Jungleland wishlist: What animals have, and humans want

We could well do with the memory, sagacity and leadership accorded to elephant matriarchs, who lead their families through thick and thin ensuring the safety of every herd member.

Birds, insects and a few mammals have the gift of flight – something we miss out on hugely. If offered to us, we’d have to choose between whether we’d like to fly like a falcon or hummingbird (or any species of our choice), or a bluebottle or butterfly. And of course flying like a bat comes with the bonus of radar! And alas, nor do we have gills, which would have enabled us to explore (and alas exploit) the vast ocean depths, of which only five per cent have been so far investigated by us.

Polar bears, they say, can detect their prey from as far as 32 km away. With that kind of olfactory power I would easily be able to detect the Murgh Yakhni Pulao being cooked at Dum-Pukht, Maurya Sheraton, from my house 20 km away in Civil Lines!

With the hearing of barn owls, we’d be able to pick up the whispers and gossip going on in all the apartments around us (especially in the dead of night) and know who’s going out with who and who’s two-timing who – worth a fortune in ‘likes’ on social media these days. And with the eyesight of eagles, we’d be able spot cops with speed guns from three km away.

We miss out on the sheer strength of stag and rhinoceros beetles, which they say, can lift 850 times their own weight. That would be me, lifting up around 10 two-ton SUVs, ten in each hand! Useful to clear traffic!

Along with strength must come stamina, and for that African wild dogs and grey wolves are hard to beat as they pursue their prey for hours, until they drop. Our hip gym-going youngsters these days collapse after a five-minute run. As for speed – it would be exhilarating to have the cheetah’s acceleration (0-100 kmph in 3 seconds) and the peregrine’s stooping top speed of around 380 kmph!

But what are the above without having the courage of the ratel or honey-badger, to back them up?

This small, furious animal will readily take on an unpleasant hyena pack or even lion pride – and will emerge victorious!

If you need to disguise yourself, the tech offered to the octopus and cuttlefish would stand you in good stead, merging you into the background till you are invisible.

A shoveler flying through the sky (Photo by Ranjit Lal)

Beauty may well lie in the eye of the beholder (especially of the sarcastic fringehead fish) but well we all gasp at the exotic gorgeousness of the birds of paradise – and have, in fits of jealous pique, plucked their plumes to adorn ourselves! For shame! Other birds like the Ruff for example, with their ruffles and 17th century pompadours look exactly as if they have just minced out of the court of Louis XIV.

With looks come song and dance. Larks, nightingales, shamas, whistling thrushes and so many other birds enthral us with their songs and cranes and pheasants with their exuberant dance numbers, so many of which we have clumsily imitated (and look silly doing). Mammals may not sing (wolves do howl tunefully) but the exuberant whoops of gibbons, lifts spirits over the rainforest canopy like nothing else can.

Where teamwork is needed, there are ants, bees, painted wolves, and lion prides, all working as one, designations and tasks fixed so there is no bitching about who’s senior to who and nonsense like that.

On the domestic front there is the sterling fidelity maintained by many creatures – the Sarus crane, geese and swans, and even (up to a point) the mantis shrimp. But yes, infidelity seems infinitely more popular and single parent-families are rife in the natural world, and these we are already familiar with! Sex change is also the in thing with many creatures, especially fish: all clownfish are born as boys and change into girls if so needed!

For sheer majesty it’s hard to beat the tiger and lion, and who wouldn’t give their ears to have a stomach like a warthog – and bid farewell to Delhi-belly forever?!

That ugly little creature the naked mole-rat has an incredible resistance and immunity to cancer – a gift we could well do with and along with the octopus as well as lizards and salamanders – have the ability to regenerate lost body-parts. Great if you bike like a maniac or play American football.

With all these talents you would of course want to live as long as possible – and for that the Galapagos tortoise is the guy to go to, or else of course you could do penance and yoga in front of a bristlecone pine and hope Mother Nature would notice and let you live for the next 5000 years!

(Seriously?)

Sure, it looks like we’ve been grossly short-changed, but there is something we can do: Put on that sweet, inane smile the three-toed sloth wears and maybe Mother Nature will bestow us with her benediction after all!