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April 30, 2007

Gripes About Stripes: Stripes Do Not A Tiger Make...

How Many Prongs Does A Fork Have?

Most people, when asked, will not hesitate to say four. I, on the other hand, want more information.

What kind of fork are we talking about here? A tuning fork, for example, has two prongs, whereas my mother has cocktail forks with three prongs, and dinner forks with four. I've never seen a 5-prong fork, but with the wonders of the world wide web I find that there is a five-prong manure fork for cleaning out farm stalls. I won't be forgetting about this use case anytime soon.

I have always valued this quirk of how my brain works. It makes for interesting conversations and, I like to think, has made me more receptive to change. I am less likely to believe that there is only one "single" answer, the only correct one. Lucky for me, I also learned early to tune my answers to what the poser of the question wants to hear - a lesson that allowed me to do well on standardized tests and such, despite thinking that many of the questions were foolishly narrow.

When I am the one posing the questions, I am often greatly dismayed by the lack of creativity shown in the answers. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, assuming they know of the other possible answers, but choose the one most likely to appease. However, when I follow up with asking for additional answers, what I get are blank looks.

So, what does this have to do with animals? Well, several times in the past few months, I've had frustrating conversations with people about animals.

I was sitting in a fabric store the other day when a fellow patron came up to me with a giant bolt of black and white striped fake fur.

"Do you think this looks like tiger fur?" she asks.

The fur is clearly meant to be zebra. It even says Zebra on it. I think to myself, well, it could be a white tiger, the cross-breed made famous by Siegfried & Roy, but I ask what it's for.

"My daughter's going to be a tiger in the school play," the mother says.

Now I know I cannot recommend this zebra fabric to this woman. It has to be stereotypical tiger stripes or the audience will be confused...Unless the audience is truly unaware of what a tiger looks like. Yes, it sounds unlikely, but then two other recent discussions pop into my head.

The other day, I was down watching the sea otters again when a family including three children (~13, ~10 and ~8 yrs old, with their mother) walk up to one of the otters sleeping on the beach. I'm sitting there glaring at them and shaking my head as they approach, but they ignore me. After scaring the otter back into the water by shouting at it and trying to touch it, they walk back by me (now rather pissed off) and my husband and I catch their conversation. They thought the otter was a seal. A seal??? How one can mistake a fluffed up otter for a seal, I don't know, but all four of them thought that's what it was. I kept hoping the nearby ranger would bust them, but she didn't. I had foolishly expected the mother to keep her kids in line, and by then it was too late to intervene.

Another friend, a mother of two young children, often looks at my pictures. Recently she told me that she loves my tiger pictures and mentioned how cute the tiger cubs are. I start racking my brain, when did I put up any tiger cub pictures? I don't think I have posted any of those recently... only to realize she's talking about my African lion shots from Kenya. The first time I corrected her, I felt like a hypocrite, telling her that the easy way to tell was that lions don't have spots or stripes and tigers have spots. Cheetahs and leopards have spots. Something easy so she learns a bit about telling big cats apart. I would have forgiven her for confusing leopards and cheetah, but lions and tigers? Even with habitats a continent apart, people still get confused??

Sometimes, these mistakes are charming. I get a little chuckle from the grade school kids who write me about where to find out more about the tusks of the elephant seals and such. Other times, like the otter-seal incident, I am shocked. Still, I'm cannot help but think to myself: young lions DO have spots and stripes. They fade as they grow to adulthood.

Posted by sorsha at April 30, 2007 4:04 PM