Swimming with Hippos

When I first heard about swimming with hippos, it evoked in my mind an animated-cartoon image of a child playfully floating in colorful, bubbly water.  The cartoonists would probably make the hippo bubble-shaped too -- chubby and cute, with tiny ears that would excitedly spin.  After my imagination got back down to Earth, I thought that it might not be that nice having potentially smelly hippos (maybe dirty too?) in the water in which people were swimming. But that was not how some people in Africa experienced it.  To them, having hippos in their swimming and bathing water was a true lifesaver.

I understood how that could be when I read about an experience described by C. Dean Freudenberger.  The people in Africa who swam and bathed in the river began to lose some hippos when the animals were shot by soldiers for food.  Without the usual hippo population feeding on marsh grasses and reeds, those plant populations exploded, trapping more silt, and thus slowing the water's flow a the edges of the river.  In that altered environment, snails flourished -- along with parasites called liver flukes, which need snails for part of their life cycles.  Sadly, humans are another part of the life cycle of liver flukes (Schistosomiasis). People began dying, ultimately due to the deaths of life-saving hippos in the water in which they bathed.

I know this environmental story is one of many.  To me, though, there was an added poignancy as I pictured in my mind the relative sizes of the three creatures involved:  Microscopic fluke, human, and hippopotamus so huge it could be fangerous to people, but in this case was an ally against the tiny.

Reading Freudenberger's account made me remember seeing a mother hippo in a zoo with her baby, half-immersed in water.  I was struck by the massive solidity of their bodies.  Even the creature people were calling "the baby" seemed too large for the man-made pond.  And it seemed that a pond the size of Africa would be the right size for the mother.

Those solders in  Freudenberger's story were not the first people to have hunted hippos.  Most Biblical scholars think the Behemoth described in God's speech to Job in the Old Testament is a hippopotamus.  In that part of the narrative in the Hebrew Bible, God mentions the way hippos were hunted with harpoons.  God is not, however, interested in giving any hunting lesson. Instead, God seems to be trying to lift Job out of his self-centered perspective on himself.  God does so by describing such animals as the awe-inspiring hippo:

"Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you; it eats grass like an ox. 

 Its strength is in its loins, and its power in the muscles of its belly....

 It is the first of the great acts of God -- only its Maker can approach it with the sword.

 For the mountains yield food for it where all the wild animals play.

 Under the lotus plants it lies, in the covert of the reeds and in the marsh.

 The lotus trees cover it for shade; the willows of the wadi surround it.

 Even if the river is turbulent, it is not frightened"

~~~

Is there a particular animal you find awe-inspiring or humbling? Which one?

(Freudenberger's account about the hippos is related by

Calvin B. DeWitt in DeWitt's Song of a Scientist, © 2012.  p. 224,.)

(The Bible passage quoted is Job 40:15-16, 19-23a [NRSV] © 1989.)

Being an Animal, for Awhile

Over the course of my lifetime, there has been an increase in the number of Halloween costumes that are gory.  I am not a professional psychologist, but I would speculate that the increase in bloody, gruesome depictions has something to do with the increase in experiences of random violence (broadcast over TV) and truly violent movies.  Perhaps wearing a gory costume helps some children and youth face their inability to prevent random violence. Nevertheless, I would like to put in my vote for another type of costuming:  Animal masks and costumes.

What am I?

Of course, there are still some non-gory costumes among the trick-or-treaters who ring my doorbell.  An occasional princess. Or a cowboy.  Nevertheless, I think some animal costumes could add some variety and sparkle to trick-or-treating.  Even a simple animal mask might provide a psychological channel for children in their learning to adjust to the world and their own emotions.  As Paul Shepard writes:  "Putting [a mask] on and taking it off is a becoming.... The principle which they embody is like the assertion 'I am a young man, but I am also a frog' or 'I am a maiden, yet I am also a bird,' a way of saying 'I am both physical and spiritual, animal and human, good and bad.' "

Most every parent who has purchased or checked out of a library some children's books has encountered this uncanny ability of small children to identify with animal characters.  In children's stories, as also in many folktales, animal characters are both similar and dissimilar to the real animals they pretend to represent.  And they are both similar and dissimilar to our human selves.

"Bye, Baby Bunting"
from
  Denslow's Mother Goose

Somehow, an animal enables a child to name -- and thus perhaps unconsciously address -- their multiple emotions.  The complex emotions of human adults can be baffling to a small child (and sometimes inscrutable even to a teenager).  In contrast, a children's book's depictions of animals, even though oversimplified compared to the real animals they are derived from, help children to begin to name their emotions. For example:  I sometimes feel hungry like a bear.  I sometimes feel happy like a singing bird.

Paul Shepard, who was quoted above, is actually an ecologist, although of an unusual type.  He has studied and explored not so much our actions upon the environment as the reverse: the effects of the natural world upon humans, our psychology, and cultures.  Sometimes, as in the matter of humans' use of masks, those effects are subtle and too often overlooked.

There is another side of the coin to this matter of our identifying with animals, even if that identification simplifies the animal's nature.  Namely, that we can have an ambiguous response to most animals.  Not only do I experience myself as both "good and bad,"  but I can experience most animals as either good or bad, both beneficial to me and a possible danger to me.  Is that perhaps the way I can also experience many a human being?

~~~

As a child, did you ever wear an animal costume?  Do you ever feel  like any animal?

(The Shepard quote is from The Others, © 1996.   pp. 131-132.)