Free The Book of Animal Ignorance by Ted Dewan Page A

The whistle signals show that they communicate, but they are a long swim away from being a language.
    Dolphin play is highly complex, and they learn fast. They have a striking ability to follow extraordinarily complicated human commands, and can recognise themselves in a mirror. They can even use tools: when hunting among sharp coral they attach bitsof sponge to their snouts as safety masks. Legends of their helpfulness to gods and humans are threaded through Greek and Roman myth and contemporary accounts of dolphin ‘rescues’ are common. In small fishing communities, dolphins are known to herd shoals of fish into nets in return for a few thrown back and a friendly wave. It’s hard not to love their big smiley faces.
    But there is another side. For all the foreplay and nuzzling, females are frequently coerced into sex by groups of males. Schools of dolphins batter porpoises to death for no obvious reason, and occasionally practise infanticide. In a comprehensive study of wild dolphins that seek out human company, three-quarters showed aggression, which sometimes led to serious injury, and half indulged in ‘mis-directed sexual behaviour’ with buoys and boats as well as humans. Given that an average male bottlenose weighs 40 stone and has a foot-long, solid muscle penis that ends in a prehensile hook agile enough to catch an eel, you wouldn’t want to give off the wrong signals.
    This same report concluded that contact with us almost always means injury and suffering for the wild dolphin. It’s worth bearing that in mind when considering the benefits of ‘wildlife tourism’ and ‘dolphin therapy’. Of course, the idea of ‘swimming with dolphins’ is attractive and there is evidence that it does have therapeutic value. But we gain just as much (and maybe more) by standing on a boat watching them through binoculars, revelling in the fact that they are where they belong, doing what they do best.
    NOSE SONAR

Donkey
    A natural source of Viagra
    D onkeys’ milk is a wonder substance. Country people in India have always sworn by it as a baby food, but chemical analysis has recently revealed it is full of oligosaccharides, carbohydrates with powerful immuno-stimulant properties. It has been tested in cases of AIDS and cancer, and some claim the milk has an effect similar to Viagra.
    Donkeys were first domesticated in Ethiopia and Somalia about 6,000 years ago. The modern donkey is the same species as the African wild ass ( Equus asinus ). It is the only domesticated animal to have originated in Africa. They were used for transport long before horses, which were originally bred in Asia purely for their meat.
    Ancient Egyptian tombs show that donkeys were the Porsches of the Nile delta: the more donkeys, the higher your status. Herds of a thousand or more were not uncommon. With donkeys came trade: their ability to carry 30 per cent of their body weight without complaint opened up the ancient world.
    The word ‘donkey’ is surprisingly recent – it wasn’t around when the King James Version of the Bible was written in 1611 – and probably originated in the late eighteenth century to avoid the growing confusion between ‘ass’ and ‘arse’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , ‘donkey’ was originally pronounced to rhyme with ‘monkey’ and is thought to come from ‘dun’, meaning brown or grey.

    A male donkey is called a jack or jackass; a female donkey is called a jenny or donkeyess. The personality of a donkey is called their donkeyship.
    Donkeys have sixty-two chromosomes (sixteen more than humans) and can be crossed with horses or zebras. The offspring of a male donkey and a female horse is calleda mule. The male mule is called a john and a female mule a molly. The offspring of a male donkey and a female horse is called a hinny. Zebras crossed with donkeys are called zeebrasses and zonkeys. Only 1 in