The Book of Animal Ignorance

A
nimals are the oats in the QI muesli, the basic black frock in our wardrobe, the baseline to our phat phunky dub. If you cannot be entranced, amused and astonished by the animal kingdom then QI has no use for you nor you, no doubt, for us.

Animals have this in common with each other: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves. A tree frog (so far as we can ascertain) doesn't wake up in the morning feeling guilty that it was a bad tree-frog the night before, nor does it spend any time wishing it were a wallaby or a crane-fly. It just gets on with the business of being a tree-frog, a job it does supremely well. We humans, well … we are never content, always guilty, and rarely that good at being what nature asked us to be –
Homo sapiens
.

There is much to be learned from the animals. Much to be learned about them, of course, but much, much more to be learned about ourselves: our limits, our lonely uniqueness as a species and, I would add, our greatness. The fact that we care with unreciprocated fervour about woodlice, woodpeckers and wolverines is to our credit. I cannot subscribe to this modern idea that we should feel guilty about our role on earth, or inferior for having evolved a (self-)conscious mind. This is just
Genesis wrapped up in new, even more sanctimonious clothes. The old religion and the new orthodoxy both claim we have guardianship over the earth and a ‘moral' responsibility for its destiny. Well, fine. But I will not apologise for committing the crime of being born any more than a marmot or a mosquito should. And between them, those two have been responsible for more death and upheaval than all human wars.

In the end, whatever weird and unfathomable purposes there might be to existence, to whichever theory of the development of life you might subscribe, we all have to face the fact that there is no entirely satisfactory explanation for the oddities and extremities of the zoological world. Nothing in nature seems to follow a fixed predictable law, not the number of penises on an insect, not the need for a chicken to have a head. I suppose they all have in common the melancholy fact that they have been impersonated, with the use of nothing more than a mop of hair, expressive hands and a pair of big brown eyes, by Mr Alan Davies.

M
y ignorance of animals is legendary.

I know two dogs quite well. One is my dad's the other is my step-mum's. Both these dogs are idiots. I know my sister's cat quite well as she is actually my cat but I gave her to my sister to look after for a fortnight in 1993. I have two goldfish, one named Brian after Brian Dowling out of TV's
Big Brother
and the other named Bill after Bill Bailey, the legendary materialist-hippy comedian from the West Country who has many animals of different kinds. Bill gave me Bill to keep in my pond when he was having the builders in to move his pond 20 feet up the garden (money well spent). Bill and Brian (the fish) get on very well. Bill and Brian the television personalities have, to the best of my knowledge, never met. I can only speculate on how their relationship would unfold. Amicably at first but I suspect they may baulk at being asked to spend five years together in a 6-foot x 6-foot pond as their fishy counterparts have. I don't know what sex the fish are but even if they are opposites they will not be able to have babies because the moment they lay any eggs they will eat them. In the wild they forget where they've put them, so the tiny Nemos have a fighting chance. In captivity they will inevitably come across them and simply forget they have laid and
fertilised them. This is not because they were drunk at the time but because goldfish have a famously short memory. Or is that a modern myth the QI folk would publicly shame me for believing? Probably. My ignorance of animals is only extended by a refusal to eat them. Although I did eat meat throughout my childhood and remember lamb in particular as being bloody delicious. Jeremy Clarkson turned to me during a recording of QI one night and said pityingly: ‘You're a vegetablist aren't you?' QI's creator and senior boffin, John Lloyd, on learning that I would eat a prawn but on no account a mammal, simply shook his head and whispered, ‘Extraordinary.' I don't know why I won't eat them, it just seems so unnecessary. Fish I do eat because they were here long before we were and they'll be here long after we've gone. No, that's not it. It's because they are cold-blooded and don't have a nervous system like mammals so they don't feel pain. Who knows if that's true? Selfishly, I eat seafood because it's hard to get decent veggie food in restaurants. Except Indian restaurants. Or Thai. Or Vietnamese. That's why those Asian cuisines really float my boat. Delicious food and nothing died.

Unfortunately, of course, in many parts of Asia, they do eat dogs. And I like dogs even though both the dogs I know are idiots …

A
nimals know things we don't. You may think this is pretty obvious, but in a book about ‘animal ignorance' it's important to point out who it is that's ignorant here. Spend a little time in the company of animals, even the ones stretched out on the bottom of your bed, and you'll start to see the world differently. Look into their eyes and try to think what they're thinking. It's impossible, of course, which is what makes it so compelling. Whatever else we discover, however close we come to understanding the inner workings of the universe, we'll never, ever know what it feels like to live life as a cat, still less an ant, or a starfish.

Animals have fired our imaginations like nothing else, not God, not the weather, not other humans. From the first moment we discovered we could daub shapes on cave walls, we've been painting, writing and thinking about them. The magical rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples, their creations myths and healing practices are all one long dialogue with the animal kingdom. To take on the power of an animal – the sight of an eagle, the speed of an antelope, the strength of a lion – these were the original superpowers. Most animals are still tirelessly exercising the same skills they've done for millennia. As a species, we're very new kids on a very old block.

The original inspiration for this book was the medieval bestiaries. These were the most popular and influential books after the Bible itself. In them you'd be amazed to discover that weasels conceived through their ears, that bees were born from dead oxen and that a goat's blood was hot enough to dissolve diamonds. And scattered among the myths about real animals was ‘real' information about mythical beasts – centaurs, unicorns, dragons, manticores. Only rarely did bestiaries contain facts based on actual observation of nature. But nobody seemed to mind, the stories were too good to miss and anyway the real point was to teach human beings how to behave. What we liked was the idea of a collection of animals that didn't leave you disappointed, as zoos so often do: a modern bestiary, based on zoological fact. After all, European eels swimming back and forth to Bermuda, octopuses' arms that crawl for a month after they've been severed, mites so small they live inside a bee's throat, or eight-legged water bears that can stay in a state of suspended animation for a century – these are even more outlandish than the wildest fantasies of the bestiary writers. They just happen to be true.

So, here are a hundred animals, some supposedly familiar, some definitely obscure, all of them, without exception, quite interesting. We might easily have called it
The Book of Animal
Engineering
. Ted Dewan trained as an engineer and, as his brilliant drawings show, how animals work is almost as mind-altering as how they behave. But this is not a workshop manual. Nor is it a reference book, or an animal rights polemic; it's a menagerie, an armchair safari. It teaches only one unambiguous truth: that the word ‘natural' is meaningless. Animal strategies for feeding, reproducing or just getting about are so madly various, so utterly, gloriously perverse that you end up believing that absolutely anything is possible.

And that's the point. Animals cheer us up. They don't need us to patronise them, or to speak for them. But after studying them in such detail, it's impossible not to feel they deserve our respect. The great American naturalist Henry Beston once wrote: ‘In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and
complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.'

So come down to the waterhole of ignorance and wallow with us for a while.