‘RUBBER’ DUCKS AND THE EXPLOSION OF QUACKERY

My quirky collection can’t keep pace with the astonishing growth of wellness claims

Can’t duck this issue. The giant rubber duck enlisted by the Ontario government to help celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday was not welcomed by everyone. Why spend $200,000 for an inflated duck that has no connection to Canada, many people asked? I wasn’t one of them.

First, I think the cost of renting the duck is going to pay off in tourist dollars, and second, I have a special relationship with “rubber ducks.” I have been collecting such species for years and can boast of a couple of hundred. I have ducks that light up, ducks that gauge temperature, ducks you can eat, ducks you can wash with, metal ducks, wooden ducks and a large assortment of ducks that represent sports teams, nationalities and characters of all sorts.

However, I’m far behind Guinness record-holder Charlotte Lee, who has a flock of well over 5,000 ducks!

Why this curious habit of collecting ducks? For me, it started when I began to realize the extent to which my days were spent dealing with bogus health claims made by people who pretend to have expertise that they do not in fact possess. In other words, the quacks. And ducks quack. So a relationship was forged. To me, collecting ducks represents the ongoing battle against quackery.

What about that giant duck presently captivating people in Toronto? Of course, to the public it is just a weird piece of art. However, I see it as representing the astonishing growth of quackery.

These days, we are flooded with claims about alkaline diets curing cancer, oxygenated water invigorating us, reflexology socks boosting our immune system and magical wands with “negative ion and far infrared inserts” relieving us of pain. There are gold crystal collagen eye masks to rid us of wrinkles, pendants to protect us from electromagnetic radiation, hydrogen inhalers to neutralize free radicals and sleep bracelets equipped with a “Natural Frequency Disc that harnesses beneficial frequencies associated with sleep and channels them to our body like a finely tuned antenna.”

I don’t think the giant duck is large enough to represent the explosion of quackery.

I do have one bone to pick with that duck, or at least with the way it is described everywhere. It is not a rubber duck! It is a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) duck! That also goes for most of the “rubber” ducks one encounters. Originally, there really were rubber ducks, thanks to Charles Goodyear who, back in the 19th century, made the accidental discovery that heating the natural latex that oozes out of the rubber tree with sulphur resulted in a much more usable material. “Vulcanized rubber” was readily shaped into a variety of items ranging from galoshes and knife handles to balloons and yes, ducks.

The original rubber ducks were made of solid rubber, did not float, and were meant to be chew toys. Whether they were intended for dogs or babies — or both — isn’t clear. By the 1940s, hollow rubber ducks began to frolic in children’s bathtubs. As the plastic industry gained momentum, PVC ducks replaced rubber ducks. They were more durable, easier to massproduce and cheaper.

But there was a problem. PVC is a hard plastic and was not squeezable in the way that rubber was. To solve this problem, chemicals that render plastic soft and malleable, known as “plasticizers” were added. That eventually unleashed another problem.

“Phthalates,” the plasticizers that were most commonly used, were found to have hormonelike properties. Parents began to worry about their children chewing on the duckies in the bathtub. Soon, “phthalate-free” ducks were rolling off the production lines with the phthalates replaced by other plasticizers, probably citrates.

Ducks, though, can also be produced cheaply from polyethylene, the most widely used plastic in the world. These are more rigid than plasticized PVC ducks but still make for fun in the bathtub. Indeed, polyethylene ducks are central to perhaps the most famous toy duck story of them all. In 1992, a cargo ship carrying close to 30,000 blue turtle, red beaver, green frog and yellow duck bathtub toys ran into a storm in the Pacific that was strong enough to sweep a number of containers overboard.

The turtles, beavers, frogs and ducks ended up in that great big bathtub called the Pacific Ocean, but children’s loss turned out to be oceanographers’ gain.

Scientists were able to track ocean currents based on where the toys ended up. And they ended up in surprising places. Ducks, being the most famous such toys, got the most publicity. Within months, they were found on beaches in Indonesia, Australia, South America and Japan. Sailors spotted them floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Most surprisingly, eight years later, some were found bobbing in the North Atlantic, having made their way through the icy Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia. In 2007, duckies washed up on the beaches of Britain.

That year also marked the creation of the world’s first giant floating “rubber” duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, who specializes in magnifying common objects. In this case, perhaps he was inspired by the publicity given to the wandering toy ducks.

Since 2007, Hofman has made a number of other large ducks that have been displayed around the world, but the one in Toronto, at six storeys high the largest ever, is not one of Hofman’s. It is an “unauthorized” version made by an American group and is the subject of a copyright dispute. In this era of “fake news,” it has been called a “fake duck.”

Fake or not, I think the amusement the gargantuan duck will provide is very real. I just hope it will not suffer the fate of one of its relatives that exploded in Taiwan. The cause is still unknown, although one witness claimed an eagle had dug its claws into the vinyl trying to carry the duck away. Must have been one optimistic eagle.

I plan to keep adding to my duck collection pretty regularly, but in no way can I keep pace with the rate of multiplication of human quacks.

I began to realize the extent to which my days were spent dealing with bogus health claims.