A few years ago we shared a story similar to the one below, where Kipling’s Just So Stories were linked with reporting on modern evolutionary biology; a year before that, at the beginning of this blog’s start in India, we discussed Kipling’s ties to that country and its wildlife. From the New Yorker‘s Elements section comes the story “How the Giraffe Got Its Neck,” by Anthony Lydgate:
It’s difficult to know what to make of the giraffe. It shuffles like a camel (right legs forward, then left legs) but runs like a rabbit (hind legs forward, then front legs). Its distinctive aroma repulses many ticks but enchants certain people. It bellows, hisses, and moans in the wild, and in captivity it hums in the dark. It naps with its head aloft but sleeps like a swan, with its head on its haunches. Had Aristotle ever seen a giraffe, he might have said that it was the product of an interspecies dalliance at the watering hole, which he thought of as a kind of zoological swingers’ club—a place where “bastard animals are born to heterogeneous pairs.”
Organikos 