The Truth About Animals by Lucy Cooke

The Husband is so thoughtful - he found another book at the library and brought it home for me to read.  He knows me well.  He brought me The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from The Wild Side of Wildlife by Lucy Cooke.  I love the cover - with a furry panda.  I started this book on January 18 and finished it on March 3.  It wasn't a quick read, but it was a good read.

Chapter 3 about Sloths begins with the sentence, "The sloth is 'the stupidest animal that can be found in the world,' wrote the Spanish knight Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés..."  I mean - who can possibly think the sloth is the stupidest animal in the world???  Sloths are amazing!  This quote made me simultaneously laugh and want to cry.

Cooke wrote about several different animals including but not limited to eels, beavers, frogs, moose, penguins, chimpanzees, and others.  She quotes historical texts, my favorite (cringe) from the Comte de Buffon (published in 1749).  This Comte, he is a real buffoon.  He wrote about sloths that they were abominable, and escaped the forces that "had shaped all other animals towards their singular form of perfection."  And that they were a "defective remnant".  

Cook enlightened me to beaver balls and their supposed mystical properties.  Beavers were so tuned in to being hunted for their balls that if they suspected they were in pursuit, they would chew their own balls off and throw them at their pursuer.  Even da Vinci - yes, THE Leonardo da Vinci wrote about beaver balls.  Cook quotes da Vinci as writing, "We read of the beaver that when it is pursued, knowing that it is for the virtue in its medicinal testicles and not being able to escape, it stops; and to be at peace with its pursuers, it bites off its testicles with its sharp teeth, and leaves them to its enemies."

With all of the animals, Cook outlines some outlandish myths and old beliefs about the animal, traces where these stories came from (most often bestiaries - texts written by old old naturalists in medieval times [not the restaurant] the actual time period), and includes real (and sometimes outlandish), and current research by notable scientists (in their own time periods).  Some of the current research is good and productive and informative.  And some of it is bat-ass crazy.  It's an interesting contrast into how naturalists have done their work through the years.  It's a little horrifying some of the things people did (and still do) in the name of "science."

One of the true tales was about bats.  In 1941, a dentist, after hearing about how the Japanese bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, recalled bats swarming out of Carlsbad Caverns and dreamt up a plan to strap tiny bombs to bats and releasing them into a Japanese city.  This dentist wrote to FDR who forwarded the letter to the National Research Defense Committee with a personal recommendation, "'This man is not a nut.'"  Well, our government tried to put this plan into action with bomb prototypes and inducing hibernation in the bats by putting them in refrigerators.  Surprise surprise, it didn't work.  The bats didn't cooperate.  And, in June 1943, they ran a test with real incendiary devices that didn't really go well.  The bat bombs strapped to wayward bats burned down the entire Carlsbad auxiliary field station...  Can you imagine little bat bombs escaping their building and then exploding things like they were meant to do, but really meant to do to our enemies, not the US government researchers?  Score 1 for the bats!  ha ha ha.

This book is funny - really funny, outlandish, head scratching, perplexing, and informative.  Did you know that some of the first pregnancy tests involved frogs?  They did!

Some of the illustrations from these old old tests are hilariously wrong.  Take our friends, the sloth, the beaver, and the hippo.  How about those balls on the beaver, and the beard on the hippo, and that poor lame-looking sloth?  Did these ancient dudes even LOOK at the specimens?

If you like animals, want to learn more about them, enjoy a good laugh, you'll like this book.  Thumbs up from me!