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Big (...not to be confused with little Amanda-at-work, though sometimes it does happen: or rather sometimes it did happen before she left us thus simplifying our at-work nomenclature, and potentially simplifying the beginning of this essay, though ultimately, as I'm sure you can see by now, her departure was unsuccessful in that last endeavour) ...anyway, big Mandy-at-work has this thing about badgers1 ---though actually, considering the sort of thing this thing is, that really ought to be "Thing" with a capital "TH". She surrounds herself with them, pictures and toys and cartoons in her office (and, of course, the one she drew on the whiteboard in mine), various computer screen names and signatures she adopts, and I believe she even sleeps with one, though taking into account everything that I have ever read or heard about badgers, I sincerely hope that that one is merely a stuffed one.
And, strangely, she is not alone in this ...well ...um I suppose she probably is as far as her particular choice of species-to-be-fixated-on is concerned, but in general, and in a definitely non-badgery sort of a way her animal fixation is not unusual: one could almost say that this sort of animalism is an attribute that almost of itself defines humanity.
And I'm not sure that it is even the animal as itself in all its animal essence that is the object of this fascination--in fact I bet that if Mandy-at-work one morning opened her eyes nose-to-nose with a real live wild badger she would have run half way to work in her nighty before she stopped screaming. You see what I suspect is going on here (and not just in the case of Mandy-at-work) is that we become engrossed upon the Ideal of the animal: not, of course, on the Platonic Idea of the animal---I mean I don't know what you were up to in the high middle ages, but I know which side of the great Nominalist-Realist debate I was on: no I think that the Ideal that people fix, if fix they must, is far from Plato or even from the Neo-platonists let alone the Realists, and is much more of a ...a Disney ideal---one that is saccherinified right out of nature red in tooth and halitosis and claw and fleas, and into a more two dimensional unreal world cave where the shadows lie and nothing has more than three fingers. Furthermore I strongly suspect that a large component of this, what we should probably by now start thinking of as anthropomorphic zoomorphism, is, to avoid taking a leaf out of those foolish Realists' rather unrealistic book, the mere, almost completely unattached, name of the animal. We can see this if we leave poor exhausted Mandy-at-work there in her nighty, and in the street and out of breath, and look closer to home, at a fascination I once had with Orycteropus afer, the common Aardvark. Even though I have actually taken a picture of one in Regent's Park Zoo (and a good picture too, if I may say so), my main exposure has been to the Name, the , affable name of the Aardvark: that double initial 'A'; that potentially trilling 'rd'; the squalkily abrupt termination in 'vark' turns the etymologically Afrikaans 'earthpig' into a word of wonder to which the long ears and and termite-icidal snout of the actual creature add but a little fillip, and then only really if it's a cartoon aardvark! And maybe not even then!
And the same is true of other creatures, from the vicious Ocelot to the smelly Emu, if an animal wants to get people on its side, while a cute and preferably vaguely humanoid appearance helps --and the vaguer the more helpful, the real trick is for it to adopt a really cute name. Call yourself a Wart-hog or a Yak and you haven't got a proverbial's chance in Hell, but if you follow the savvy-er sorts, like a Thompson's Gazelle or a Bush-baby then your species will be on the gravy train for life---in fact you may even be able to avoid the gravy or even ketchup or steak sauce altogether.
Anyway I have to stop this now so I can get back to badgering Mandy-at-work ...
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
1 Badgers
"... this thing about badgers" I have not, so far, been able to determine whether her thing is for the Eurasian (presumably specifically British) badger Meles meles or the American badger Taxidea taxus. I'm sure it can't Zopossibly be the Stink badger, so we won't go there.
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