The Unexpected Truth About Animals: A Menagerie of the Misunderstood

After all, God had created all the animals, and only one—mankind—had lost its innocence.

Spotted hyenas are unlike all other mammals in that the females are significantly bigger than the males and much more aggressive.

How can sloths exist when they’re such losers?” As a zoologist and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society I get asked this question a lot. Sometimes “losers” is further defined—“lazy,” “stupid” and “slow” being perennial favorites. And sometimes the query is paired with the rider—“I thought evolution was all about survival of the fittest”—delivered with an air of bemusement or, worse, a whiff of superior species smugness. Sloths are, in fact, one of natural selection’s quirkiest creations, and fabulously successful to boot. Skulking about the treetops barely quicker than a snail, and being covered in algae, infested with insects and defecating just once a week might not be your idea of aspirational living, but then you’re not trying to survive in the highly competitive

Without bats, there would be no tequila, which may or may not be a good thing for humanity.

The US TV network Fox News recently reported on a German couple who attended a fertility clinic because they had failed to have children, only to be told that in order to have a baby, they had to actually have sex first. They thought the stork was enough.

I joined Claudio on an expedition in search of one of the country’s most fabulous freaks, the incredibly rare Southern Darwin’s frog, which was discovered by the big beard himself in 1834 on his epic five year Beagle voyage. What makes this frog so extraordinary is that it has eschewed conventional pond-based metamorphosis for something more sci-fi: after mating the male guards the fertilized eggs until they are close to hatching, then gobbles them up. Six weeks later, like a scene out of Alien, he barfs up baby frogs. He is the only male animal other than the seahorse to give birth, albeit through his mouth.

The myth of grave robbing persisted all the way into the nineteenth century. The Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse was inspired by the hyena to pen particularly purple prose that owes more to Mary Shelley and the fashion for Victorian Gothic horror than it does to the truth. “In the Place of Tombs, gleam two fiery eyes,” he wrote in 1861, in his massively popular Romance of Natural History, “with bristling mane and grinning teeth, the obscene monster glares at you, and warns you to secure a timely retreat.” Other naturalists of the era showed a tad more restraint, but they still described the hyena as “a most mysterious and awful animal,” “rank and coarse” with “revolting habits.” This creature, they decided, was “adapted to gorge on the grossest animal substances, dead or alive, fresh or corrupted,” and as such was “cordially detested by the natives in all countries.

The idea of wearing perfumes is to send out a big open-for-business message,” scent expert Katie Puckrik explained.

jungles of Central and South America—something the sloth is very good at. The reputation of the sloth was sufficiently besmirched that I felt compelled to found the Sloth Appreciation Society. (Our motto: “Being fast is overrated.”) I gave a talk on the unexpected truth about this much maligned creature to festivals and schools. This book grew out of those talks and the need to set the record straight—not just for the sloth, but for other animals as well. When seeking to understand animals, context is key. We have a habit of viewing the animal kingdom through the prism of our own, rather narrow, existence. The sloth’s arboreal lifestyle is sufficiently extraterrestrial to make it one of the world’s most misunderstood creatures, but it is by no means alone in this category. Life takes a glorious myriad of alien forms, and even the simplest require complex understanding.