Why Pandas Do Handstands And Other Curious Truths About Animals

Foreword Generations ago, even the cleverest people used to dismiss animals as dull, uninteresting creatures -- at least compared to us humans. Mark Twain, for instance, argued that "man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to" while D. H. Lawrence called man "the only animal in the world to fear." G. K. Chesterton, glass in hand no doubt, wrote that "no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness -- or as good as drink." He would have needed a stiff whiskey if he knew how wrong they all had been. Mr. Chesterton had clearly not encountered a Scandinavian elk, blind drunk on fermented apples, or witnessed the carnage caused when a flock of berry-addled birds fly into the side of a glass tower. Nor, obviously, had Mr. Twain witnessed a sexually aroused male ostrich, its long neck burning a vivid scarlet. If he had, he would have turned bright red himself. And Mr. Lawrence had obviously never been stung by the awesome Australian box jellyfish. If he had, he would have spent a week suffering from the hideous Irukandji syndrome, a combination of nausea, high blood pressure, and manic depression that can reduce a man to, well, a quivering jelly. If he had, he would have feared animals forever. In their defense, all three were living in another age, a time before electron microscopes and wildlife filmmakers, the National Geographic channel and computers capable of decoding a dog's DNA. Today, no one can look at the animal world without feeling amazed on a regular basis. Every day, or so it seems, a scientific journal or research paper, a wildlife documentary maker, or zoologist is delivering some new discovery or insight. The variety, unpredictability, and pure strangeness of the facts they come up with are endless -- and endlessly fascinating: cows produce more milk to the sound of Beethoven; male mice serenade their sweethearts; penguins can fire their feces like cannons; lobsters behave like mobsters; elephants can imitate the sound of passing trucks. Animal life, clearly, is anything but dull. This book is an assembly of some of the curious, the bizarre, and the sometimes barely credible things we now know about animals. As will be obvious from the beginning, this is a collection intended to inform and educate, but, above all, to entertain. So, while I have been scrupulous in providing source references and have endeavored to maintain scientific accuracy at every turn, I have not let pedantry get in the way of the sense of fun and wonder that, I hope, lies at the book's heart. To have done so would have been to risk making animals uninteresting to another generation. And that simply wouldn't do. -- Augustus Brown, London, 2006 Copyright 2006 by Augustus BrownBrown, Augustus is the author of 'Why Pandas Do Handstands And Other Curious Truths About Animals', published 2006 under ISBN 9781416531906 and ISBN 1416531904.