I’ve met people who dislike dogs (although usually they’ll tell you that it is the dogs that don’t like them), I’ve met people who dislike cats with a passion (they are strange little people and they have my sympathy) but I’ve never met anyone who hates the tortoise. How can you? They’re one of the most inoffensive creatures on the planet. Slow moving, posing a threat to nothing (unless you’re a lettuce and then, whoa, you are in trouble), with a generally contented look upon their countenance; it’s hard not to like a tortoise, let alone harbor any misgivings about them.
Maybe this is the reason why so many people love turtles? They look similar to tortoises after all? They generally move around the reefs with slow and languished strokes of their flippers; which isn’t to say they lack the ability to turn the power on, as anyone who has tried to swim along with one in a hurry will tell you. They appear to have a primarily environmentally friendly vegetarian diet consisting of sea grass and soft corals. Appearances are deceiving though, the soft corals that resemble broccoli are animals but we are quite happy to watch them being shredded by a hungry turtle. We love the turtle and we'll even forgive them snapping hard corals with poor buoyancy control while in search of something palatable on the reef.
The two most famous turtles in the world are … probably not the leatherback and loggerhead turtles, nor the hawksbill and green but two individual, surf-cultured
dudes’
turtles named Crush & Squirt from Pixar’s “Finding Nemo”. Pixar could have gone with a more Eeyore styled rendition of the turtles and it would have worked too, the slow are often attributed with slow witted, but they went with the cool and the knowing. And it wasn’t just surf knowledge, but paternal knowledge too. Crush offers serious advice to Marlin about allowing Nemo to grow as an individual, “
Well, you never really know, but when they know, you know, y'know?” Surely this is the most succinct advice given about parenting, ever. Y’know?
Another famous turtle (although within more specially refined circles) is the star turtle, Great A’tuin; a creature so large that it carries on its back a whole world (shaped like a pizza but without the anchovies) and four continental sized elephants. Whether A’tuin is highly intelligent or extremely dumb no one knows, but you can’t argue that he or she (A’tuin’s sex has never been proven) has a position of supreme and singular importance to everyone on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. And if you think that is a strange idea, he (Sir Terry Pratchett) was influenced by a major world religion.
We are as a species in love with the turtle and, whatever the reason is, it runs deep ...
... and we don’t mind tortoises either.
I’ve met people who dislike dogs (although usually they’ll tell you that it is the dogs that don’t like them), I’ve met people who dislike cats with a passion (they are strange little people and they have my sympathy) but I’ve never met anyone who hates the tortoise. How can you? They’re one of the most inoffensive creatures on the planet. Slow moving, posing a threat to nothing (unless you’re a lettuce and then, whoa, you are in trouble), with a generally contented look upon their countenance; it’s hard not to like a tortoise, let alone harbor any misgivings about them.
Maybe this is the reason why so many people love turtles? They look similar to tortoises after all? They generally move around the reefs with slow and languished strokes of their flippers; which isn’t to say they lack the ability to turn the power on, as anyone who has tried to swim along with one in a hurry will tell you. They appear to have a primarily environmentally friendly vegetarian diet consisting of sea grass and soft corals. Appearances are deceiving though, the soft corals that resemble broccoli are animals but we are quite happy to watch them being shredded by a hungry turtle. We love the turtle and we'll even forgive them snapping hard corals with poor buoyancy control while in search of something palatable on the reef.
The two most famous turtles in the world are … probably not the leatherback and loggerhead turtles, nor the hawksbill and green but two individual, surf-cultured dudes’
turtles named Crush & Squirt from Pixar’s “Finding Nemo”. Pixar could have gone with a more Eeyore styled rendition of the turtles and it would have worked too, the slow are often attributed with slow witted, but they went with the cool and the knowing. And it wasn’t just surf knowledge, but paternal knowledge too. Crush offers serious advice to Marlin about allowing Nemo to grow as an individual, “Well, you never really know, but when they know, you know, y'know?” Surely this is the most succinct advice given about parenting, ever. Y’know?
Another famous turtle (although within more specially refined circles) is the star turtle, Great A’tuin; a creature so large that it carries on its back a whole world (shaped like a pizza but without the anchovies) and four continental sized elephants. Whether A’tuin is highly intelligent or extremely dumb no one knows, but you can’t argue that he or she (A’tuin’s sex has never been proven) has a position of supreme and singular importance to everyone on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. And if you think that is a strange idea, he (Sir Terry Pratchett) was influenced by a major world religion.
We are as a species in love with the turtle and, whatever the reason is, it runs deep ...
... and we don’t mind tortoises either.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder