Recently, I took Kit to visit the zoo. He was so young the last time we went that he didn’t remember much. This resulted in him asking a lot of questions.
“Do ducks use snorkels? Can a tortoise ever be homeless? Do fish climb trees? And, my favourite, “How old were you when you got your tail docked?”
“I can’t answer that question,” I replied, explaining, “I never had a tail.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said in a stage whisper, “Are you some kind of mutant?”
“No, dear,” I answered, sighing, “I mean humans don’t grow tails.”
“Shut up!” he exclaimed, looking shocked, “All the other mammals here have tails. Except the orangutans. I read about humans docking dogs’ tails, so I thought you must have all been docked as well.”
“Well, orangutans are apes, like us,” I explained, “And apes don’t have tails, like monkeys do. But some humans object to being called apes, so we use the word ‘hominoid.’”
“But apes are awesome!” Kit exclaimed, “They are so strong they can bend iron bars. And they can swing around in the trees and do acrobatics, like a ninja superhero. Who wouldn’t want to do that?!”
“And can you explain about that?” he said, pointing at a zebra.
“You mean its stripes?” I asked, honing in on its most obvious feature.”
“No, I mean its mane,” Kit corrected, explaining, “How come zebras and lions and horses all have ‘manes’, and humans have ‘hair’?”
“That’s a really good question,” I replied, adjusting his position on my shoulder.
“And what’s a really good answer?” he asked cheekily, adjusting himself back.
“I don’t know,” I mused, adding, “Well, there is a long history of certain types of humans wanting to distinguish themselves from other animals.”
Kit swiftly extinguished that idea by pointing out, “Yeah, but dogs have ‘hair,’”
“Well I suppose that’s not the explanation then,” I conceded. “But I did once meet a woman who declared, ‘I didn’t evolve from an ape!’”
“You’d have to be pretty special to think that!” Kit said, “It doesn’t sound like she had evolved much at all.”
“But, there is, unfortunately, a long history of a certain type of human thinking that our species is more evolved, and better than all the other species on earth,” I confessed.
“Well, that’s ridiculous!” Kit said dismissively, “You don’t even have tails! All the best animals have tails.”