Eklil Blog – August 2024
Hello all. I slightly delayed my work on the August blog, because I was tipped off that there was some big news to come in the horse world. Nothing Olympic (side thought – why do the riders and not the horses get gold medals?). Nor was it that Ripon was living up to a Yorkshire stereotype and not paying out to make their biggest day fit the Premier Racing criteria. In the end, when the big mystery was revealed, it was a bit of a disappointment to me, and all blog readers I hope, as Nottingham Trent University (i.e. not THE Nottingham University) had “discovered” that horses can plan and strategise.
Humans have known this for thousands of years, and although it pains me to give credit where I am not certain it is due, the circumstances apply to pretty much all animals. Raw animal cunning was a phrase formerly used. But when musk oxen form a circle, horns pointing out, to defend against wolves, or sheep scatter in all directions to annoy sheepdogs, or swallows build a gravity defying nest at the top of the wall in your stable, or a leopard sits in a tree to ambush a gazelle, this a plan with a strategy.
{Do gazelles never look up? – Ed.}
No, because they are watching the horizon for lions. They have calculated the probabilities and decided that lion attack is the number one risk. Leopards they have to gamble with. More interestingly, what does a giraffe think if it goes to eat from a branch, and stumbles across a concealed leopard on it?
{Probably “do all of these things fly, or just this one?” – Ed}
What NTU added was a cue based on a light being on and off which indicates whether an action was futile or not. Apparently they believed that horses are unfamiliar with concept of lights, suggesting that they think we hibernate in winter. The real lessons of this are that just because an animal dashes about at a thousand miles per hour like a headless chicken, it is not actually a headless chicken and that some boffins get too engrossed in their area of interest to see the world outside.
Needless to say, I contacted Monty’s Award for any observations he may have on the subject and he said “Just off to the dentist, but my brief comment is ‘Well, duh!’” I knew that he would say that, but I made a plan and strategically asked him in a way to get the answer that I expected. Anyway, I have asked Andy if I can have a chessboard, because Atalanta’s Boy has got lots of toys, and my strategy here failed, because I did get a chessboard, but because I was not specific enough, I got no actual chess pieces.
{I am busy carving some out of carrots and apples, be patient. Will Connect4 do in the meantime? – Ed}
It’s health and safety gone mad. But if you could carve them so it looks like giraffes versus leopards, that would be really cool.
This month the question comes from Mr Eliud Kipchoge, of Rift Valley Province, Kenya. He says that his Olympic training for a marathon hat trick has suffered because he is deeply distracted by not knowing whether the Nandi Bear is a real animal, and asked if I could help. The answer, of course, is that I cannot help, because I have never been to Kenya. I have heard of the possible animal, and all I can offer is that if it does exist, it probably is not a bear, and the clue is that some regional variations on the name use local words for hyena. The best I can say to Mr Kipchoge is that he is most unlikely to be attacked by a Nandi Bear on a training run in Kenya and I guarantee a road race around northern France is 100% safe because if there were Nandi Bears in France, the locals would have eaten them. Raw, probably.