Alternative Anthropology.

[retepsnikrep]

A bat, flying about in stygian darkness, in a narrow cave full of catamites and stigmatites, avoids all these obstructions by emitting ultrasonic pulses, and receiving their reflections back. Yeah, Yeah, and I can talk to dolphins.

There's another phenomenon, dolphins. They do the same Watson-Watt radar trick and furthermore talk by clicking and whistling. The fact is they happen to click and whistle that's all, the same as pigs happen to grunt. They also appear to have an affinity with humans. The affinity is food-chain, but we are too big to fit in their mouths.

You will remember my previous post about atomic particle mechanics, which cast doubt on the current scientific thinking. i.e. one kitten in two separate boxes at the same time. I think my opinion has now been widely accepted by the scientific fraternity. They call it the chaos theory, which was my suggestion. It means it’s all any old how. The quarks, bosons, sub mesons and the rest zoom around the place, bumping and splitting, looking for the sub-atomic custard creams.

I’m sorry to dispel similar myths about the animal kingdom, we are desperate to believe they are wildly intelligent, or clairvoyant, but they are not. The bats are just lucky.

I have widely researched the whole animal and insect kingdoms and some other myths can be laid to rest. Snakes smelling with their tongues for example. I don't know what school David Attenborough went to but I can advise him as follows:- Tongues taste or blow raspberries. Noses smell. Snakes have noses, you can see them under the little beady eyes. What will they tell us they are? A rudimentary moustache? There are also supposed to be creatures that can 'see' with the hairs on their legs. Sorry, I’ve got fairly hairy legs and they can detect nothing. Butterflies are said to emit a scent that males can detect miles away. Say Mandy butterfly is on London Bridge, Shane butterfly can smell it from Finsbury Park. You know and I know you have to get the hooter within a few inches of the female neck or wrist to smell ‘Allure’ or ‘Boy’. Put these butterflies in Granny’s kitchen where you can only smell cabbages, and they’d flitter about aimlessly till you let them out of the door.

The homing instinct fascinates anthropologists. Birds do look down and we do not live on a featureless matt grey globe. There are ‘things’ that can be recognised as being on the way, like South America. We operate in exactly the same way in finding our way back from the Co-Op.

The bee-dance on top of the honey combs which tells the others where the bonanza honey flowers are is a bit far-fetched. The dancing fellow jerking round always looks a bit pissed to me. The others clear off and go for a fly about in case he starts a fight, naturally some are going to the same place the dancer did as there are so many of them, and some are going up your sleeve.

While I am on the anthropological theme, there is something a bit degrading about the courtship rituals of animals and birds. I don’t really like looking at it. I am embarrassed for them, I look away at the actual coupling that is often so quick it seems hardly worth while to have taken all that trouble before hand. (Human courtship behaviour is no less degrading and will be the subject of a future post entitled, ‘Do you come here often?’) If you showed the film of their showing off to the animal doing it afterwards they’d tone it down a bit in future I bet. The peacock is at least beautiful, though way over the top, many others are horrible. The inflation of the red neck bladder, who could like that? The red and blue bum enhancements of our cousins the monkeys, disgraceful. The rubbing of scent glands on sticks. I’m glad we don’t have those scent glands, I don’t fancy anointing the phone box by the Post Office, the bollards, and the gate of number 7. And all this blowing and squirting doesn’t seem to get most of them very far. The main qualification for the privilege of mating seems to be getting yourself half-killed by your colleagues. Then you get some sex, if you can still do it.

Peter :-6