美国国家公共电台 NPR Who Cares If They're Cute? This Zoologist Accepts Animals On Their Own Terms

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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Lucy Cooke is the founder¹ of the Sloth² Appreciation³ Society. Their motto - being fast is overrated. Of course, that's not her only claim to fame. Cooke is an Oxford-trained zoologist⁴ and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. And in her new book, "The Truth About Animals," she sets the record straight about sloths⁵ and other much misunderstood creatures. A warning to our listeners, we will be discussing animal sex a lot. She joins us now in the studio. Hello.

LUCY COOKE: Hello there.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this book takes us deep into the history of not only animals but how humans have studied the animal kingdom. Why did you write this book?

COOKE: It was the sloth that really inspired me because I get asked a lot, how can sloths exist when they're such losers? And people think that because the animal is slow that it's somehow useless and redundant⁶. An actual fact - they are incredibly successful creatures. So the sloth is not the only animal that's been misunderstood in this way. And I thought it was time that we rebranded the animal kingdom according to fact and not sentimentality because we have a habit of viewing the animal kingdom through the prism of our own rather narrow existence and judging animals on our terms. So I thought there were quite a lot of wrongs that needed to be righted.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And, you know, we are going to talk about quite a few of them because you have a lot of interesting things to say about a lot of these animals. But I want to start with the sloth. I lived and worked in Latin America, where the sloth obviously lives. And they get a bad rap. What should people know that they don't?

COOKE: Well, people think that being slow is second-rate, and we are obsessed⁷ with moving faster than nature intended. But actual fact - sloths are energy-saving icons⁸. And they are incredibly successful because of their slothful nature. The sloth is an inverted⁹ quadruped, so it hangs from the trees. To hang like that is an incredibly energy-saving existence because, you know, if you're an upright existence, you need much more muscles to hold yourself upright. And the sloth actually only has 50 percent of the muscle mass of a comparable mammal that lives in upright existence. But the problem is when you turn the sloth the other way up...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: They look slow. They look like they're not really doing much. And so we're not looking at them in the right way.

COOKE: Yeah, gravity removes their dignity, basically. So they sort of sprawl¹⁰ like a pancake on the ground. And that's how the first explorers would have seen them because they would have been taken out of the trees. Do you know what I mean? And they're crawling helplessly along the ground.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: But you do note - and I have to say this - that they are drug addicts¹¹.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: Yeah, there's an island off the coast of Panama that is home to a species of sloth that is a dwarf¹² sloth. It's the pygmy sloth. And those sloths live in the mangrove¹³ swamps, where they graze off an algae¹⁴ that has alkaloids in it with a similar property to valium. So they don't just look stoned. They are stoned.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: It's an island of pygmy baked sloths...

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: ...Which you might think is something of an evolutionary¹⁵ cul-de-sac. But there's no natural predators¹⁶ on the island. And by slowing down their metabolism¹⁷ so much, they're saving even more energy.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Now we're going to get to the nitty-gritty. I want to talk about penguin¹⁸ sex.

(LAUGHTER)

COOKE: Be warned. Be warned, listeners. Yeah. Well, I mean, penguins¹⁹ are one of those creatures that have been totally misunderstood. We always think of them as being great parents, monogamous...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.

COOKE: ...Fantastically faithful. The movie "March Of The Penguins" has much to blame, actually, because the thing about penguins is these are birds with tiny brains. They live in a very harsh environment. It's brutal²⁰ living in the Antarctic. And so they are flooded with hormones²¹ that make them basically have sex with anything that moves and quite a few things that don't move, like dead penguins, for instance. So, you know, they...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right. I didn't see that in the "March of the Penguins" or in the many other penguin movies I've seen. Why is it? That seems so strange to me.

COOKE: Yeah, they left out the pathologically unpleasant necrophiliacs from the lineup. So the males are basically having sex with anything that moves. And the females are one of the only animals on the planet that we know of, other than ourselves, that engages in prostitution. So the females will make use of these randy males by coercing²² sad singletons into having sex with them in exchange for pebbles²³.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Wow.

COOKE: Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's amazing.

COOKE: Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And I was also happy to read that hyena²⁴ colonies are run by women.

COOKE: So this is an interesting thing. The other day I was reading - I think it was the New York Times, even - described Harvey Weinstein as a hyena. And I thought to myself, that is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read because hyenas²⁵ - they come from a matriarchal society. Most people think they're all scavengers. They're not. They are highly successful predators, really, really intelligent.

So the amazing thing about hyenas is that they - in the ancient bestiaries, they thought that they were hermaphrodites. And that's fair enough that they made that mistake because the female hyena's genitalia is a perfect facsimile of the males. She has what's described in polite zoological circles as a pseudo-penis. And she also has a fake scrotum. So I think it's really interesting to trace back where a lot of these myths came from and to find that some of the mistakes and the preconceptions we have - they date all the way back to Greek, Roman and Medieval times.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I just have to bring this up because no conversation is complete without pandas. You know, you write that humans are preprogrammed to want to nurture²⁶ anything with baby-like features, hence our obsession²⁷ with pandas. What do we get wrong about them?

COOKE: Well, the thing about pandas is that they look like wobbly, little toddlers. They've got these sorts of baby-like features. So they trigger the reward centers in our brain to wanting to nurture them. And because of that, we don't think of them as bad. We think of them as helpless evolutionary mishaps²⁸ that can't survive without our help. And so a lot of the conservation has been centered around captive breeding efforts in China and sort of micromanaging the bear's lives. And the insinuation is that they can't survive in the wild without us. And this is complete rubbish. What we need to do is the reverse. We need to leave them alone but just leave them with enough bamboo forest because pandas - we think of them as being - very famously, they're rubbish at sex. You know, papers love to scream headlines - oh, zoo panda failed to do it again.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, they don't want to breed in captivity²⁹. But you make the point - and I think it's a really valid³⁰ point - who wants to have sex in a concrete enclosure surrounded by glass (laughter)?

COOKE: Exactly. The panda needs the equivalent of a nice glass of wine and a bit of Barry White in order to get in the mood.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).

COOKE: And they - pandas are just as choosy as humans are. And so it's very difficult breeding in captivity because you have to understand what these complex behavioral environmental cues are in order to get the animals to do it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I guess in one way, what you're saying is that we're loving them to death. But isn't the other argument that if we anthropomorphize animals, it's a way of sort of valuing them, and it is a way of increasing our consciousness about conservation and about other issues? Getting children involved in going to zoos and really understanding these animals. Isn't there an argument to be made for that?

COOKE: Yeah, but I think we're choosy about what we like and we don't like. You know, so vultures for instance - vulture populations have crashed in India of late by 99 percent. And that has cost the government billions, billions in an increase in disease and rabies and stray dogs. But vulture conservationists - they can't get anybody to donate money to them because nobody likes them because they look like the Grim Reaper³¹, and they eat dead things for a living. You know, but we need them, just as much as we need the pandas. So, you know, I'm trying to sort of stop people from projecting ourselves and our values onto animals and to see them for what they are and what they do and not choose favorites.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lucy Cooke's new book is "The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, And Other Tales From The Wild Side Of Wildlife." Thank you so much.

COOKE: My pleasure. Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MICHAEL GIACCHINO'S "SUITE FROM ZOOTOPIA")