Laughing Matters: The Wild World of Animals

By Ryan G. Van Cleave |  Illustrations by Darcy Kelly-Laviolette
May 2021

Hold onto your ten-gallon hats, partners, because I’m about to wow you back to the Old West.

Here goes: Horses do not breathe through their mouths. 

I know this bizarre statement is true because I got a little stir-crazy last month and skedaddled over to the nearest horse ranch for some COVID-19 riding therapy. (Thus, the cowboy-style lingo at the top!) While saddling up my trusty steed, the owner matter-of-factly just told me, “Hey, did you know that horses do not breathe through their mouths?”

To which I said, “Whuuuut?”

If that were true, I reckoned, then clearly I didn’t know Thing One about horses. I mean, I had about as much animal IQ as a ghost town has people.

I’ve since Googled that horse breathing thing. It’s true! They breathe entirely through their noses. 

And I’ve discovered that there’s more high-falutin’ weirdness to horses than I ever suspected, such as how a horse’s teeth take up more space in their heads than their brains. And they can get a sunburn. Plus, this—a horse’s closest relative isn’t the pig, cow, or goat. It’s the rhinoceros.

I wondered: if I knew so little about horses, what didn’t I know about other animals? 

So, I’ve decided to remedy my animal ignorance by doing what every good American citizen should do once in their lifetime. I took out my friendly neighborhood zoologist for a smoothie.

Clarification 1: zoologist = dude I knew who went to veterinary school at UF for half a semester

Clarification 2: friendly neighborhood = willing to go if I paid for the smoothies

Clarification 3: smoothie = beer

To keep you from being embarrassed at parties by not knowing what everyone else except me seems to, I’ll share 10 of the most useful animal facts I learned:

1. Butterflies taste with their feet.
2. Flamingos are naturally white—their diet of brine shrimp and algae pinkifies them.
3. Reindeer eyeballs turn blue in winter to help them see better in low-light situations.
4. Baby elephants suck their trunks for comfort. (Awwwwwww!)
5. Nine-banded armadillos ALWAYS give birth to identical quadruplets.
6. Male ring-tailed lemurs stink-fight by firing a stench at each other.
7. Some turtles breathe through their butts.
8. Dolphins handle toxic puffer fish on purpose to get high.
9. Cowbirds—which lay their eggs in other bird species’ nests to be cared for—have a secret password they use to call the young ones back home.
10. To display social status and attract mates, male capuchin monkeys cover themselves with their own pee.

While those are amazing things, no doubt, did you know that a trained pigeon can tell the difference between the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet? (So says my animal-knowing friend over his second freebie drink). I totally believe it because I once had a hermit crab—Hermes!—who would clack his claws to every single song on Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet album but would shrink up into his shell at the first downbeat of any—and I mean ANY—Bee Gees song. It might’ve been because Hermes’ shell was the exact same shade as Barry Gibb’s beard and my little crustacean buddy felt insecure about that. 

Hermes might also have been driven bonkers by the ridiculous falsetto yelpings of any English-Australian disco era band, too. You know how judgy-judgy hermit crabs can get.

At one point during that out-with-a-zoologist scenario, I got to wondering if my childhood pet rabbit—Lady Bunnicula von Dracula, the Eater of Souls—was perhaps not looking at me so adoringly from her habitat when I woke up each night and saw her red eyes beaming through the bedroom darkness.

Hmmm.

I don’t mean to be an animal alarmist, but c’mon! I now know for darn-tootin’ that most butterflies will drink blood if given the chance. And the closest living relative to the T-Rex is a chicken. Plus, houseflies hum in the key of F. What’s all that about? What terrible secret lurks at the heart of all this strangeness?

Anyway, I told my animal pal I had to be moseying along. He slurped down his third freebie drink and gave me an I-know-something-you-don’t-know smirk. Then he said, “Grizzly bears have been clocked at 30+ miles per hour.”

He went on to explain that snow leopards can leap 50 feet in the air in a single leap, and that even after having its head bit/ripped/yanked off, a cockroach can live for weeks. 

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m going to ambulate over to my big-screen TV and erase the Animal Channel from its memory, and I’m cancelling my subscription to Horse & Hound magazine. It’s clearly a prairie full of weirdness out there, and I, for one, am steering clear.

I might even have to get rid of my lizard-green stuffed Baby Yoda on principal alone.

Okay. Maybe not that. 

If you have first-hand information proving that a locust swarm can be 450 square miles in size and can gobble up 400 million pounds of plants in a day, please reach out to me now at ZebraFartsArentFunny@SceneSarasota.com. I’m gathering information for a Very Secret Project and you might be just the special person I’m looking for.