Douglas the Hippo

You'd think enough had recently gone wrong in my life to satisfy the most vengeful of Old Testament gods. 

But no sooner have I caught up with all the back admin, whose omission had plunged me into a cold bath of chaos, than another thunderbolt strikes.

Douglas has changed sex again.

Hang on a minute I've lost you, haven't I? Let me step back a pace and see if I can get a little logic and sound story sequencing into this one.

A few months ago, Glasgow Science Festival kindly helped me adopt a baby hippo, which had been found orphaned last February, at just two weeks old. 

It's a process that is easier and carries less responsibility than you'd imagine. You don't actually have to raise the little guy, teach him the difference between right and wrong and get him into a good university. 

All you do is send £5 to £65 a month to help with his care, protection and, if all goes well, reintroduction to the wild. In return you get photos, an adoption certificate and regular updates on the progress of young Douglas - for that was his name - at the Chipembele Wildlife Education Trust, on the banks of the Luangwa River in eastern Zambia.

But a recent update came as shock to me and his other adoptive parents. They had chosen the wrong name for the little hippo, they told us. Henceforth he was a she and her name, god help us, was Douglina.

Around this point I began to lose confidence in the assorted vets and conservation people in Douglina's entourage, having previously assumed they knew what they were doing with young hippos. If they couldn't even tell the boys from the girls, how expert were they?

So I did a little research and found a good reason for their failure. Male and female hippos are hard to tell apart, even for experts, and especially when they're just little shavers.

As you know there are lots of lies, damn lies and statistics out there on the internet. An oft-repeated claim about hippos is that they're the most aggressive and dangerous animal in Africa, responsible for more human deaths than lions, leopards and other big cats combined. It's an assertion that raises plenty of questions in my mind. 

What are the relative numbers of these different groups, how close do they all live to humans and, critically, what were the humans doing to provoke the attacks?

Most often, it seems, the attacker is a mature bull hippo or a mother, because the bulls are aggressive in the mating season while the females are "quite protective of their young calves."

Show me any male and female mammals who aren't.

Another blindly-repeated claim is that hippos are not sexually dimorphic, which means males and females are identical in all observable respects. It's not true. The behaviour of male and female hippos is quite different, and so too are some aspects of their size and structure.

Mature male hippos tend to be larger and heavier and have longer teeth than females. They also have undescended testicles, no scrotum, and penises they keep in their pants till the time is right.

All of which brings us back to Douglas or Douglina, as they've been encouraging us to call the poor little bugger. 

The latest news, believe it or not, is that the experts now admit they've got it wrong again.

Douglina has been having an "amorous encounter with a water barrel", and they have the photographs.

During this episode it became evident to onlookers, they tell us with restraint, "that boy bits were involved." So Douglina is Douglas again and will remain so, they insist, for all time. 

I have my doubts. Watch this space. 

I will keep you posted.

It's possible to be too attractive

The firm conviction that no animal is ever going to hurt me would, if I lived in some parts of the world, be a fatal error.

I don't believe for instance the stories about hippos being deadly killers. They live on leaves, bark and vegetation, for heaven's sake, which is pretty much what I eat every day. Vegetarians aren't dangerous.

I like spiders and snakes, having had a tarantula walk on my hands and an African rock python wrapped around my neck. 

The snake smelled my forearm with a darting tongue before nuzzling the back of my hand with its head, as a cat would, while the spider touched my palm softly with her foot, feeling for danger and finding none, before planting her surprisingly heavy body and raising another tentative leg for the next step. In both cases I got a strong feeling of shared sentience. 

All this, I'm guessing, has its origins in a childhood spent in Scotland, a country devoid of dangerous animals, except for the female Homo sapiens, which will attack when provoked and has been known to bite the head off the male after mating. 

So when the biggest pig I've ever seen comes lumbering out of the New Forest at me, I stand my ground, certain I won't get hurt, despite the huge disparity in our weights and probably intelligence. 

Sure enough the quarter-tonne sow stops short of trampling me into the dust and contents herself with nuzzling my groin with a wet and substantial snout. 

The civilities satisfied, she hangs out with me for a while on the grass verge before, like an oil tanker at sea, turning majestically into the wind and setting off into the woods again, on a mission that Rachel explains to me, as we stroll back to the car. 

"It's called pannage," she says.  

"What is?" I say, furtively wiping my trousers and hoping sow slobber doesn't leave stains.

"What you've just seen," she says. "The owners release their pigs in the autumn to wander around the forest, eating the acorns that could otherwise poison horses and cattle. It's a practice that goes back centuries. It's even mentioned in the Domesday Book."

"Fascinating," I say. "My Mum thought pigs were great. Her grandparents had smallholdings in Shropshire, and she'd often spend holidays there as a child. They kept pigs, hens and ducks, she told us, and she loved them all. The pigs, she said, were especially affectionate."

"They are sociable animals," Rachel says. "And at least as smart as a three-year-old child. They're very clean too, contrary to their image. Newborn piglets leave the nest to go to the toilet within a few hours of being born."

"Impressive," I tell her. "It took me years."

"What's more, pigs don't eat like pigs," she says. "They take it slow and savour their food. I'm with your Mum. Pigs are gorgeous. According to one biologist, no other animal is as curious and willing to explore new experiences. "Pigs are incurable optimists," he says, "and get a big kick out of just being."

"Are they ever dangerous?" I ask.

"Only if you threaten their young," she says. "Or look like competition to a dominant male for the affections of a female."

"What?" I say in sudden alarm, ending the fruitless trouser-wiping and looking up to see another pig, even bigger than the first, emerge from the trees, sniff the air and fix an undeniably irate eye on the two of us.

"Tell me something," I say, lengthening my stride and trying to estimate our chances of reaching the car before this big boar gets to us. "How attractive, on a scale of one to ten, would you say that sow just found me?"

"Ten," she says.

"Run!" I tell her.

Pigs and pannage in the New Forest

Top Ten Fascinating Facts About Pigs

Tiny dancers

"You can't have two robins on your bird-table," Rachel assures me. "They're territorial birds. If you had two robins in your garden, never mind on a small piece of wood together, they'd be ripping each other's feathers out."

"Let me get this right," I say. "You're 500 miles away on the end of the phone and I'm looking out my back window at a bird-table six feet away. But you know better than me what's on it?"

"Sounds like it," she says. "Could one of them be a chaffinch?"

"No," I tell her. "One of them couldn't be a chaffinch. It's two robins side by side, happily pecking the bread I put out for them."

"Maybe one of them's a bullfinch," she says. "They have red breasts too. Easy mistake to make."

If Rachel has a fault - and I'm not saying she has - it's over-reliance on her own brain at the expense of mine. Normally it's not a problem. But when she doubts the evidence of my senses it's mildly irritating.

"No!" I tell her. "One of them couldn't be a bloody bullfinch. I know what they look like. This is two robins. Get over it."

The line goes quiet, then "Aha!" she cries. "I've got it. Take another look at your robins. I'll bet they're mincing about with their hands on their hips."

"What?" 

"They're gay," she tells me. " You've got gay robins. They've set up home together in your garden."

"Bollocks," I say. "There's no such thing as gay robins."

"Shows what you know, pal," she says. "You get homosexual behaviour in loads of animals - swans, penguins, mallards, vultures, dolphins, apes, lions, lizards, sheep, goats. In one study, over 90% of giraffe mounting was male on male."

"If I had giraffes on my bird-table I'd have noticed," I say. "I have robins. And they're not gay."

"You're in denial, son, maybe even homoerithacophobic. Take it from me - if you have two male robins on your bird-table they're gay."

I ponder this while watching my birds surreptitiously through the back window. They seem straight to me. "Is there some way to tell for sure?" I ask her.

"Other than catching them in the act, only one way I know," Rachel says.

"What's that?"

"Look out an old Elton John song, play it loud and open the window. If your robins start bopping on the birdtable, they're as gay as pink pants."

Catty comments

My sister gets annoyed with science. Well not so much science. More me.

"Why do you ask so many questions?" she says. "Why don't you just believe me when I tell you things? It's offensive."

"No it's not," I say. "It's not about you. If people tell me stuff, I want to know where they got it from and what the evidence is. It's because I'm a scientist and a journalist."

"It's because you're a pain in the neck," she tells me.

So last night, when we were watching a second-rate romcom called A Good Year (Russell Crowe should stick to parts where he sweats, grunts and hits people) and she made a comment about her cat, I tried to tread carefully.

"I don't know if he thinks he's a small person or I'm a big cat," she says, as he nuzzles her hand and purrs on her knee.

"What makes you think he thinks anything?" I venture. "He's a cat. They're not known for ontological reflection."

"See that's just like you," she bridles. "Of course he thinks. Anybody with a pet will tell you that.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re right,” I say. “Majority opinion often isn’t. One thing modern science has shown is that reality is counter-intuitive.”

“One thing you’ve shown is you don’t know much,” she says, wielding an exasperated remote control and muting an advert on steam-cleaners that I particularly wanted to watch. 

“Animals can tell what you’re talking about,” she continues. “They sense your feelings. They get scared, excited, happy and sad. They’re like wee people with fur.”

“Ha ha,” I start to laugh but cut it off fast when her face tells me it wasn’t a joke.

“Don’t you think we just project our own thoughts and feelings onto our pets?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“Don’t you realise it’s very hard to know what’s going on inside an animal’s brain?" I ask.

“No,” she says.

“Have you had enough of this conversation?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“Fair enough," I say. "I’ll talk to the cat. What are your thoughts, puss, on the government obsession with austerity, which evidence shows is exactly the wrong thing to do in a recession?”

The cat stares at me for a moment then stands up, turns around and arches his back, giving me a long, close look at his behind.

I think he's trying to tell me something.