The dog is man’s best friend
He has a tail on one end
Up in front he has teeth
And four legs underneath.
So wrote Ogden Nash in An Introduction to Dogs. This stanza is a pretty fair first approximation to dogs, but could also apply to most mammals, or, indeed, most tetrapods, and, if newspaper reports are any guide, summarizes the entire zoological knowledge of most journalists. In popular parlance, for example, ‘animals’ is synonymous with ‘mammals’.
So it was no surprise to read newspaper reports in which actress Amanda Holden, ex-wife of comedian Les Dennis, allegedly compared her former partner’s bedtime performance unfavorably with the behaviour of ferrets, to find these animals referred to as rodents. Ferrets, however, belong to the order Carnivora, so that if ferrets are rodents, then so is this:
Okay, one might excuse such zoological solecisms. After all, ferrets might easily be confused with rodents such as – say – rats. Like rats, ferrets have sharp teeth at one end, four legs underneath, and are likewise furry and intelligent (albeit with an attitude problem) but smell fairly rank if you don’t clean them out regularly.
But what I find really irksome is when I hear journalists using the terms bacteria and viruses as if they were interchangeable (even worse, using the word bacteria as a singular, cf. ‘a criteria’. Ugh!). You may think they know the difference between Fiscal Drag and the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement, but don’t be fooled – when the chips are down, they don’t know the difference between their own anal orifices and an hole in the ground.
Aww, what a cute pinniped.
Half a point, Bob. Pinnipeds are a darn sight closer to dogs than ferrets are to hamsters.
Usually when ferrets are close to hamsters they eat them. And good riddance, I say.
Hey, Brian, why the deep antipathy to hamsters? I suspect a rodent-related childhood trauma…
ahem
From a well known scientific journal:
Yes, I know. It was I that spotted this and said that if a shrew was a rodent, then a raven was a writing desk. What really pisses me off is the general attitude in science that whereas molecular biology is taken seriously, old-fashioned organismal biology exists only for its entertainment value, and accuracy is neither here nor there. Now, that could be an awful caricature, but it sure as hell looks like the truth from where I’m sitting.
Yeah. The next thing we know, the molecular biologists will be wanting to give every species their own DNA barcode…
Don’t get me on that subject. Politics, Religion and DNA Barcodes. Aaaargh!!!