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| Fish have memories, people! |
In general we're a pretty intelligent species, but some of our beliefs are completely unfounded - yet we hold onto them out of habit or simply because our experience fails to challenge them. Some are harmless - but some - like the old "goldfish have a three second memory" have profound welfare implications for the subject of that myth.
For this reason we leapt at the opportunity to interview Max Cryer, author of Is it True? The Facts Behind the Things We Have Been Told. It isn't just about animals - in fact Cryer is something of a polymath, looking at myths around social history, language, politics, music and the natural world.
Cryer has had an interesting career. He's been a TV presenter, school teacher, performed opera in London and caberet in Vegas, and written numerous books, so we leapt at the opportunity to ask him about animal-related myths.
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| Max Cryer, also author of Who Said That First? |
Aside
from being an author and entertainer you've had a varied career. Is there a common thread?
I discovered that moving from being an entertainer
into being an author has a link : both are concerned with engaging and interesting
an audience. In my case I spent ten
years in between the one thing and the other, as a television producer of
academic shows – so I learned a great deal about research and tight
organisation. And a writer needs both those.
What
are some common myths about animals?
Bears don’t lick their newborn
into shape, crocodiles do sometimes have moisture coming from their eyes - but is isn’t weeping and certainly has
nothing to do with sorrow. Swans do not
sing before they die. Shakespeare and Keats got one thing wrong – they both
wrote about female nightingales singing, but the females don’t sing, only the males do.
St Bernard dogs did not carry barrels of brandy – that’s a myth invented
by an eccentric British painter (Edwin Landseer) who painted a St. Bernard in the
snow – and by a whim, added a little
barrel of brandy round the dog’s neck. Which wasn’t true, but the myth took
hold and became a legend which thousands of people believed. And ostriches do
not bury their heads in the sand and never
have.
Myths
are everywhere and often we accept them as truth. How do they come about and
how come we all accept them so blindly?
In general, myths are
spread by people telling each other what someone else told them...without
anybody checking back to see if what they’re told was true. It seems to be a
quirk of human nature that we believe what
we were told first – and are
often unwilling to have that corrected later.
Many folk tales and ‘beliefs’
come from people’s grandmothers – who are often repeating what their grandmother said.
Alas, granny was often on
shaky ground – but even so the myth spreads, eventually gets into print, and
nowadays can spread round the world in half an hour on Internet.
Sometimes a myth dates back
to just one person writing one line in an ancient book. For instance ‘crocodile tears’ –
meaning weeping insincerely in falsified sorrow, was first mentioned in English
by Sir John Mandeville in the year 1400. He wrote about ‘cockadrilles’ : “These
serpents slay men, and then weeping, eat them.” The image has stayed in use
for over 600 years.
And
in 79AD the Roman writer known as Pliny the
Elder wrote that if ostriches see a
predator they bury their head and then “imagine that the whole of their body is
concealed.” Belief in that one line has lasted nearly two thousand years
into the present day. But while ostriches do lie low when they need to feel
safe, they do not ‘bury their heads.’
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| Crocodile basking. |
Can
some myths about animals be dangerous or harmful?
Many myths about animals
are harmless – because the animals are largely
unaware of beliefs which people have about them, and they just get on doing
their own thing. So myths about bears
and crocodiles and swans are relatively unimportant and not really harmful to
those creatures.
Whereas the practice of docking
animal tails – often for vanity ‘cosmetic’ reasons – is cruel.
And sometimes a belief can
be limiting. For instance, because cats are perceived as ‘solitary’ creatures,
owners of a 10th floor apartment believe that their pet cat is happy there living
by itself, and it’s OK that it never gets out and about. But cats like to roam,
and they also like to ‘socialise’ in
their own mysterious ways. So committing cat to solitary confinement is not
kind...
Thank you Max. The book is certainly full of interesting myths, many of which we admit to previously subscribing to.
Max's last point provides plenty of food for thought. At SAT we think cats can be kept in apartments but appropriate environmental enrichment is essential in keeping them sane - consistent and abundant interaction with humans, an indoor garden or safe balconey access etc. There's not much point in having any pet if you simply isolate it in a tower without paying any attention to his or her quality of life.
