Manbird of Alcatraz

I make my daily visit to the company gym.

Another of the regulars there, apropos of nothing, vouchsafes to me that she is ordering a special backpack for her African Grey parrot, so that she can take it out with her on hiking trips, presumably to torment it with panoramic views of freedom while it remains trapped in its hi-tech mobile cage. Pounding the treadmill next to me, the proud owner is happily oblivious to the irony of the entire concept.

And hiking is not the only extra-mural activity she shares with her bird. According to her, it also enjoys drive-in movies, with a marked prediliction for Hitchcock retrospectives. That’s not to say that the poor creature is some sort of sad, unidimensional character. “Sleepless In Seattle”, starring Meg Ryan, is another favourite. We are dealing with a complex and well-rounded personality here. The parrot, that is, not Meg Ryan, who tends to attack her own reflection in the dressing room mirror whenever left unattended.

While I sympathise – who could ever get enough of “Rear Window”, after all? - I can’t say I approve. I wouldn’t give a parrot the car keys no matter what, and I doubt that it’s insured.

Experts advise that the African Grey is one of the largest and most high-maintenance parrot breeds, and provide a handy three-step guide to recognizing one in the wild:
1) is it large?
2) is it grey?
3) does it have (a) feathers or (b) a trunk?

If the answer to 3 is (b), what you’ve got hold of there is an elephant. Superficial resemblances to the contrary, these are not actually parrots at all, and respond very badly to being placed in small cages and expected to roost on a twig. Let it go and try again.


Some African Greys, yesterday, in their natural habitat. Polly wants some trail mix…

Libera eas de ore leonis

Tributes pour in for Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, dead at 44 after a freak accident involving a stingray.

I’m not looking forward to explaining that to the kids.

The unfortunate Mr Irwin is just the latest in a long line of wildlife documentarians to meet sticky ends at the vengeful hands of Mother Nature, such as Gerald Durrell (crushed by a python), Johnny Morris (lured out into the garden by a parrot imitating his wife, and then eaten by foxes), David Attenborough (buggered to death by gorillas, tho’ could be they got the wrong Attenborough), and David Bellamy (choked on a badger).

Of that generation of TV nature-lovers, only Bill Oddie survives. He is kept under 24-hour seclusion in a specially fortified safe-house in Birmingham, where no bird outside of fried chicken has been seen for at least twenty years. And frankly, if one has nothing but a life-sentence in Birmingham to look forward to, one might very well envy the dead. Death - unlike a ray – can eventually lose its sting…


Bill Oddie in happier days, yesterday. If you want to know why they call them twitchers, sneak up behind him and go “cheep”.

“If you enjoyed Free Willy, you’ll love this new face cream

The BBC mourns on behalf of the world of tree-huggery as a right-on, eco-friendly whale safari stumbles across some Norwegians enjoying a safari of their own.

“This really wasn't what we came to see” opined one sensitive soul, stumbling ashen-faced off the Love Boat upon their return. Well, honestly, what did they expect? They went to see whales in their natural habitat, and that natural habitat includes whalers with Freudian issues and harpoons to match. The result is not going to be pretty. If you don’t want to see that sort of thing, go on a tofu safari instead.

It’s all so typical of that breed of whining hippies, who have no more grasp of the workings of Mother Nature than you get from reading the first three pages of “Earth In The Balance” and wearing Birkenstocks. On similar jaunts to Africa no-one complains when the lions grab a snack out of a passing zebra, so why single the Vikings out? Norwegians, let us not forget, are part of the ecosystem too, you know. Each had a mother…


Whale and Norwegian in perfect harmony, yesterday. All part of the circle of life…

Joined-up thinking

The laws of Murphy and unintended consequences come together to comic effect in Norway, as the local environmentalists’ shiny new wind farm promptly slices the local endangered eagle population into so much salami (link courtesy of our friend Desargues).

One minor detail seems to have escaped the notice of those gallant eco-warriors who sited nearly seventy sets of hundred-foot-tall whirling knife blades in the middle of the white-tailed eagle breeding grounds on the island of Smola. As an RSPB conservation director patiently explains:

“It seems these birds are flying around a lot of the time.”

Wind farms, by the way, produce energy at a cost between six and eight times higher than regular power stations, without in any way reducing the number of coal- or gas-fired generators: as the wind can never be relied upon, the other plants must always be running to ensure the power supply.

However, although utterly pointless, wind turbines are both “new” and “green” and so have become yet another worthless secular idol at the feet of which the white-tailed eagles of Smola are accumulating in sacrifice. It all has a certain pleasing symmetry…


A white-tailed eagle, yesterday – bravely taking one for the team in the fight against cheap electricity. Did I say “cheap electricity”? I meant “global warming”. Sorry.

It’s always tempting to impute / Unlikely virtues to the cute

Shock and dismay among the nation’s naturalists, today, as it turns out that meerkats – those sweet, anthropomorphized rascals of the savannah, are actually amoral, baby-eating bastards.

So attractive to look at, yet so unpleasant – who does that remind us of?


The election thief, the wire tapper and the night swimmer, yesterday. We dodged a bullet there, if you’ll pardon the expression…

It’s not big and it’s not clever

Des and I got onto the subject of swearing on Monday, after a particularly vitriolic display of Tourettes from Des in a comment about Putin. While everything that he said was unarguably true, he was belatedly overcome with remorse at the thought that my innocent sprogs might read it and be warped forever, bless his little cotton socks.

For better or worse there is no danger of that sort of damage being done, as my kids are already fluent in the foulest imaginable profanities that the Hungarian language has to offer, which make their anglophone equivalents wilting flowers by comparison. I have lived in eight different countries, mostly in central or eastern Europe, and have heard every expletive that the words “Communist”, “Russian” and “Gypsy” can provoke, and in all that time I have never met a match for Hungarian’s broad vocabulary and imaginative metaphors, nor for the enthusiasm with which both are deployed by the populace, without regard to age, sex or social class.

To this day I vividly recall hearing a sweet silver-haired granny with her shopping caught in a tram door describe uses for a horse’s cock that would make a docker pale, all while her cherubic grandkids looked on unfazed. There must have been a good fifteen permutations, all of them a rare combination of the graphic and yet strangely plausible, in a tirade lasting long enough for the tram to reach the next stop and the doors open again, whereupon she got off in a huff to the spontaneous applause of her fellow passengers.

I’m therefore going to stick my neck out and nominate lófasz (horseprick) as the most powerful swearword in any language anywhere ever. What say, my globetrotting crew – can you beat that?

Additional bonus question: Complete the following sentence in ten words or less:

I think swearing is both big and clever because…

What's everyone looking at me for?

Cry Havoc! And unleash the bugs of war…

Those wacky pranksters of the Pentagon are once again pushing the envelope on the words “unethical”, “impractical” and “deeply disturbing” with yet another attempt to turn animals into weapons.

After their recent fun and games with remote-controlled sharks, they’re trying the same trick with insects. By integrating microelectronics into butterfly larvae, they hope to direct the adults as bomb detectors or spies.

You might think that this is paranoid nonsense. And you’d be right. There are clearly unhinged minds at work here, which covers the paranoia, and the insects themselves have supplied the nonsense but firmly refusing to co-operate. Early trials with wasps quickly degenerated into farce: these skinheads of the insect world cheerfully ignored their remote controls, opting instead to obey their God-given primal instincts to mate, lay eggs, and ruin picnics. Unless Osama Bin Laden is sitting outside his cave on a red check tablecloth, wrestling with a mayonnaise jar, he can probably rest easy.

Nor is this the first time that the military has failed to overcome the natural limitations their unfortunate subjects.

In the Second World War, attempts were made to stick a bomb on a cat and drop it from a dive-bomber on to Nazi ships. The concept was that the cat, hating water, would "wrangle" itself on to enemy ship's deck. Result: the cats proved strangely ill-equipped to deal with being slung out of aircraft and operating parachutes, and promptly passed out in mid-air. However, 2nd Lt Muffy “Whiskas” Miaow, King’s Own Tortoiseshells, did go on to escape from Colditz a record three times, repeatedly taking the war to the enemy even in captivity, and killing an alsatian guard dog in his final ill-fated attempt by cleverly wedging his corpse in its throat.

Also during WWII, another winner. Attach incendiaries to bats, induce hibernation, and then drop them from planes. They wake up, fly any into nearby buildings (such as factories) to roost, and then blow up. Alas, hibernation takes several hours to fully recover from: the bats universally plummeted to their deaths, to the strains of the Last Post.

But it’s not all abysmal failure. During the Vietnam War, dolphins were trained to tear the diving gear off of Vietcong divers and drag them to interrogation, and even to use syringes placed on their flippers to inject carbon dioxide into the divers, causing them to explode. Whereupon they jumped through a hoop, rang a bell and got a fish. About 40 divers are thought to have met this truly bizarre end. Did they know what was happening to them? Did the dolphins?

Fortunately, there are also civilian applications. The New York Police Department, for example, is trying to wire up rats to find people trapped in collapsed buildings. Let’s hope that instinct does not win the inevitable conflict of interest in this case, too. After all, in the normal course of events, a rat doesn’t want to find live bodies in the wreckage – what it really needs is dead ones. But if hungry, it’ll settle for one that can’t writhe or kick too much. If the NYPD is reading this, well, keep your fingers on the “Off” switch, boys…


The Navy’s cutest secret weapon, yesterday. No Flipper jokes, if you know what’s good for you.

Furry lobsters, supercreeps…

The dedicated scientists of the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer) have excitedly announced their latest discovery, a species of hairy lobster native to the South Pacific. Some of the boffins theorise that the “yeti lobster”, which thrives around geothermal vents, uses the hairlike filaments to catch food. An alternative school of thought among their older, sadder and wiser colleagues is that it is recently divorced and just can’t be asked to shave.

Encouraged by this success, the gallic geeks of Ifremer are planning to redouble their pursuit of that elusive holy grail of marine biology, the bearded clam. Curiously, the pasty deoderant-free Frenchmen, who spend all their waking hours in labs smelling of fish, have not managed to track any of those down yet. Maybe next year.


The hairy lobster, yesterday. I searched for bearded clam images too, but got some rather off-topic results

Getting one’s goat

A Sudanese man has been forced to 'marry' a goat reports the BBC breathlessly, unimaginatively filing the story under “Africa” rather than “Entertainment” or “Agriculture”, or even “Agricultural Entertainment”.

It seems that Mr Tombe, of Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, was smitten by the silky little temptress as he made his way home one night. Unfortunately for him, no sooner had he leapt the garden wall and consummated his passion than his neighbour appeared through the floor like the Demon King, inquiring with justifiable acerbity as to Mr Tombe’s intentions. To this question the trouserless Mr Tombe found no ready response, and he was hauled off before the local council of elders lickety split.

Mr Tombe was ordered pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to his neighbour, receiving in return the goat, who remains in his possession at time of writing. I can’t imagine that it made a very comfortable addition at the breakfast table that morning, especially if Mr Tombe is already married.

I suppose that we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr Tombe. After all, this sort of thing has an ancient pedigree (cf Aesop’s fable of the Spartan boy and the fox, where to my mind not the least remarkable thing is that the boy planned to eat the fox afterwards) and is hardly unknown in England, either. In some ways it’s an inspiring story, if only because this example of sharia in action will put extra backbone into Welsh support for the War on Terror.

But what about the goat? No-one seems to know or care how she feels about all this. After all, as is so often the way in backward patriarchies like Sudan, she didn’t get any choice in the matter. Who knows - maybe she would’ve preferred the bloke down the street? At least he brought her flowers.


A nanny goat, yesterday. A sad yet undeniably alluring symbol of oppressed womanhood everywhere.

Norwegian Blue

Somalia is now the piracy capital of the world. As Africa’s premier failed state, it is also a hotbed of endangered species smuggling. Including parrots. Coincidence? I don’t think so…

When will the world take a stand against these feathered Moriarties?


Can you spot the sneaky Svengali on the shoulder pad?

Their eyes are bigger than their bellies

Light begins to dawn as to why the news has been colonised by one whale story after another lately. There’s just too many of the damned things. And now we know who to blame.

The Japanese have suddenly and inexplicably gone off whale meat.

For a while Japan’s brave fleets continued to kill and butcher them with the single-minded purity of purpose so typical of their island race where bloodshed is involved, but eventually even these dedicated professionals cottoned on to the fact that there was no point killing more whales than anyone was prepared to buy.

Hence the oceans are full of Flipper's fat friends – so many that you can walk across the Channel dry-shod on the heaving mass of blubber, with the surplus ending up in the Thames, a menace to shipping.

Fortunately, the selfless public servants of the Japan Whaling Association are fighting a noble rearguard action with their new informational pamphlet “Delicious whales!”, to be distributed free to all households. The mind boggles to imagine how it might be illustrated, but I’m sure its arrival is eagerly anticipated by the whole family.

One can only hope that it works, and the Japs start reaching for the ketchup once again with their old-accustomed vigour. Only then will sanity return to both rivers and newsrooms around the world.


Go on – get it down yer neck, my son! Lovely…

Banana Peelers

Following up on its worldwide exclusive re the perils of avian welfarism, the Economist catches our eye again with this piece on the role of policing in primate societies.

The noble scientific pioneers of the the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, in between barroom brawls, gunfights and cattle rustling, have taken time out to study what happens to primate behaviour when the alpha males are removed from circulation. Their theory was that the role of these high-ranking individuals extended beyond simply maintaining their own primacy, to include breaking up conflicts between lower-ranking individuals even if they had no stake in the outcome, effectively acting as the local bobbies on their own beats.

Picking on a troop of previously blameless pigtailed macaques, they put this theory to the test. Sure enough, removing the coppers for just a few hours every day

“resulted in the remaining monkeys grooming fewer others, playing with fewer others and dividing up into cliques as the social network that held the troop together broke down. The number of aggressive incidents also increased”

The boffins conclude that

“the role of policing in these monkeys is to allow individuals to socialise widely at little risk and thus hold a large troop together, since the police will intervene if things get out of hand”

The relevance of this study to the human condition is self-evident when one considers the many parts of Britain’s towns and cities where the humble copper has long since become a sight unseen. Not that this is exactly a novel insight. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) says it rather well:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites... Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

Given that forty years of comprehensive education and welfarism have left a significant percentage of our urban population somewhat less civilized than a pigtailed macaque, perhaps the time has come once again to draw a leaf from Mother Nature’s recipé book and apply it to our high-rise Sodoms. One could of course try to winkle our current policemen out of their squad cars and diversity training seminars and back onto the streets they are paid to patrol, but they would doubtless consider that infra dig, and anyway who would then compile the quarterly hate speech statistics, replace the film in all the speed cameras, and shoot passing Brazilians?

No, if other primates can do such an effortless and effective job of policing their own societies, let’s outsource our own policing to them. Let chimps twist the heads off of shoplifters and gorillas throw muggers into the paddy wagon one limb at a time. As an added bonus, they can hardly be accused of racism, and so can strangle gangstas with their own chains and ram a certain cleric’s hooks up his arse with unimpeachable impartiality.

The sight of an adult male silverback tying some lippy chav into a pretzel will I am sure remind all other nearby undesireables of pressing business elsewhere, and the streets will once again become safe for women, children and the elderly, as they were back in that unimaginably distant past when the human police actually did their damned jobs.

Come on, boys – let’s go to work…

Did somebody say “Pig”?

Don't you want a little gorilla you can call your own?

Reflecting upon the role of cartoonism in so many avoidable deaths, I am drawn almost against my will to the sad case of Magilla Gorilla, an early victim of Hanna Barbera’s barbarous trade.


We've got a gorilla for sale
Magilla Gorilla for sale.
Won't you buy him,
Take him home and try him,
Gorilla for sale.

Don't you want a little gorilla you can call your own,
A gorilla who'll be with ya when you're all alone?

Take our advice,
At any price,
A gorilla like Magilla is mighty nice.
Gorilla, Magilla Gorilla for sale.



Week after week we watch Mr Peebles’ increasingly desperate and insensitive attempts to get shot of him. Discount after discount whittles away at his self-esteem, and time after time the sale that offers escape ends in a humiliating return to the shop window. How can one doubt that this is a deeply traumatised individual, ripe for an eventual explosion of irrepressible rage given frightening force by his sheer size and strength? And yet Mr Peebles continues to hawk this unhappy ape to any passing child for a nickel.

Naturally it would be perverse to blame Magilla for his sad situation or resultant state of mind, but one can’t help but fear that it will all end in tears…


All the signs were there, but we just didn’t want to see them.

Smarter than the average Barbera

More on the willful blindness of certain “experts” as to the true nature of their chosen subjects, as our good friend Desargues draws our attention to another example of the same kind of romantic nonsense.

Timothy Treadwell was a “bear expert” in the habit of living for months at a time among wild bears of Alaska, giving them names and sneaking up close enough to touch them. Alas, it appears that the bears did not reciprocate his feelings: at some point during his final visit they dispassionately decided that he and his girlfriend were easier to catch than yet another bloody salmon, and promptly ate them both. Rangers stumbling upon the grisly scene were forced to shoot the bears to recover the remains.

One deduces from this tale of woe that the North American varieties of bear are made of sterner stuff than their child-rearing Indian and European kin. A search unearths four other examples of fatal bear attacks in the same general area, without even starting on horror stories such as the baby eaten right out of its stroller in upstate New York.

Like M. Cousteau, Mr Treadwell preferred to characterise his unpredictable friends as misunderstood – “harmless party animals”, even. One may now suppose that he has modified his views somewhat, although sadly too late for himself and especially the luckless female who trusted in his expertise. In their memories therefore we hereby dub North America’s bear community “the sharks of the forest”.

So how does one go about confusing a five hundred pound carnivore with a soft toy? Wise old birds have long warned us that

“it’s always tempting to impute
unlikely virtues to the cute”

The otherwise inexplicable popularity of the Kennedy family is grim testimony to this deplorable human frailty. But the cuteness excuse just doesn’t wash with me this time. Bears are big, they’re covered in filthy fur and ticks, and they reek. A teamster’s mother might find that combination appealing, but don’t tell me anyone else is rushing to hug them. Something else is at work here, and inevitably the finger of suspicion swings unerringly towards the real culprits - Hanna Barbera.

Stay with me here.

Yes, it was those unscrupulous manipulators at Hanna-Barbera who lured luckless losers like Mr Treadwell into the hills, with the reckless and deceptive nonsense of Yogi Bear. Yogi and Boo Boo were not much prettier than the real thing, but they were harmless. They were in fact simple and easily biddable creatures who would do practically anything for a “pickernic basket”, which is how Ranger Smith persuaded them to pose for that tawdry and ill-advised Spartacus centrefold with the Banana Splits and got the whole show cancelled.

Sadly, children’s cartoons are a notoriously unreliable source of zoological minutae. For example, one can watch any number of episodes of Magilla Gorilla without once learning that gorillas build nests and show a high degree of fecal disinterest. Or that they can, if sufficiently provoked, rip off your arm and beat you to death with the wet end.

And so it is with the bears. We were conned, plain and simple, by shameless pro-bear propaganda, and two more victims have paid the ultimate price. Surely Hanna Barbera know the human cost of their products by now, yet apology comes there none.

How many more must die? How many more tourists shredded while proffering a picnic basket? How many more children pounded to a pulp by a deeply disturbed discount gorilla from the pet shop? How many more blameless citizens shot by incompetent law enforcement horses?

Hanna-Barbera – j’accuse…


Yogi and Boo Boo, yesterday. Foiled by those fiddly little clips on the child seat, they skip the hors d'oeuvre and go straight to the entrée…

Timeo danaos et dona ferentes

Jacques Cousteau’s grandson, Fabien, is following in his illustrious forebear’s flippers by building a shark-shaped submarine. By means of this ingenious device he will get closer to his toothy subjects than ever before, without altering their natural behaviour in such circumstances: ie, to immediately rip him limb from limb and swallow the still twitching chunks whole.

We await with interest the first time he uses the thing during mating season, whereupon death might suddenly lose its sting.

His interviewers are too polite to ask whether he has tested his shark sub on unsuspecting swimmers. This would present an almost irresistable temptation for any normal human, but marine scientists are obviously made of sterner and more disciplined stuff. Also M. Cousteau is French, and so a bit lacking re sense of humour.

Instead he is wholly devoted to far worthier aims. Through close and dispassionate study, he hopes to dispel the popular image of Great Whites as “bloodthirsty serial killers”. “Fewer than 12 people a year are killed by whites. We shouldn't demonise them so much” he opines. Will he then discard his submarine subterfuge to frolic openly with these gentle denizens of the deep? No.

The dozen people killed and eaten by Great Whites in the last twelve months were not available for comment.


Young Cousteau and his remarkable disguise yesterday. Proof if it were needed that the only way to avoid ending up inside a shark is to already be in one.

It's not big, and it's not clever

Whales continue to thrust their way into the headlines, blubbery media-whores that they are, this time by vomiting some sort of fabulously over-priced intestinal treasure over some passing Australians. While one can understand and even sympathise with the desire to vomit on Australians, one wonders why they didn’t stick with the traditional suspicious-kebab-and-inexplicable-carrots variety, rather than something that sells for $20 a gram. What are they, stupid? Don’t they know that stuff’s valuable? These big floating lummoxes are beginning to get on my nerves.

"A period of silence from you would now be welcome." – Clement Attlee.


Yet another bastard whale, yesterday, hawking a 30lb prairie oyster over a boatload of horrified eco-tourists. Bloody show-offs, that’s what they are.

No fat chicks

I’m sure that we are all grateful to the Economist for a valuable insight into the subtle interaction of diet and reproduction. Conservationists in New Zealand, attempting to save a species of flightless and nocturnal parrots called kakapos, isolated them on predator-free islets and fed the females as much as they wanted to aid them in breeding. Unfortunately, the immediate side-effect of this all-you-can-eat buffet was a generation of fat females producing many more male offspring than female, with predictable results in terms of the parrot equivalents of violence and social cohesion. Only when the scientists cut the ladies’ rations back to being just enough to maintain fertility, and no more, did both gender balance and peace return.

One wonders if there is not some wider application to this lesson. If

free food + lazy females = too many preening males

then perhaps also

state-subsidized chips + idle welfare whores = too many 50 Cent wannabes and knife-wielding ratboy hoodies

Now as the Good Book says, the poor are always with us, as are the stupid. For ease of identification the two are usually the same, with the obvious exceptions of the Royal Family and your boss. No-one minds that there are lots of poor people. But it does become an issue when they are mostly dangerous vermin, and there are not enough dim-bulb scrunchied slappers to ring up your purchases in Boots and jack you off in nightclub car parks. The natural order is at risk.

Wherefore we turn to Mother Nature for answers, and she offers us the example of the humble kakapo. Round up your slappers - she seems to tell us with a benign smile - dump them on some barren offshore rock, and feed them just enough to keep them fertile, and soon cashier lines and cosmetic counters throughout the land will echo once again to the happy trilling of that simple yet decorative creature, the Great British Bird.

Let’s listen to Mother.


A shameless welfare sponger and her hoodlets, yesterday.

Where the wild things are

More on the subject of inter-species adoptions, as my attention is directed to Pyrénée, a charming work by Philippe Sternis about a young girl raised by a bear. Petit à petit, j'ai trouvé les caractéristiques graphiques de Pyrénée, de l'ours et de l'aigle… Sternis informs us breathlessly in an interview.

Being French, they bang on at length about la beauté de l'histoire, la simplicité et la profondeur des dialogues, la poésie du dessin, and I’m sure we all agree with those fine sentiments. But they take an interminable length of time to get to what for anyone else would be the first question asked… why is the poor creature butt-naked throughout? Sternis acknowledges his debt to Kipling’s Jungle Book, but even Mowgli had a loin-cloth. Those raised by wolves are indeed typically naked, but somehow one expects better things from bears.

Sternis says he and his partner saw her as a fée clochette (the sort of fairy who lives in bell-shaped flowers), which is probably enough to get them banned from a teaching post in any British school. Win-win for them, then.

Humans have long had complex relationships with bears – Grizzly Adams was notorious in going beyond what one would consider the limits of normal interaction. One can see his point – presentable females were thin on the ground among those untamed peaks, and I dare say he saw it as an elegant combination of the sex and the fur rug, needing only to supply the roaring fire. Fortunately, Pyrénée bolts back to civilization before anyone thinks to develop the plot in so unhealthy a direction in her case.


Pyrénée yesterday. She’ll catch her death like that, so she will…

And the lion shall lie down with the lamb

The trusty Beeb provides us with an entertaining list of cross-species adoptions in the animal kingdom, often by predators of prey. Curiously, they list alongside them the story of how the locals warmly welcomed a surprise visit from a whale in Tokyo Bay.

There’s surely something vaguely libellous about the association of the Japanese item with the others – it somehow suggests that all Japanese are predators whose instinctive reaction to meeting a whale is to start hacking it to death on the spot. The fact that a few of them stopped to enjoy the sight of one in a bay is therefore equated with some sort of bizarre freak of nature.

It’s quite unfair, of course. The Japanese are an extremely cultured and sensitive people, as evidenced by the exquisite haiku they would compose, tears in their eyes, to celebrate the memory of those allied prisoners they had just spontaneously beheaded for raking the sand the wrong way, or whatever:

Cow eyed foreigner
Thought that there were rules to war
Unlucky for him

…and so on. See? Beautiful. Almost an honour to be turned into sushi by such sophisticated folk.

Personally, I think that the offending link should be removed forthwith. Now if a Japanese man adopted a whale, that would be another matter entirely. The lion and the lamb lie down together often enough – but usually only the lion gets up again. At least if you’re lying next to a whale the odds are more even. About 50-50 really, depending upon which way it rolls.

Update! Synchronicity works overtime as a whale turns up in the Thames. Aren't you glad I use my powers for Good?

Will we be as soft a touch as the people of Tokyo, or will it be eaten by chavs? Watch this space...

Update update! That Thames whale was pants, actually. With that bottlenose it didn't look like a whale at all - more like a dolphin that had really let itself go. If the best we can muster is Flipper's fat friend then we might as well stop issuing them visas.


A poet and his captive audience, yesterday.

Arrr, Jim lad

News reaches us of an indiscreet parrot that has broken up its owners’ relationship by shopping the female for bonking another man while her mate was out at work. Apparently the bird took to imitating her passionate cries of “Gary!” in front of the increasingly suspicious boyfriend, who is a Chris. Given enough time, even a Yorkshireman can join the dots.

It’s difficult to know where one stands on cases like this. No-one likes a sneak, but on the other hand the parrot belongs to the man, and so arguably was showing simple loyalty. After all, we don’t object when Lassie pulls children out of wells, however much we might fantasise about leaving the noisy little bastards down there, and maybe chucking a few rocks in after them for good measure. Mother Nature has not equipped the humble parrot for such feats of strength and daring, but on the other hand she has gifted them with the power of speech, which this one has used to excellent effect.

However, it still smacks of the dirty and the underhanded, and parrots have form in this regard. They are, of course, inextricably linked to piracy, sitting on every captain’s shoulder, directing every villainous scheme, and maintaining their rule of fear by savagely ripping out an eye at the slightest sign of defiance. But when their underlings finally fell into the hands of the authorities, it was all “Pieces of Eight!” and “Polly wants a cracker!” Whoever ended up swinging from the yardarm in Greenwich, it was never the parrot.

Perhaps it’s time that the parrot community followed the example of the Anglican Church, and issued a formal apology for those long-ago crimes. Somehow, I feel that the spirits of Blackbeard and Teach would rest a little easier for it.


A parrot yesterday. Best not to turn your back on him for too long.