The Book of Animal Ignorance

by Ted Dewan

  Unsurprisingly, it took 300 years after its first discovery for the giant tortoise to receive a scientific name: the specimens were all eaten before they got back to the scientists. Worse still, large-scale commercial whaling in the nineteenth century was only made possible because the giant tortoises enabled ships to stay at sea for weeks at a time. One ship’s log records ‘turpining’ parties taking 14 tons of live tortoises on board one ship in four days.

  If there is a glimmer of hope it concerns Adwaitya’s descendants. In 1875, the government of Mauritius, inspired by Albert Gunter of the British Museum, declared Geochelone gigantes the world’s first protected species. There are now 152,000 Aldabras – 90 per cent of the world’s total giant tortoise population – happily isolated from their only serious threat: us.

  Gibbon

  The talking ape

  One of the odd things about the great apes – our closest primate relatives like the chimpanzee and the gorilla – is that their vocal communication is relatively unsophisticated compared to our own.

  Not so the thirteen species of gibbons that live in the tropical forests of South-East Asia. Gibbons aren’t monkeys – they don’t have tails or cheek pouches – but ‘lesser apes’, and their calls are some of the most beautiful and idiosyncratic sounds made by any animal. Gibbons use these calls to communicate precise messages, assembling elements of each call into a string which has a meaning that is understood by other gibbons in their family group, who use a similar sequence in return. Linguists call this ‘syntax’ – the linking of sounds in a particular way to create meaning – and it is the basis of all language.

  KING OF THE SWINGERS

  The development of this language may be linked to the fact that gibbons – unlike most other monkeys and apes – are monogamous. Like songbirds, gibbons sing to attract and keep a mate and to mark their territory, particularly their favourite fruit trees. To snag the best female to breed with, a male gibbon has to work on his singing. For females, the better the singer, the better the genes, and the more regular the supply of fruit.

  Couples sing to each other every morning in fabulously complex duets. Males sing before dawn, sometimes while still in ‘bed’, which for a gibbon means sitting high up in the branches, with their arms hugging their knees and their heads tucked into their laps. Females are much more active and dramatic, breaking branches, leaping and climaxing with a sequence called the ‘great call’. Males who have a mate sing more regularly when there are rogue males sniffing around, as you’d expect.

  Most family groups comprise a male and female living with three or four offspring, some of whom don’t leave home until they are ten years old. Because of their energy-poor diet – fruit, leaves, and the occasional insect – families spend half their time just hanging around grooming one another. The female rules the roost at home; the males are right at the bottom of the hierarchy, even below the offspring. In some species the male takes over childcare once the young are weaned, teaching them how to swing.

  No one knows how the gibbon got its name. The French naturalist Buffon coined it, maybe as a version of ‘gibb’, the old name for cat, or in honour of his friend Edward Gibbon, the historian.

  Gibbons are built to swing. Their arms are longer than their legs and bodies combined, and strong enough to propel them at speeds of 35 mph and across 50-foot gaps between trees. Their wrist bones are separated by soft pads which allow movement in all directions. This enables them to swing and change direction without having to turn their bodies – saving energy and giving them the breathtaking agility for which they’re best known. On the rare occasions they walk on the ground, gibbons are bipedal, which has led researchers to propose that walking on two feet might originally have developed as an unforeseen by-product of arm-swinging in the canopy.

  In Thai mythology, gibbons are the reincarnated souls of lost lovers. In one story, a woman searching for her murdered husband wanders the forests to this day repeating the gibbon’s plaintive song, ‘Pau! Pau!’ (Thai for ‘husband’).

  Giraffe

  Big head, bad smell

  The ability to reach the leaves at the very top of trees seems reason enough to grow a long neck, but a giraffe’s neck is about more than just food. Male giraffes use their necks as weapons and as signs of their virility. There’s nothing cute about ‘necking’ between male giraffes; they lock them together like arm-wrestlers or swing their heads like medieval maces, with a terrifying force that can topple or kill their opponents with a single blow (a giraffe’s skull weighs more than a full-size boxer’s punchbag and sports up to five skin-covered horns called ossicones). Unlike the female’s, the male giraffe’s neck and skull continue to grow thicker throughout its life. The bigger the neck, the more victories, and the greater number of willing females that come flocking. To counter-balance the weight of these heavy-duty sex toys, the giraffe’s neck has evolved with one more vertebra than other mammals, at the point where it joins the chest.

  MORE THAN JUST A LONG NECK

  The other key weapon in a male giraffe’s lady-killing armoury is his odour: downwind you can smell one from over 800 feet away. Early explorers compared their scent to ‘a hive of heather honey in September’, but the key chemical constituent is indole, the nitrogen compound that gives our faeces their characteristic smell. As well as driving females wild, giraffe-pong has a practical function, acting as an inbuilt parasite repellent and killing many of the microbes and fungal organisms that graze on a giraffe’s skin. Giraffes even secrete the active ingredient in creosote to kill bloodsucking ticks. As far as they are concerned, smelling bad means you are clean and healthy.

  Most of a giraffe’s life is spent either eating or chewing the cud. Their favourite meal is the acacia tree, which is so thorny that most other animals leave it alone. The top joint of their neck allows them to raise their heads vertically in line with the neck and browse for the young thornless leaves at the very top. Amazingly, the trees have learned to fight back by releasing a chemical that turns their leaves bitter. They also release a wind-borne ‘warning burst’ to alert surrounding trees to do the same. Giraffes, in turn, always try to approach acacias upwind.

  The Romans exhibited giraffes in their amphitheatres as ‘camelopards’, assuming they were a cross between camels and leopards.

  Next to the neck, the other essential device is the tongue, which can extend up to 20 inches, long enough to clean their ears. A grasping tool with the same level of dexterity as three human fingers, a giraffe’s tongue is used so often that it has taken on a blue-black colour to reduce the risk of sunburn.

  Giraffes need less water than camels, and as acacia leaves are 70 per cent water, they rarely need to drink. This is good news, because their awkward splayed pose at a waterhole leaves them vulnerable to lions and crocodiles. The only time they kneel is to sleep, laying their head on the ground for ten minutes each day and, even then, keeping half their brain awake.

  Giraffes are often hunted for their tail tuft which, at over 3 feet, is among the longest hair found on any mammal. It is used for bracelets and as an unofficial currency in Sudan and Uganda.

  Goat

  The farmer’s friend

  Far from being a poor relation of sheep and cattle, the goat (Capra hircus) was the first herbivore to be domesticated, 10,000 years ago in the mountains of Iran. Without goats, agriculture might never have taken off. The bezoar or wild goat (Capra aegagrus), ancestor of all domestic breeds, seduced the Neolithic nomads with its hardiness, its ‘herdability’, and its weed-busting diet. Goats, then as now, much prefer thistles, brambles and twigs to plain grass (a grass-fed goat suffers badly from worms). It was an unbeatable combination and as the first farmers radiated outwards from the Middle East, the goats followed as a kind of all-terrain convenience store, every bit as revolutionary in their time as seed-drills or combine-harvesters.

  In developing countries, goats are still a very important economic resource. They produce more milk for their size than cows a
nd some estimates put goat ahead of chicken and pork as the world’s most consumed meat. Even in the US, goat is now the fastest-growing livestock sector. The meat is healthy, with much less fat and cholesterol and more iron than lamb or beef. Goat’s milk has more protein and calcium, and less lactose than cow’s milk. They also make good pets, and are surprisingly fastidious. If another goat’s saliva has touched their food, or if it has even the faintest taint of dirt, they will refuse to eat it.

  The word ‘tragedy’ comes from ancient Greek and means ‘goat-song’.

  The only downside is the smell. ‘Goatiness’ comes from a trio of fatty acids present in both the milk and the meat. These are also produced as waste products by the ten million or so bacteria that feed in the human armpit, which might explain our squeamishness. Female goats on heat, however, find it irresistible.

  Goats have a reputation for lust and excess which has a sound basis in fact. A male goat (buck or billy) is ready for action at just four months. As he comes into ‘rut’, he begins to smell strongly – this is not helped by a fondness for urinating along his belly and soaking his beard. To really get in the mood, he will lick his penis and then drink the urine of his prospective partners. The nannies (or does) either stand back and watch until they are needed, or mount one another to further inflame his ardour.

  In Sudan in 2006, a man caught having sex with his neighbour’s goat was forced to marry it and pay a dowry to its former owner.

  SPIDERGOA

  The man–goat relationship can be equally close. Alexander Selkirk, the castaway who was the real-life model for Robinson Crusoe, used to mark the ears of the goats he ‘enjoyed most’ so as to avoid eating them. The ancient Gauls made goat’s milk hair-cream. For a thousand years, the sum of human knowledge was recorded on goatskin parchment. Young goat’s leather made soft gloves (hence the expression ‘handle with kid gloves’) and the hair from their backs gave us cashmere, the fashionable yarn for ladies; its name is an old spelling of Kashmir, the region where the longhaired goats come from. In 2002 a herd of Canadian goats was implanted with a single spider gene. When their milk was skimmed and the protein extracted it made a fibre that was identical to spider silk. It has been patented as BioSteel.

  Goats have a much greater mythological resonance than sheep or cattle. The horn of plenty belonged to a goat. Pan and Satan had goat’s legs and horns, and in Hindu mythology aja means both ‘goat’ and the primordial nothingness from which everything came.

  Goose

  Smart and saucy

  Despite having acquired a reputation for stupidity, geese show signs of great sensitivity and intelligence. Many species mate for life and the death of a loved one leads to behaviour that is remarkably similar to our own. They honk mournfully, stop eating, hunch up their feathers and can remain that way for months. If one is shot down, its partner will return to earth to stand vigil next to its corpse. Reunited couples perform a ‘triumph ceremony’ – a combination of dance and song which re-enacts their courtship. Geese can even be taught to perform simple tasks – there are several nineteenth-century accounts of them turning spits, using their powerful necks like an arm.

  THE CHIMNEY SWEEP’S GOOSE

  The French ornithologist Christian Moullec has taught a group of thirty endangered Lesser white-fronted Geese (Anser erythropus) a new migratory path. After bonding with them as goslings, he flew a microlight to lead them the 1,000 miles between wildlife sanctuaries in Germany and Sweden, a journey they repeated the following year on their own. They are now so well trained that Moullec and his ‘flock’ regularly appear as the star turn at airshows.

  Although farmyard geese rarely fly, the wild birds are amazing long-distance aviators. Six million Lesser snow geese (Chen caerulescens caerulescens) travel the 4,000 miles from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico twice a year. The Barheaded goose (Anser indicus) migrates from Central Asia to India over the Himalayas at a height of 29,000 feet. The swirl of air created by flying in V-formation produces more lift and a clearer view for each bird. They lose altitude by whiffling – a spiralling nosedive, which sometimes leaves them flying upside down.

  People wrote with goose quills until the nineteenth century. ‘Pen’ comes from the Latin ‘penna’, or ‘feather’. Quink, the world’s top selling ink, is also an old name for the Brent goose.

  Geese were domesticated about 3,000 years ago in ancient Egypt from the wild Greylag goose (lag is an old word for ‘goose’, so we should really just call them greylags). It had more to do with sex than food. Wild greylags were the focus of fertility cults throughout the ancient world and goose fat was considered a powerful aphrodisiac. The famous geese on the Capitoline Hill, who saved Rome from the Gauls in 390 BC, were being kept as sexual talismans not ‘guard dogs’.

  The connection is still alive in the innuendo of the nursery rhyme ‘Goosey, goosey, gander’ and for centuries goose was slang for a prostitute while gooser meant penis. The verb ‘to goose’ still carries a sexual connotation.

  Because no one ever saw a migratory goose mate or lay an egg, for centuries it was thought they hatched from the barnacles washed ashore on driftwood at the same time of year as they arrived from the Arctic. This belief persisted well into the days when scientists were naming species; thus today we have the Barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) and the Goose barnacle (Lepas anatifera).

  It caused confusion for the Catholic Church, too. Some dioceses allowed the eating of geese on fast days because they were ‘fish’, others because they were ‘not born of the flesh’, and therefore a kind of vegetable or nut. Pope Innocent III finally banned goose-eating on fast days in 1215.

  Gorilla

  Going ape

  Gorillas are the largest living primates and the most misunderstood. Their name dates to 480 BC when the Carthaginian explorer Hanno described an African tribe of ‘hairy women’. He called them Gorillai and it was this that American missionary Dr Thomas Savage decided to use to describe the ‘monkey-like animal remarkable for its size and ferocity’ whose skull he’d seen when he visited the Congo in 1847. In the popular imagination, Savage’s gorilla came to personify animals at their most wild and terrifying, a myth that culminated in the 1933 film King Kong.

  Real gorillas are shy and peaceful creatures. They are herbivores, eating green plants and bark. To run a 25-stone male gorilla requires a straw bale’s weight in vegetation every day, which is why they have such huge stomachs (to house the large intestinal tract) and heads (to anchor the huge jaw muscles needed for chewing). It also explains their habit of eating their own droppings; as with rabbits, this helps them extract the maximum nutrition and re-cycle helpful digestive bacteria and enzymes. Also, because leafy plants are low in sodium, gorillas supplement their green diet with tasty mouthfuls of soil.

  Both species of Gorilla, western (G. gorilla) and eastern (G. beringei), live in the equatorial forests of Africa where vegetation is both plentiful and fast growing. This enables them to maintain much smaller ranges than their cousins, the fruit-seeking chimps. The consequence of this is a ‘harem’ system where a dominant ‘silverback’ male lives with up to ten females and youngsters. All a single lady gorilla wants is a large, powerful male with a good-quality home range. As a result, silverbacks are much bigger than the females, but sex isn’t at such a premium as among the promiscuous chimps – a silverback’s erect penis is only an inch and a half long. He doesn’t need to compete sexually once he’s got his troop: they do what he says. At least they do until a younger male chances his arm. This is where the ‘scary ape’ routine derives from: standing tall, drumming chests with cupped hands, yawning to display canine teeth, roaring and charging. Actual fighting is rare; as with humans, loud threats backed up by size usually carry the day.

  Despite this, gorillas are the strong, silent members of the ape family. They aren’t as vocal or as flashy with their skills as chimps, but they have better memories and often do things independently rather than simply for a reward. Koko, a female gorilla bor
n at San Francisco Zoo in 1971, has mastered up to a thousand words in sign language, and seems able to communicate complex emotions like sadness and even make jokes. She describes herself, touchingly, as ‘fine animal person gorilla’.

  The Beast was a tough guy too. He could lick the world. But when he saw Beauty, she got him. He went soft. He forgot his wisdom and the little fellas licked him.

  KING KONG

  FORWARD PLANNING

  It’s hard to know how much of Koko’s ‘personhood’ derives from the thirty years she has spent being coached (and loved) by developmental psychologist Dr Penny Patterson. Ironically, it was just this ability to bond with a human that spelt doom for Kong in the film. Given the precarious position of the gorilla population (10,000 western gorillas and only 400 of the mountain species), maybe Koko’s willingness to learn and talk in our language, will persuade us to rewrite King Kong’s tragic ending and preserve her relatives in the wild, where they are happiest.

  Hedgehog

  Disappearing lawn urchin

  Snuffling in the dark and gorging on insects, the hedgehog hasn’t changed much in fifteen million years. But, in spite of regularly topping the polls as the UK’s favourite garden animal, the British hedgehog population is now in freefall. It has halved in the past fifteen years and the current estimate is below a million. If this continues there will be no British hedgehogs left by 2030.