Fuzzy about creatures
> Humans have lost touch with nature so much that they don’t know a bear from a dog
SCIENCE HAS confirmed that women are the most powerful kind of human beings, but the ones I work with still scream if they see an ant.
Luckily, I am the man without fear in this regard, and can remove the offending ant with my bare hands!
And you can hold back the cries of ‘hero’. I just get in there and do it without thinking.
Not that men are any better.
At a garden party, I saw a sticky, smelly toddler run to the adults holding a live spider.
The women ran shrieking from the spider and the men ran shrieking from the sticky, smelly toddler.
The child learned a vital lesson that day about adults: Can’t trust them.
Small children aren’t scared of nature at all. In fact, their total all-round fearlessness is a major cause of parental stress.
My kids used to fall out of trees all the time until I broke the news to them that if they died in real life, they would also die in Runescape, their favourite computer game.
After that, they sat quietly on the bench with the mums.
We modern adult people are no better. We are cut off from nature these days by technology.
I was on the morning bus the other day and some guy actually looked up from his phone!
It was quite scary. I mean,
who does that sort of thing these days?
Arriving at the office, I found I’d been sent several news cuttings which showed that unfamiliarity with nature is a growing problem around the world.
A man in China raised two ‘dogs’ for several years without realising that he was actually sharing his home with a pair of bears.
It doesn’t say how the owner finally twigged, but he probably found them sitting upright eating honey-coated picnickers.
It said the man gave his nondogs to some sort of animal centre.
He should have sold them to one of those TV talent shows as the only bears in the world who wag their tails, lick your face and hide under the bed if you switch on a vacuum cleaner.
Maybe the spread of animal parks will help humans get to know nature better.
At a safari park in China recently, a group of tourists in a small bus (more like a ‘packed lunch container’ to the animals’ eye) found the exit gate jammed.
This gave the visitors a fascinating 45 extra minutes to take close-up pictures of large beasts licking their lips, fetching cutlery and unfolding napkins.
In the UK, a snake catcher was summoned by a man who said there was a dangerouslooking snake curled up asleep inside his computer’s box part.
The thing had red and black markings, which suggested that it was poisonous.
The snake catcher raced to house. When he opened the computer, he found a red and black electric cable. It was dangerous, but unlikely to slither around the house biting people.
Unless it was an Apple computer, then someone’s probably made an app that gives it this function.
I have to go now. I’ve just remembered that the dog we adopted from a rescue centre likes honey, so I just need to get home and count the kids.
Nury Vittachi is an Asia-based
frequent traveller. Send ideas and comments to lifestyle.nury@
thesundaily.com.