Long Shadow Of The Locust

Imagine this scenario.

You’re a farmer in a country, let’s call it, oh, just let’s say it’s called India.

You don’t have much of a farm. In your grandfather’s time it might have been quite large, and fertile, and the rains irrigated it plentifully every summer so that his crops never died of thirst. Even if there was a year or two when the monsoon rains failed, there was a tube well and more than enough groundwater to ensure that the harvest wasn’t a failure. And whatever your grandfather produced, the government guaranteed that it would buy it at a certain price, known as the minimum support price, so he knew that even if he couldn’t sell it at a bigger profit in the open market, he could still depend on a certain guaranteed level of income, just so long as his crops continued to grow.

But that was then.

Things happened. First, with increasing health care standards, no matter how imperfect, more of your grandfather’s offspring lived to adulthood than in his father’s time. So your grandfather’s farm was divided among your father and uncles. And, in time, your father married and bred, and more of your siblings survived to adulthood than in your father’s generation, which meant that his share of the farm was divided again between you and your brothers. So, you ended up with only a tiny fraction of your grandfather’s farm.

Meanwhile, other people have been breeding too, and their children, too, have been surviving to adulthood in hitherto unprecedented numbers. So, to house them and to supply food for them, and to rip coal and oil and minerals out of the ground for them, forests have been chopped down; and to supply the thirsty cities with water, rivers have been dammed and their water piped to said cities. Chimneys have been spouting smoke from factories, because the government has decided that unchecked industrialisation is the only path to “growth” – and also because the corporations owning those industries are important sources of funds for elections and to buy up politicians afterwards. All this has done enough damage to the climate that the rain has grown increasingly erratic and unreliable, so that you’ve had to rely more and more on your tube well to irrigate your patch of field. The groundwater level, in consequence, has been falling, and falling, and you’ve had to borrow money to dig your tube well deeper and deeper – and still the water continues to fall.

All this while, your own expenditures are climbing. Things are more expensive. Your tiny patch of field doesn’t bring in enough to pay the bills unless you begin to plant multiple crops a year. This is turn exhausts your soil, leaching out the fertility, which earlier used to be renewed because your grandfather could afford to leave it fallow between planting seasons. So you have to buy huge amounts of fertiliser as well as farm machinery, because the old ways are no longer productive enough. Pests invade your field, and the pesticide you used to use no longer work because the pests have developed resistance. So you have to buy more expensive pesticides. Because the pesticide, fertiliser, and farm machinery are not free, you have to borrow money to buy them, so you slip into debt.

Then the government decides on “economic liberalisation”, which means that it starts systematically pandering to the corporations that provide it with money. Suddenly, your minimum support price is no longer paid on time, or is simply abolished altogether. You can’t pay your loans back to the banks from where you took them. They threaten to foreclose on your land. So, in order to pay them off, you borrow again, this time from the village moneylender. And then an unseasonal storm, which happens more and more frequently, comes along and kills off your entire harvest.

You think you have problems? Your problems are just beginning.

Because there isn’t anything like enough money coming in from your farm to pay your bills and even the interest on your loans, in between plantings and harvests you need some other income. So you look for work, as a labourer or whatever else you can manage. Work isn’t available in the vicinity, so you have to travel long distances, often to the other side of the country – and it’s a big country – to look for work. In a desperate attempt to make ends meet, you hire yourself out as a labourer for some months, rush back home, harvest and plant, try and sell on the market, try to keep your head above water, and then rush off to work as a labourer again.

Meanwhile the cost of machinery and fertiliser keeps increasing, the groundwater levels keep dropping, your debts keep piling up, some foreign company called Monsanto cajoles and bribes the government to compel you to buy seeds from it – seeds that cease to grow after one season, so every year you need to buy seed stock from Monsanto again, instead of using leftover seed from the previous year to plant again. And it begins to rain when it shouldn’t, drowning your crops, and it’s bone dry when it should be raining, so that what you have left withers to straw poking through cracked brick-hard soil. And the government, which you voted for, doesn’t care. It wants to grab your fields to hand over to its capitalist cronies for factory farms or just factories, and the worse things get for you, the better said capitalist cronies like it.

You see where we’re going with this?

Then, just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do.

You’re in the city, working at a temporary job as a construction worker, and you need to come back to your tiny farm because the harvest is due. But just as you’re about to, suddenly the government imposes a curfew because of some foreign disease that is supposedly killing people left and right. Your employer dismisses you and doesn’t even give you your back pay, on the grounds that he has no money. You can’t even step out into the street without being beaten by the police, even to buy food; and, if you do manage to sneak out of the city, you don’t have any way of getting home. There are no buses, no matter what the politicians claim, no trains, nothing. So, with no other option, you begin walking home along the highways, under the grilling midsummer sun, while the government spends taxpayer money to bring in rich Indians who abandoned the country for greener pastures abroad and suddenly find themselves unwelcome in their new homelands.

Meanwhile, your brother, who’s stayed back on the farm, has his own problems. The harvest can’t be sold because the markets and distribution systems are all shut because of the government’s lockdown. There are no preservation or storage facilities, so the produce can’t even be kept relatively fresh, and, even if there were, he couldn’t afford the fees. So what option does he have except to dump the stuff in the fields to rot in the sun?

None.

It isn’t the worst yet, oh, no.

While all this was going on, the climate worldwide has been going to hell, too. Forests have been disappearing, fossil fuels have been filling the skies with smoke and carbon dioxide, ice caps have been melting, the ocean currents have been changing as a consequence, and scientifically illiterate imbeciles have been pretending all of this is a hoax. Evaporation from oceans that are warmer than they used to be has warmed the air above and filled it with moisture. The warm air, rising, has drawn in colder air from around it to warm in turn, pick up moisture, rise, and bring in yet more colder air, until you have a gigantic vortex of rotating cloud and wind, spiralling towards land, bringing not just destruction but heavy rain wherever it goes. This thing is known as a cyclone.

This cyclone hits, shall we say, another – possibly fictional – country called Saudi Barbaria, which is mostly desert. It dumps so much rain that actual, literal lakes develop in the desert. This sudden moisture causes an equally sudden proliferation of vegetation. And, before the sun has an opportunity to parch this vegetation to mummified hay, yet another cyclone comes along and dumps another few thousand tons of water on the desert, creating even more greenery.

Great, right? Green is good, right?

Wrong.

There are animals living in that desert, notably insects, those most adaptable of all creatures. One of those insects is a, usually inconspicuous, middle-sized short-horned grasshopper called Schistocerca gregaria. This is a rather well-known insect; it’s been featured in no less than the Bible and the Koran, and you may even have heard of it under its common name.

Schistocerca gregaria is also known as the desert locust.

Locusts are grasshoppers. Grasshoppers eat vegetable matter. When there is a lot of vegetable matter, the grasshoppers lay a lot of eggs, which hatch to form many more grasshoppers, which live to grow to adulthood because of all that easily available vegetable matter, and lay more eggs, which give birth to more grasshoppers, which...

You get the idea.

And then there are so many grasshoppers that they begin to eat all the vegetation. And the cyclones don’t keep coming, so the lakes dry up, as the desert returns to its usual state, and the greenery, without water, begins to die off. So the grasshoppers crowd together to get at whatever little vegetation remains, because they don’t want to starve to death any more than you do. And when they get packed in tightly enough together, they bump against each other, just as you would in those crowded unreserved railway compartments in which you’d travel back to your hometown from your construction job in the city.

Now, unlike ordinary grasshoppers, locusts – there are many species, all of which are short-horned (that is, with short antennae) grasshoppers – do a special thing when there are a lot of them in such close proximity that their hind legs bump each other. Their biochemistry changes, with increased production of the hormone seratonin. Their bodies change colour, in the case of Schistocerca gregaria to yellowish pink and black. 

Their habits change – normally night-flyers, they now switch to flying during the day, and instead of maintaining distance from each other, they now actually seek out each other’s company. This is known as the gregarious or migratory phase. Soon, the massive agglomeration of these insects takes off in search of new food deposits to devour.

And, because of that global warming, there have been unseasonal rains here and there, so the locust swarms have plenty of food. They land, eat, have sex, lay eggs, and, with their ranks swollen by the new generations, set off again on their mission of conquest, flying up to a hundred and fifty kilometres a day. Oh, and they can cross oceans too, because when they get tired, they rest on the floating corpses of their friends who died of old age or exhaustion and float, bobbing on the waves.

Now these locusts have been migrating east and west for two years, devastating countries with names like “Ethiopia” and “Somalia”, “Yemen” and “Kenya”, which you’ve never heard of. But the government, with its overeducated bureaucrats, has most certainly heard of them. It is aware that two neighbouring countries, let’s call them, for fun, “Iran” and “Pakistan” have been hit hard in recent times. Just the previous year, in fact, Pakistan had some 40% of its crops eaten by locusts, which isn’t a small amount. In fact, a one square kilometre swarm of locusts – which is an extremely small swarm – can eat, in one day, as much food as would be needed to feed, wait for it, 35000 people. Locust swarms can extend over hundreds to thousands of square kilometres.

In reality, locusts are such a menace, and have been such a menace through history, that the United Nations’ Food And Agriculture Organisation (FAO) monitors them closely and warns governments when their countries are about to be attacked. Your own government – the same one that has stopped paying your minimum support price and is having you beaten up for coming out in the streets – knows that the locusts invaded the country last year, but did nothing, claiming that the insect swarm had receded without doing any crop damage.

Well, right now, those swarms are back. They’re back earlier than ever, in greater numbers than ever, and they’re eating their way across the west of the country. In fact they’ve been doing it for some time, but that same government and its tame media, which ignored your existence as long as possible, ignored the swarms too, until they blanketed the city of Jaipur, known for its pink sandstone construction, in a pink blanket of hungry insects. Then, suddenly, the media deigned to notice it. Because it had no choice.

So, to recapitulate.

The agriculture sector had already been devastated by shrinking farms, dropping groundwater levels, irregular and unpredictable rainfall, and cyclones, The government has taken a policy decision to let small farmers die, literally and metaphorically, by neglect so that the farming sector can be taken over by corporate cronies to set up factory farms and car manufacturing plants. Farmers are drowning in unpayable debt that keeps piling up as their land becomes agriculturally unsustainable. And then you’re walking the highways starving after being thrown out of your job without pay, the economy has packed it in, what of the harvest was collected is unsaleable and had to be thrown out to rot, and now a plague of ravening pinkish grasshoppers is eating every bit of vegetation in sight.

Right. Not only was much of this – in fact every bit of it except the COVID-19 outbreak – totally predictable, none of it just turned up overnight. All of this has been developing over years to decades, and the successive, post-1990, governments of India not just ignored it, they actively connived and encouraged most of the worst of it. They, and their paid media prostitutes, actively promoted the idea that the manufacturing industry was the only way to economic “progress”, and, to do this, the farm sector would have to be sacrificed. I remember asking multiple times on internet fora over the years whether people would be expected to eat cars and television sets, and being downvoted en masse every time.

But people cannot eat cars and television sets, and with the economy sliding downhill into the nether doldrums, there is no longer any market for cars and televisions; the vehicle industry has been moribund for well over a year. And the farm sector isn’t doing exactly well for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, so that, for the first time in thirty years, the level of average nutrition is actually dropping in India. And the Modi regime has systematically ignored all of this, including the gigantic locust plague which has been moving towards India for over two years now.

And by gigantic, I mean that this is the largest plague in 78 years. It’s also much more dangerous than any plague of comparable size 78 years ago. Why? For the simple reason that the population of the planet is much, much higher than 78 years ago, and vulnerable areas – east Africa and west and south Asia – are infinitely more stressed than they were 78 years ago. Not to speak of the fact that global warming causes more and more of the flood-drought cycle that promotes swarming, and that two of the worst affected countries, North and South Yemen (I do not consider them to be one country any longer, as a supporter of the now fait accompli South Yemeni independence), have been under invasion and a starvation blockade by Saudi Barbaria and the Imperialist States of Amerikastan since 2015.

Therefore, the chances of famine are extremely high, and, since the Modi regime has shown absolutely no signs of changing its policies, have been growing higher and higher. And now the locust swarm, which is spreading steadily eastward and northward towards the agricultural heart of India, is in the act of delivering the coup de grace.

I have noticed that the Modi regime’s pet media, after a couple of days of finally admitting the existence of the locusts, have suddenly made a point of repeatedly mentioning that the locusts “entered from Pakistan”. I assume that this is not accidental; nothing the Modi regime’s media does is innocent, accidental, or without the acquiescence of the regime. I can only speculate that if the regime fails to halt the locusts through the measures it is now allegedly taking – spraying pesticides from drones – it will move on to accusing Pakistan of deliberately sending the hordes of Schistocerca gregaria over the border to harm India. This would be on a par with the Trump regime in the Imperialist States of Amerikastan accusing China of creating COVID-19, a claim parroted by paid CIA agents on Indian social media.

Speaking of which, the Modi regime – in a desperate and transparent attempt to divert attention from its endless failures – is trying to provoke a border confrontation with China. Except for the fantasy world of Modi’s pet television channels, Republic and Times Now, this is going over like a lead balloon.

Starving people have more immediate concerns than that.

Anyway, if and when the Modi regime decides to blame Pakistan for the locusts, I’ll make it easy on them and give them proof. Here’s your Jihadi Locust, Jihadocerca pakistaneria.

You’re welcome.

For Earth Day

Ladies and Gentlemen, in honour of Earth Day, here is an animal I have painted before and will almost certainly paint again: India’s National Aquatic Animal, the Ganges River Dolphin, Platanista gangetica. Note the elongated rostrum (“beak”), the tiny eyes – little more than pits in the sides of the head – and the swollen, prominent melon (“forehead”). This animal is functionally blind and relies entirely on sonar and touch for navigation and hunting.

Title: Ganges Dolphin

Material: Acrylic on Paper

Copyright B Purkayastha 2016

Dino Tales

  

Your quiz question for today: Identify this (sadly extinct) creature.

Hints: 

1. It used to live in China and Mongolia.
2. It was about the size of a large turkey.
3. It had about the brain power, at best, of a chicken.
4. It was a predator of small to medium sized animals – up to the size of a small pig and

5. It was a solitary hunter which couldn't run particularly fast so probably waited in ambush for prey to come by.

[Source]

No, it isn't a chicken from a mad scientist's lab, cool as it might be.

I’ll give you an additional hint: its name is extremely well known, but most people will completely fail to recognise it when they think of that name.

No, that name is not Maozedongasaurus, either.

Well?

Perhaps you’ll recognise it if I show you the Hollywood version?

This:

[Source]

Yessssss...now you know it, don’t you? Velociraptor. Owing to the Jurassic Park franchise, the second-most recognisable dinosaur in the world, allegedly, right after Tyrannosaurus rex.

Of course, like everything else in Hollywood, Velociraptor looked nothing like that and nor did Tyrannosaurus, which in reality had a longer, narrower face, much less pronounced brow ridges, smaller arms, and in all probability a coat of feathers.

Did I say feathers? Yes, I said feathers. I said Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers. The only questions are whether it had them lifelong or only when a chick...er, baby...and whether said feathers were downy and hairlike or a full plumage like the Velociraptor.

Somehow, this looks much more impressive than the "conventional" image [Source]

So, yes, let’s get back to that Velociraptor, shall we? By now, you’ll have understood that Jurassic Park got one hell of a lot of things wrong, but, you know, you haven’t even begun to understand just how wrong.

Let’s see where they began; in the first film, they wanted a relatively small, highly agile dinosaur as an antagonist. In the book on which the film was – very loosely – based, the animal antagonist was based on a much earlier – it lived a full 30 million years before the Velociraptor – dinosaur, Deinonychus. This was about shoulder high to a human, but still looked a lot like the Velociraptor, with feathers, an elongated toothy snout, and a stiff, rigid tail. That's because they belonged to the same group - dromaeosaurs.

Michael Crichton, who wrote the book, chose to call the dinosaur he based his story on Velociraptor for one reason only – the name was “cooler” and easier to pronounce. Crichton even said so.

Sounds like the kind of thing Amerikastani administrations hire marketing agencies to come up with when trying to find ways to invade yet another country.

But that wasn’t quite enough. Crichton didn’t just want a Deinonychus. He wanted an enlarged, scarier Deinonychus. So, for reasons best known to himself, not only did he make it even larger, he decided to give it intelligence on the order of chimpanzees. This from an animal, you need to understand, with a brain to body ratio that would make it much, much stupider than a sparrow. And, of course, he decided to make it a pack hunter capable of fast running, because a solitary ambush predator just wasn’t scary enough.

At this moment, whether Deinonychus was a pack hunter or not isn't even established either way.

So in the film based on the book, the turkey-sized, solitary, Mongolian Velociraptor became an oversized Deinonychus with a behaviour pattern no actual Deinonychus could ever have managed – moreover, a Deinonychus that didn’t even look like a real Deinonychus – even without the feathers.

As for the feathers, that can at least be excused partly – at the time the original film was made, there was not yet evidence (though there was certainly lots of suspicion) that Velociraptor and Deinonychus had plumage. Now we know that not only did they have plumage, they were basically toothed, clawed birds.

But that was not the end of the confusion. Not yet.

You see, while the original Jurassic Park was being made, a much, much larger animal was discovered – another dromaeosaur – known as Utahraptor (go ahead and guess where it was found). I remember reading back then (1993) about how though the film “velociraptors” were admittedly bigger than the real ones (they didn’t say how much bigger), this was validated post facto by the discovery of the Utahraptor. Unfortunately, the real life Utahraptor was another feathered stiff-tailed quasi-bird beast, and as much bigger than a Deinonychus as that was than the real Velociraptor.

And then, because things weren’t complicated enough, the subsequent films in the franchise resolutely refused to correct the initial mistake, thereby fixing the fiction in the public eye.

So I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, but here’s what:

1. Velociraptor was a small, solitary, feathered ambush predator from China and Mongolia with a stiff, rigid tail.

2. Its name, because it sounded sexy, was given to a larger, but otherwise similar, predator from an earlier predator from North America.

3. Said larger predator was then scaled up in size and given abilities far beyond its capabilities, and this was “validated” by the discovery of a larger member of the group, still.

4.Then this totally fictional creature that was thereby created was fixed in public consciousness as the original Velociraptor.

Click to enlarge enough to read the names [Source]

That gives you an idea of the dromaeosaurs, but if you want scale, here is one:

[Source]

Really, this is sounding more and more like the propaganda campaigns that created myths like Russia’s “invasion of Ukraine” and “Assad’s gas attacks”, isn’t it?

The people responsible how to make a tangle so intricate most people won't even try taking the threads apart again.

So here's a Velociraptor racing with a friend...um, trying to kill and eat it.

[Source]

He might prefer to eat the makers of Jurassic Park instead.

Baby Calotes

I found this baby Calotes on coming back from work today. It was sitting on the path, and for a moment I thought it was a twig. I picked it up and put it to safety on a Canna leaf before taking these photos.

An amazing number of Indians are terrified of these harmless lizards, and a lot of them imagine it's a vampire which "sucks their blood"- because it's got a coloured dewlap (this one has one too, bright blue, which it displayed when I picked it up) and the floor of its mouth moves up and down as it breathes. Some morons even used to murder them on sight earlier. I haven't heard of anybody doing that in a long time, fortunately, but I have seen people refuse to walk along a path just because one was sitting on a wall on one side.

People are bizarre and stupid.

Alien

It’s not difficult to discover an alien creature. Take a sterile plastic tip, pass it between your gum and tooth, and put it on the microscopic slide. Among the masses of bacteria you’ll see will be many which don’t need oxygen to survive – in fact, creatures to which oxygen is a poison, which destroys them as surely as breathing in Zyklon B would you or me.

If one is a little more adventurous, one could go down to the depths of the Pacific ocean, where life clusters around geothermal vents – life which flourishes at temperatures near the boiling point of water, at pressures which would crush any of us flat as a sheet of thick paper, and at levels of mineral concentrations which would be toxic to any organism living nearer the surface. Here are giant tubeworms, which don’t even have mouths and digestive tracts, but have masses of symbiotic bacteria creating food for them.

(One might even imagine a religion for these creatures – where god lives underneath, not above, and hell is the frigid, low-pressure heights above. And one can imagine the wrath of this god, which causes tectonic shifts to close off the vents, so that everything around withers and dies.)

Then there are the tardigrades, which I’ve mentioned elsewhere – a phylum of creatures so tough that they can survive being roasted, boiled, frozen, starved for years on end, subject to hard radiation and shot into the vacuum of space without protection – all the same creature, remember.

Why do I call these creatures alien? Aren’t they of this earth?

Well, of course they are. But so what?

Let’s imagine a planet, like one of those the scientists are discovering just about every week these days in the “Goldilocks zone” orbiting other stars, which is to say, at distances where liquid water is possible and conditions may be conducive for life to develop. Now let’s imagine some – purely theoretical – life on one of those planets. If it’s a rocky planet, like earth, with liquid water, it’s got to have approximately earth-like conditions, even if particular details differ – say, it has a different mix of atmospheric gases than earth. 

Most creatures which evolve under such conditions will, therefore, be fitted to life on that planet broadly like we are fitted to life on this one. While, of course, shape, size, and other physical features – dependent on the accumulation of beneficial mutations over hundreds of millions of years – will differ, an “alien” from such a world and a human could more or less coexist under the same conditions, with only minor aids, like, say, gas masks, being necessary.

So, just how is such an organism more “alien” than something which is living, literally, in your gums?

Even Hollywood hasn’t managed to come up with creatures as alien as the deep sea tubeworm. The archetypal Alien itself, which gestates inside a human body before exploding out in a shower of blood and Ellen Ripley heroics, is a pretty straightforward lift from a common Earth organism – the ichneumon wasp. Not that anyone ever accused Hollywood of having originality or imagination.

Meanwhile, of course, to an anaerobic bacterium or a deep sea tubeworm, we are the aliens. We breathe poison, live under conditions approaching vacuum, and at temperatures where any decent, honourable tubeworm would freeze in an instant. We even have mouths and eat, instead of having other organisms create food for us out of minerals in the water. How can any of these creatures not conceive of us as aliens?

The fact that earth organisms are more “alien” than most “aliens” would be raises an interesting notion. Life can adapt, apparently, to any conditions anywhere, even if said conditions would normally be considered lethal. Therefore, life ought to be a remarkably tenacious phenomenon, occupying any and all niches which it can possibly occupy.

To something, somewhere, we are all aliens. Or, in other words, none of us are.

Live long and prosper. I have spoken.

The Moth in the Basement

I came across this huge and spectacular moth in the parking lot of the basement in which I have my clinic. I didn't know what it was except that - from the lobed wings, the enormous size and the furry antennae - it was a male of one of the Saturniidae. A little research online told me what it was: a Luna Moth, Actias luna.

Like most Saturniidae - including the world's largest lepidopteran, the Atlas Moth, which I have also seen - the Luna Moth doesn't have functional mouth parts as an adult. It eats all it's ever going to eat as a caterpillar. Once hatched, its only purpose in life is to locate a member of the opposite sex - hence the furry antennae, all the better to gather your scent molecules with, my dear - mate, and (in the case of the females) lay eggs before the stored energy gives out and it starves to death, a process which takes about seven days. In other words, the adult is just a breeder, and once it finishes passing on its genes, it's entirely disposable as far as said genes are concerned.

Evolution can be a cruel thing.

Incidentally, as a kid, I was phobic about large insects. Today, I tend to go to the opposite extreme, especially where beetles are concerned. I love beetles.

So, anyway, here's a stick insect, another animal I love, this one from my garden:

This one was about twenty centimetres long. I've seen longer, and handled them too.

The Jarmaan Shefaard

The world’s rarest breed of dog is the Jarmaan Shefaard.

Also known as Elséshiaan or Elsishaan, this breed exists where you find the Bunglee middle class family. Nowhere else can you encounter one. It is simply not possible.

Through the length and breadth of Bunglistan, and by extension anywhere in the world (as far as Bunglees are concerned), there are just three types of dog: three only. These are the aforementioned Jarmaan Shefaard, the Bhutia Kukur, and the Deshi Kukur (or, as some Bunglee dialects have it, the Dishi Kukur or Peti Kukur).

The Bhutia Kukur can be recognised anywhere. It can be as small as a Pekingese or a Lhasa Apso, or as large as an Old English Sheepdog or a Tibetan Mastiff; that doesn’t matter. What matters is the fur.

Fur? What’s fur got to do with it?

Well, a Bhutia Kukur is marked by its fur. Any and all long-haired dogs are Bhutia Kukurs, be they Border Collie or Komondor, Shih Tzu or Pomeranian. They are all, every single one of them, Bhutia Kukurs to the Bunglee. The only exception to the rule is that their own family dog can never be a Bhutia Kukur. What their own dogs are, I’ll get to in a moment.

Above and below: Bhutia Kukurs.

All Bhutia Kukurs are from Bhutan (hence the name Bhutia Kukur, Bhutanese Dog). Even if they are Great Pyrenees Mountain Dogs from Andorra or Newfoundlands from Canada, if they’re Bhutia Kukurs, they’re from Bhutan. And all Bhutia Kukurs are universally delicate and will die on you without warning. If you buy a Bhutia Kukur, you’ll be lucky if it lives five days. Remember this.

The other common type of dog is the Deshi Kukur (Country Dog). This is an exceedingly common breed, in fact, a breed so common that every single dog in Bunglistan which is not a Bhutia Kukur – bar one very, very important exception – is a Deshi Kukur. You know that pure-bred fox terrier down the lane? That’s as much a Deshi Kukur as the piebald mongrel which accompanies you on your morning jog, tongue lolling; as much as the Doberman on guard duty at the police barracks outside town or the whippet racing the tracks on TV. They’re all Deshi Kukur; every single damned one of them. And they’re fit to be looked down on, the whole ill-bred caboodle.

Above and below: Deshi Kukurs

Deshi Kukurs don’t have pedigree. They can’t be trained, they’re promiscuous and have twenty or thirty puppies at one go (Bhutia Kukurs and Jarmaan Shefaards have only three or four; if they have more they aren’t Bhutia Kukurs or Jarmaan Shefaards). One of the worst insults you can offer a Bunglee is to call his dog a Deshi Kukur. How dare you.

Because, you have to remember, the Bunglee’s own dog is always a Jarmaan Shefaard. To each Bunglee, his dog, and only his dog, is a Jarmaan Shefaard. Oh, yes, he’s vaguely aware that other Jarmaan Shefaards must exist – at least the two who bred to give birth to his dog – but every other dog he knows is either a Bhutia Kukur or a Deshi Kukur.

The Jarmaan Shefaard, then, is the world’s rarest dog – because there is only one.

Now be clear about this – the Jarmaan Shefaard is not a German Shepherd. A real German Shepherd is the unattainable dream for the Bunglee, a dog that’s almost mythical, a dog the very idea of which sends shivers down the Bunglee spine, the very name of which is holy. Hence, the Bunglee’s own dog is always a Jarmaan Shefaard or “Elséshiaan” (the closest the Bunglee tongue can get to pronouncing “German Shepherd” or “Alsatian”). Even if it’s a mongrel whose closest brush with German Shepherdhood was that its grandfather once rubbed noses with a German Shepherd through a railing, it’s still a Jarmaan Shefaard. The Bunglee won’t be happy if you inform him that his Elséshiaan simply isn’t one.

This is not a Jarmaan Shefaard

This is a Jarmaan Shefaard

Along with the German Shepherd, a few Bunglees will admit to the existence of some other mythical breeds – the Bulldog, which is as big as a bull, the Bloodhound, which is so ferocious that it drinks blood, and the “hound”, which is the fiercest of the lot. But none of the Bunglees will have seen these animals; they’re in the same universe as mermaids or centaurs.

There are entertaining ways Bunglees squirm out of situations where they have to admit their dog might not be quite the German Shepherd they claim it to be. One common way is to call it, when challenged, a “mixed” Jarmaan Shefaard. Just what the poor animal was mixed with isn’t specified – it’s best left to the imagination. And if asked why the Jarmaan Shefaard is so small – the size of a terrier, say – they’ll claim stiffly that theirs is the real Jarmaan Shefaard and the larger ones are all “mixed.” And so on.

Bunglees are the world’s greatest experts on their Jarmaan Shefaards, too. Such things as “walks” or “brushing” are not necessary for their Jarmaan Shefaards, who are more likely than not chained up all day. The Bunglee knows that if you don’t tie up a dog, it gets “spoilt”, so it’s usually kept on a chain.

There are other things the Bunglee knows. For instance, the reason some dogs have their tails docked is that cutting the tail makes the dog “fierce”. But thankfully the thought of paying a vet to dock the tail will also make the Bunglee blanch, so the tail is always left alone.

But this is actually a two-edged sword. The Bunglee may not have his dog mutilated, but he won’t splurge on such things as anti-rabies shots either. In Bunglee canine mythology, a dog only needs to be inoculated if it bites people, because, you see, dogs have poison glands like snakes, and if they bite people, the poison kills them too in ten days unless you inject them with the “medicine”. No, I am not joking about this blithering idiocy – any of it.

I only wish I was.

"Are animals like people in that, within a species, some are very intelligent while others are...uh...thick?"

This was another Yahoo Answers question I replied to, as follows:

Obviously, it depends on what you mean by "intelligence."

Some animals - the so-called "lower" ones - often have no brain or brains far too primitive for thought, so one can rule out intelligence in them. It's meaningless to talk of intelligence in a tapeworm, for instance.

In animals with more organised nervous systems, like social insects, intelligence is still not a given, because their responses are hard-wired by evolution and neural programming. It's only when you come to the molluscs - specifically the cephalopods - that you see evidence of "intelligence" in terms of behaviour geared to solving problems which aren't encountered in everyday life. For instance, octopuses in aquariums can do things like open boxes and solve puzzles, which they'd never have to do in the wild.
 

For the purposes of this argument, then, we can consider "intelligence" to be the ability to solve problems one is not evolutionarily hard-wired to solve.

Now, going by that definition, we have to consider only those animals which

1. Can interact with humans in a measurable way
2. Are biologically equipped to demonstrate problem-solving abilities (even a genius fish couldn't do much to prove its intelligence without a voice or any other way of manipulating objects).

So, we come down to animals which can either demonstrate behaviourally that they are intelligent problem-solvers, which pretty much restricts us to birds or mammals, or can also manipulate objects, which takes us back to the cephalopods. All these categories have large brains and the ability to respond in a plastic fashion to the environment, unlike the hard-wired responses of insects, for example.

Among them, again, some species show a markedly higher level of this ability than others; crows, for instance, are far and away the most intelligent bird species, just as primates show higher levels of intelligence than civet cats or kangaroos.

Also, it's fairly obvious that all animals of a species aren't identical in every way. And we are also animals. Therefore, we can take it that since different people show different levels of intelligence, animals of other species will also (where applicable) show different levels of intelligence to solve the same problem.

I hope this goes some way to answering the question?

Slug Rescue and the White Moth

I like slugs, actually, and when I found this one in my bathroom I had no hesitation in releasing it unharmed in my garden. By the way, this is the second large slug I've found in my bathroom in the last two days. The other one was crawling over my (now former) toothbrush.

Then there was this white moth. I'd gone out last night and when I came in I found it clinging to the back of my left wrist. It was a real collector's item - bright white, with a fluffy top to its thorax, and black compound eyes and antennae. There were orange crescents behind the compound eyes, and a line of red spots down the sides of its abdomen along the spiracles. I wish the pictures had come out better.

I had a hard time getting it to fly away. I took it out, blew at it, shook my arm and it still didn't want to go away. I finally had to gently pry it off with a fingertip. I wonder what it thought I was. Food?

I wish the moth had come clearer in the pictures. I really do.