Eternal Animals

 "How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks."

- Dorothy L. Sayers

Sometimes, when I'm busy with a fairly mindless task, either at home or at work, I start to get a little philosophical.  The other day, I happened to be traipsing down the path in our zoo and happened to look at a cheetah, and my brain started along a new train of thought.  

Cheetahs are known for their very limited genetic diversity, the result of a natural near-extinction event.  Even forgetting that, the slow rate of evolutionary change (both natural selection and that zoos and captive breeding programs try to avoid artificial selection) means that cheetahs in all-recorded history are pretty much the same.  That means that a cheetah at my zoo is almost indistinguishable from a cheetah on the Serengeti.  It also means that either of those cheetahs is, for all practical purposes, the exact same as the first cheetahs to come to American zoos over a hundred years ago.  It means that they're also the exact same as the cheetahs that were kept in the royal court of Akbar the Great as trained hunters hundreds of years ago.

(Domestic animals, with centuries of selective breeding, are a very different story.  I don't know what a Bronze Age herder would make of our modern animals).

And it's not just the cheetahs - the lions we see in zoos wouldn't be different from those fighting gladiators in the Coliseum.  Grizzly bears would have been the same as the ones that chased Lewis and Clark across the northern plains.  The giraffes would be indistinguishable (accounting for subspecies) as those that bedazzled Europeans when they first appeared after an absence of thousands of years on that continent following the fall of Rome.

A darker flip side - when I look at older zoo and circus photos of chimps in tiny barred cages, too big to be cute and cuddly anymore, or elephants chained and beaten, those aren't some past breed of stoic, durable beast that we no longer have with us.  Those animals, those individuals, were just as sensitive, intelligent, and capable of fear and joy as are the ones I know today  They were just never given the lives in which they were allowed to be happy or wild. 

I didn't really have any grand conclusion where I was going with this.  It just added yet one more facet of animals that I was able to appreciate - their timelessness.  Excepting the ones that we drive to extinction, of course...