Free The Book of Animal Ignorance by Ted Dewan Page B

10,000 of these hybrids are fertile.
    A donkey is like a housewife. In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for you’ll never catch the donkey being dis loyal to his mas ter.
    RAJASTHANI SCHOOL TEXTBOOK
    Donkeys have a reputation for stubbornness; in fact, they are highly sensitive to danger and rather sensible. Unlike horses, which bolt when spooked, donkeys stand rooted to the spot, braying loudly, and are the only animals of their size that won’t back down when confronted by a lion. In Africa, guard-donkeys are used to protect cattle. Dogs are instinctively scared of donkeys: they have a surprisingly accurate kick.

    By 1939, there were only a hundred donkeys left in England. There are now about 10,000 – 800 are licensed to work on beaches and 75 per cent of them live in donkey sanctuaries.
    Every donkey has a dark cross on its back that is supposed to date from Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. Before it became associated with Christ, the donkey was identified with the Egyptian sun god Ra, and Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theatre. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Santa Claus always rode a donkey.
    Dead donkeys are lucky. You should jump over them three times. Or make a sandwich out of their hair to cure a cough. Or sprinkle their toenail clippings over your enemies. Or pop their heads in the oven: cephaleonomancy is divination using a roast donkey’s head. In 1869 a donkey was served for dinner at high table in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. One of the dons remarked that it tasted ‘rather like swan’.

Eagle
    Omnipotent omnivore
    E agles belong to the family Accipitridae , from the Latin accipiter , a ‘bird of prey’. In English, an accipiter is a ‘nose-bandage’ from its resemblance to the beak or claw of a hawk. Not everyone agrees what an eagle is; no one knows how eagle species are related to one another and the evolution of eagles is poorly understood. Eagles are defined by what they are not. According to one professional definition, an eagle is ‘a large or very large diurnal raptor which is not a kite, vulture, hawk, buzzard or falcon’. In all eagle species, females are larger than males: the more aggressive the species, the larger the discrepancy.
    Eagles lay clutches of two eggs, but the first chick to hatch usually kills its sibling, even when food is abundant. No one knows why .
    An eagle’s eye can be up to twenty times larger in proportion to its body than a human eye. They are so big in their sockets that there is little room for them to move: like owls, an eagle has to move its whole head to look round. Nonetheless, the visual acuity of an eagle is up to eight times better than a human’s. An eagle can spot a rabbit from 2 miles away. As an eagle swoops down on its prey, the muscles in its eyes continually adjust the curvature of the lens to maintain sharp focus and accurate depth perception throughout the attack. Eagles of the soaring variety must wait until the air is warm enough to create thermals. The heavier the eagle, the later in the day it begins to hunt. Eagles, however, can hardly be described as heavy. A golden eagle ( Aquila chrysaetos ) is 7½ feet wide but weighs less than 9 pounds. A bald eagle’s ( Haliaeetus leucocephalus ) feathers weigh more than twice as much as its bones. An eagle’s dive reaches speeds of 200 mph, but only about one in four such attacks are successful.
    TIPTOE TERMINATOR
    Some eagles have given up on the exhausting business ofroaming the azure yonder, falling like a stone and missing. They prefer to sit about biding their time. Many reptile-eating (and some fish-eating) eagles perch in trees in a lordly manner, waiting for their prey to scuttle by. They then drop straight onto them from a sitting position. The lesser-spotted eagle ( Aquila pomarina ) neither falls like a thunderbolt nor watches imperiously. It walks around looking for frogs to eat. Eagles will eat anything, dead or