The world kind of sucks right now. Here are some fun animal facts to make you forget about your troubles and the troubles of the world for a little bit. Surprise and delight your friends, alleviate awkward silences at parties, bombard new acquaintances with knowledge they didn’t ask for and win trivia with these small, basically useless tidbits.
Enjoy!
1. People used to think that geese hatched from barnacles
No, really. It only really makes sense if you know that not all barnacles look like the ones we most readily associate with the species – like the little jagged rocklike things you see on the side of boats and docks etc.
Some barnacles are perched on a long, thin stalk that looks a bit like a goose neck.
People thought that was enough of a reason to assume that that was where geese came from. It also had the handy side-effect of being able to classify goose as not a meat, but a fish, meaning that you could still eat geese during Lent and other fasting days.
But I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.
2. And that rabbits laid eggs… Hence Easter Bunny
Have you ever wondered why we have cultural myths of Easter Bunnies who bring eggs for children?
It’s because people used to think that bunnies hatched from eggs. Why did they think this? Well, because ground-nesting birds like the lapwing and the plover make little lairs that look a lot like rabbit burrows. Because people couldn’t often tell them apart, they assumed that the eggs they encountered that belonged to a lapwing or a plover was actually a soon-to-be-born baby bunny.
Not sure where the chocolate factors into it though.
3. Theodore Roosevelt is behind two of our childhood touchstones – the first? Teddy bears
Life is weird. Like why are touchstones of my childhood impacted by one particular president of a country in which I am not a resident? Why was this part of the cultural zeitgeist? Pure happenstance. Like everything.
The first makes more sense to me. Teddy bears, I learned early on, were named after Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, but I didn’t know why.
Apparently it came from the fact that during one particular hunting trip, Roosevelt, an avid hunter, refused to shoot an American black bear that had been cornered by dogs and beaten with clubs, asking only that the animal be put out of its misery. It wasn’t, he said, “a sporting shot.”
This incident was made into a cartoon (???) in a newspaper, in which a cute little bear is shown with a rope around its neck and Roosevelt is shown with his back to the bear, looking thoroughly disgusted.
With each version of the cartoon, the bear got cuter and smaller and eventually it was made into a children’s toy called the “Teddy Bear.”
So there you go. Your favourite childhood toy stems from a mercy kill. Wild.
4. And the second? Piranhas.
There are a couple things I remember being very concerned about as a child as cartoons led me to believe that they would be recurring lifelong issues. First – quicksand. That seemed to be everywhere in cartoons and kids movies. The second? Piranhas. You might be the same. When you think of piranhas, if you’re anything like me, you think of a bubbling cloud of ravenous chomping fish, drawn to a single drop of blood in the water that are capable of stripping flesh from an entire body in seconds. That’s what they do, right?
Wrong!
When it comes to people, piranhas rarely do much more than nibble a toe. They’re pretty indifferent to blood. They also don’t tend to hang out in groups or hunt together. They are actually fairly chill.
So why do we all think this? Because of Teddy goddamn Roosevelt. Again!
In 1913, Roosevelt who again, was an enthusiastic hunter, took a trip to the Amazon. It was a momentous moment for the region and the people who lived there and naturally they were keen to show off and amuse him – and so they invented the myth of the insatiable pack of piranhas.
They netted off a 100-yard stretch of river and filled it with the fish and kept them there. They didn’t feed them. So by the time Roosevelt arrived, they were intensely concentrated, highly stressed and very hungry. They regaled him with tales of their danger before leading an old cow into the water where… you know, the expected happened.
But importantly – it was aberrant and entirely humanly engineered behaviour. But Roosevelt was in. He went home and wrote about it in a book he wrote about the Brazilian wilderness, saying:
“The head with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes and gaping, cruelly armed jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity. And actions of the fish exactly match its looks… They are the most ferocious fish in the world… They will snap off a hand incautiously trailed in the water, they mutilate swimmers… they will rend and devour alive any wounded man or beast; for blood in the water incites them to madness.”
And thus, the myth of the man-eating, swarm-feeding piranha was born.
5. In 1631, locals believed orang-utans could talk but choose not to
I love orang-utans so much. Is there anything cuter in this world than a baby orang-utan?
Anyway, orang-utans (which means people of the forest in Melayu) first came to the attention of the West after a Dutch scientist named Jacobus Bontius wrote about them in 1631. He said that apparently at that time the local people believed that orang-utans were capable of speaking but chose not to because they didn’t want to have to get a job. Which, you know, fair.
Darwin also recalled his first encounter with an orang-utan, not in the wild, but in a zoo in London. There was an orang-utan called Lady Jane or "Jenny” for short, who was dressed in human clothes and taught to drink tea. Their innate human-like qualities impressed him and he wrote more than once how much like a human child Jenny was and advocated for their treatment as fellow human-like creatures. Pretty advanced stuff for back then, at any rate.
Bits and Bobs
This week I’m trying desperately to distract myself from pretty much everything else that’s going on (which I acknowledge in itself is a tremendous privilege and which I am supplementing with my own education) and so I’m…
Watching: I just started that new Netflix show which is called “Bodies” and which is based on a graphic novel from DC. It’s a time travel murder mystery, what’s not to love?
Reading: Speaking of time travel, I just finished Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions and he is pretty adamant that it’s very unlikely to be possible ever. Sad.
Listening to: The Brain’s Way of Healing by Norman Doidge who also wrote The Brain That Changes Itself. I have been super interested in neuroplasticity lately and it’s a great look at the subject.
That’s all for now friends. Hope this cheered you up a little. Keep your chins up.
Lots of love,
I love that I never know where you’re destined dear wise one, you endlessly titillate and inspire me, AB