two decades I've spent working in zoos and aquariums, I've made one important anthropological discovery. Most of the people who say that they love animals... don't. Not really, anyway. They love the idea of animals, the simplified cartoon version. They think of sleepy sloths and faithful penguins and pandas that would have slipped into extinction years ago if they just weren't so darn lovable.
None of this is true. As is the case with most legends, the truth is a lot messier, a lot more complicated, and a lot more fascinating.
In The Unexpected Truth About Animals, zoologist Lucy Cooke compiles some of the stranger beliefs that our species has cooked up about our fellow earthlings over the years, focusing on a dozen or so species. Some of these beliefs are very prevalent in today's meme-driven culture, where it seems everyday my facebook feed is filled with friends sharing sloth pictures. Others are a bit more historically obscure and might be more surprising to the reader. For example, did you know that throughout much of history there was a belief in the medicinal value of beaver testicles? Ok, you're thinking, maybe that's not too weird... I mean, rhino horns and pangolin scales, right? The difference being, of course, that rhinos weren't believed to bite off their own horns and throw them at hunters to avoid capture... whereas beavers... well, that's worth a cringe or two (and there's an illustration too!).
Unfortunately, some of these beliefs, true or not, can have negative impacts on the animals themselves. Cooke details how European white storks were almost eliminated from England by superstitious persecution; the same association with fertility and child-bearing that made them beloved in much of Europe led to their association with paganism and witchcraft across the Channel. Today, the false belief that pandas are evolutionary failures which would die to almost instantly without us leads to a lot of keyboard experts claiming that they should just be allowed to go extinct. (On an unrelated note, I do have some issue with Cooke's claim that panda breeding in zoos and conservation centers isn't worth the effort because it's "unnatural." I honestly have come to feel that despite their rarity in zoo, pandas - being evolutionary disposed to sitting in one spot and eating all day, then sleeping - are better suited to zoo life than any other bear species. That's just my two cents, though).
Also unfortunately, some of our historic attempts to learn more about other species and their workings have been a bit... inconsiderate. I'd gloss over the chapter on bats - especially the parts about the experimentation on their senses - if you get at all queasy. (Ditto with the necrophiliac penguins). Indeed, the book does tell us just as much about human nature as it does about the animals. Cooke seems to have a special whatever-the-lack-of-fondness-is for the Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist who was sort of like the David Attenborough of Enlightenment-Age Europe, with virtually every chapter containing at least one quotation of his which goes on to prove laughably wrong.
Still, that's kind of the point of Cooke's book. Even today, with all of our technology and gadgetry and exploration of space and the sea, we still know remarkably little about so many animals, and so much of what we know is wrong. Part of it is that there are things that we don't know. Part of it is that there are things that we want to believe we know. To be honest, I was dubious about this book from the beginning because there have been so many similar books where uninformed authors collect "facts" about animals that sound cool and cobble them together without checking to see if they are accurate or not. Thankfully, Cooke is both an actual zoologist and, I must admit, a very funny, engaging writer. The Unexpected Truth About Animals, it turns out, is that we ofttimes don't want to see the real animal. We want to see a mirror that nature holds up to ourselves.
The Unexpected Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife at Amazon.com
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