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Stupidity Tests
Wednesday March 8, 2006
Quail are the only creatures that make
chickens look smart.
We have a bird feeder on our deck. We keep it filled through the winter,
when the natural supply of food for over-wintering birds is limited by snow. We
don't want to make the birds dependent on us.
Finches usually discover the free-food bonanza first. Then the sparrows
and starlings. Then the flickers and the stellars jays. Eventually, the quail
find the feeder – just about the time that spring arrives.
It took the quail six winters to find it at all.
Now they return regularly. But they have very little spatial sense. The
feeder has a platform around it, big enough for several dozen finches or
sparrows, three or four flickers, or a pair of mourning doves. Up to eight quail
could fit on the platform, if they spread out. But quail apparently can't do
that. They all have to bunch together. Inevitably, half of them get bumped off
-- literally.
Every other bird species learns about glass. Not quail. We have a
glassed in railing on our deck. Predictably, the quail come in for a landing –
through the glass. Or they try to take off – through the glass.
There's a loud bonk. A dazed-looking quail staggers around the deck for
a while like a drunk heading home from a Christmas party. Eventually, it tries
to take off again – through the glass.
Self-destructive behavior
The notion that
lemmings periodically pitch themselves en masse into the Arctic Ocean to drown
has been proven false. Apparently Walt Disney invented the myth for dramatic
effect in a nature film. But quail regularly sacrifice themselves in front of
cars. They scurry out of the bushes like a plague of locusts descending on
ancient Egypt, reach the other side, and then decide that where they've just
come from was safer and scurry back across the road, while the onrushing cars
plow helplessly into them.
Quail would be laughable. If they weren't so much like humans.
Faced with a crisis, we almost always scurry back to familiar practices
– even if those practices led to the current crisis.
Political parties turn to former luminaries to lead them out of the
wilderness.
Businesses that got into trouble because they fired all their
experienced staff try to get out of trouble by laying off even more staff.
A society addicted to fossil fuels spends more and more money trying to
extract more and more of the stuff from more and more difficult locations.
Sometimes it launches horrendously expensive wars to secure its supply.
And when the religious tenets we have taken for granted for so long come
under fire, we tend to cling to them more and more obstinately. We memorize
texts that support our viewpoint. We attack anyone who challenges us to re-think
doctrines we have long taken for granted.
And that, by the way, is just as true of Hinduism and Islam as of
Christianity.
By comparison, quail don't look so stupid after all.
Copyright © by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study
groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
To send comments on this column, email
Jim Taylor
directly. You can also receive Jim's column by email. Contact him at
jimt@quixotic.ca
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