I had an odd and surprising exchange with my boss today regarding what constitutes an animal.
We were working on choosing an important image and she suggested a shot of an eagle.
“What do you think?” she asked as we looked it over.
“It’s good,” I replied, “the first time we’ve featured an animal since I’ve worked here.”
“The first animal in this placement, ever,” she corrected.
“No. You used salmon a few years back.”
“That’s not an animal.”
“Salmon? Sure it is.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. It’s a fish. Fish are animals.”
“Well …” she scrambled to regain her conversational footing, “it’s not a mammal.”
“Well, neither are eagles.”
“They’re not?”
“No. Eagles lay eggs. Mammals have live birth.”
“Oh.”
Now, she has a master’s degree and I barely graduated from high school. What’s wrong with this picture?
The funny thing is, I’ve run across this before.
I worked with a guy in the late 90’s who didn’t think of insects as animals – or even as alive. In his mind, it was as if they were some rare blend of animal, vegetable, and mineral, which had come together to form something else. Like walking dirt, maybe?
He was quite distraught to be disabused of said notion and you could see in his eyes a desperate and hasty attempt to reorder the universe with this new information before all of reality slipped away from him like a greasy egg on a tilting plate.
It was hard to watch.
I’ve had (far too) many conversations with people who think non-mammals aren’t animals, including an argument with a friend who refused to believe that a dolphin was a mammal…and, of course, not an animal either.
So when I drop the “OK then, is it a vegetable or a mineral?” bomb, I just politely stand back and watch their wheels spin in embarrassment as they finally come to the proper conclusion.
Most of the time I’m just too incredulous to be smug.
Seriously? I thought this thing was kind of rare. I can’t see how a person could get through school – much less college! – without knowing these basic facts.
To heck with school, how could your base observations not tell you this stuff?
Shocks the hell out of me.
“Stupidity Is The Most Plentiful Element In The Universe” -Frank Zappa
We must be elitists, the lot of us.
No. I’m a mammal. (sheesh)
Well I figured that out ’cause you’ve got fur…duh!
Thats OK, I know people who arent human. HAHA!!
Hahahahahahahahahahaha wow…
(Hangs a shaking head)
(Takes a long sigh)
I find that most people choose to sleep through science/biology classes. You want to really have fun, start connecting the dots through chemistry.
And brother, if anyone of us is a mammal, it’s you.