Nature is a funny thing as long it is postioned inside your TV-set. In reality it can be mean, evil and nasty! In the 16th Century a Swedish noble man named Carl von Linné went out into nature and started the systematic work of mapping it and to name all plants and living beings he could find there. However, Linné had a problem; he had to explain nature so that ordinary people understood what he was talking about. In order to that he took traits from human life, culture and habits and transplanted them into flowers and animals. Others followed him and we could learn from books dealing with nature that birds and animals lived in marriage like forms. Nature was made a mirror picture of human life - that was human life as it was in northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
This continued into our time when people start to address this as what is being "natural". Every thinking human must be sceptic about such a discourse. It has nothing to do with reality out there in nature. A lion or a wolf does not kill another animal because it is evil and a killer, it kills because thats what lions and wolves do in order to survive. In philosophy this kind of explanation is called a tautology... an explanation in which the answer contains parts or the whole question. Or a circular definition.
So why is the Garden Gnome Guide caught in the mouth of an old female elephant? Maybe he said something stupid that annoyed the elephant. Or he might have interfered in some way with some foodstuff the elephant was interested in. Or he might have done something many, many years ago which he had forgotten, but obviously not the elephant. Mythology tells us that elephants have very good memory capacity.
The following story will illustrate this. A little boy went with his father to see when a circus came to their small town. It was a big event in the small town and people stood along the main street as the animals and the people of the circus paraded before them. Among the animals was a group of elephants and among them a very young male elephant and this was the young elephant's first parade ever and he was probably as excited as the little boy. As he passed the little boy, the boy took out a piece of chocolate and showed it to the little elephant. The little elephant was overjoyed and tried to catch the piece with his trunk, but the boy was quicker and took it out of reach and laughed at the little elephant...
Many years later the same circus returned to the very same town and the boy was now a grown man with a son of his own. He remembered his youth and the excitement he had felt when the circus came to town and he took his son to give him a similar experience. As the elephants passed, first among them marched a giant of an elephant and as he laid eyes on the father he immediately gave the man a strike with his trunk. So you see, this was the same elephant, still remembering the chocolate bar he once was promised but never got...
What can we learn from this? Elephants never forget? Of course not! This is a fable and the purpose of a fable is to give animals human traits and interprete the story to give advice to humans...
What did the Garden Gnome Guide learn? Beware of old nasty elephants!
This continued into our time when people start to address this as what is being "natural". Every thinking human must be sceptic about such a discourse. It has nothing to do with reality out there in nature. A lion or a wolf does not kill another animal because it is evil and a killer, it kills because thats what lions and wolves do in order to survive. In philosophy this kind of explanation is called a tautology... an explanation in which the answer contains parts or the whole question. Or a circular definition.
So why is the Garden Gnome Guide caught in the mouth of an old female elephant? Maybe he said something stupid that annoyed the elephant. Or he might have interfered in some way with some foodstuff the elephant was interested in. Or he might have done something many, many years ago which he had forgotten, but obviously not the elephant. Mythology tells us that elephants have very good memory capacity.
The following story will illustrate this. A little boy went with his father to see when a circus came to their small town. It was a big event in the small town and people stood along the main street as the animals and the people of the circus paraded before them. Among the animals was a group of elephants and among them a very young male elephant and this was the young elephant's first parade ever and he was probably as excited as the little boy. As he passed the little boy, the boy took out a piece of chocolate and showed it to the little elephant. The little elephant was overjoyed and tried to catch the piece with his trunk, but the boy was quicker and took it out of reach and laughed at the little elephant...
Many years later the same circus returned to the very same town and the boy was now a grown man with a son of his own. He remembered his youth and the excitement he had felt when the circus came to town and he took his son to give him a similar experience. As the elephants passed, first among them marched a giant of an elephant and as he laid eyes on the father he immediately gave the man a strike with his trunk. So you see, this was the same elephant, still remembering the chocolate bar he once was promised but never got...
What can we learn from this? Elephants never forget? Of course not! This is a fable and the purpose of a fable is to give animals human traits and interprete the story to give advice to humans...
What did the Garden Gnome Guide learn? Beware of old nasty elephants!
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