Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and the self-quarantine
and what else have you have only made it worse. Earlier today, I have come
across a children’s book – ‘The Bear that Wouldn’t Share’ or something along
those lines – and it rather set me off. Start rant.
What the book is about? A bear made some cupcakes; a bunch
of other forest animals, including an owl and a red fox, ask him if they have
any, and the bear refuses. By the standards of the children’s books, ‘Bear-Share’
made a point of pointing out that the other animals usually do not come over to
the Bear’s – they are not really his friends, they just want his cupcakes. The
bear refuses and goes to sleep. He wakes up, the cupcakes are gone, and no one
has supposedly seen one, cough. And then he finds his son, the Baby Bear,
eating one of them – apparently, the latter found them and promptly shared them
with his friends, cough, because he’s a special snowflake (or whatever the
lingo is) and doesn’t need dad’s permission or info, and his mom, the Mrs. Bear
or whoever, isn’t around at all, (the original Bear might be divorced, widowed,
whatever – how woke!). The original Bear sees this, is overcome by emotion, and
asks for a piece of his final cupcake, and BB says – ‘Okay’, ‘Yes’, or
something else along those lines. End recap. Pause.
Now, the thing is that sharing is good – when it is done
with your friends, when it is done with those, who are in need, and so on,
(just look at the COVID-19 world around us, cough). In this particular story,
though, the lines are more blurry – the Bear does not appear to be truly
friendly with the owl, the fox, and the rest, and as such, while sharing would
be polite and kind, it was still his call. The Baby Bear took the initiative
out of his paws without permission and behind his back, something that many
parents would take offense about still.
…The main flaw, however, is the story’s script – if in the first
half it overshares, explaining that the owl, the fox and co. aren’t really the
Bear’s friends at all, then the second half undershares – i.e., the Bear sees
his son, the last cupcake, and immediately understands that sharing is better
than not-sharing, (all concepts of private property aside), the end. Maybe not
the worst message, but the depiction of it? Sucks.
…And where’s the Mrs. Bear, anyhow? Up north with her new
husband, Polar? …Yes, I understand that the ‘Bear-Share’ is a children’s book,
a very young children’s book, but still, the way the story is written? Could
have been better, even for the children. Anything else? (End rant).
Well, before I came across the ‘Bear-Share’ book, I wanted
to talk to you about foxes – see, while the red fox and the Arctic fox are the
best know, there are other vulpine species as well… pause.
Foxes of the genus Vulpes
are the best-known foxes of all, they contain such ‘heavy-hitters’ as the
aforementioned red and Arctic foxes, as well as the fennec and the corsac
foxes, for example. Some scientists claim that they are the ‘true’ foxes out of
them all, but we will not get into this issue here. Who is next?
…On the other end of the scale there the Ethiopian wolf,
jackal, or fox, a wild dog much more closely related to the domestic dog and
the grey wolf than to the ‘true’ foxes. Indeed, most people call it the
Ethiopian wolf or jackal rather than a fox, because foxes and ‘true’ wild dogs,
(aka the genus Canis), are quite
different in several things, including size and behavior: even the smaller ‘true’
canids, such as the coyote and the jackals of the Old World, are notably bigger
than the biggest fox – the red fox. Next?
…’True’ canids usually hunt in packs or small family units,
while foxes are loners. The American foxes of the Urocyon genus, (i.e. the grey fox and its’ cousins), can even climb
trees and subsist on plant matter for food, showing that they are really basal
carnivores – the more derived carnivorans usually cannot eat plants… The grey
fox is the biggest member of this genus, but it defers and backs down from the
red fox, even though the two animals are roughly the same size and shape… Where
were we?
Aside from the bat-eared fox of southern Africa, (monotypic
genus Otocyon), which is an
insect-hunting specialist in its own right, (not unlike the fennec of the ‘true’
foxes, but quite bigger in size that the fennec is), the rest of ‘foxes’ belong
to various South American genera, which come in all shapes and sizes, though
the most famous South American canids, the maned wolf and the bush dogs, aren’t
called ‘foxes’ at all. (Mind you, the maned wolf is no ‘true’ wolf either, but
still). They are called either ‘dogs’ or ‘foxes’, but they belong to their own
genera and aren’t all that closely related to the ‘true’ dogs or foxes discussed above. Scientific
classification can certainly make strange things!
…Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!
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