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Ruth Scott Anglican Priest and Quaker:

As I speak my son, Tian, may well be swinging through the trees on Primrose Hill, behaving like a ring-tailed lemur. You heard me right! As a drama student, during the Christmas holidays he had to visit London Zoo to choose an animal he identified with and could learn to impersonate this term. I think it was Sir Peter Ustinov who, at the same stage of training, chose to be a sloth, and I remember spending six weeks myself learning to behave as a chimpanzee during a Mime and Physical Theatre course. Very messy! In an idle moment I found myself wondering what animals you and the team might relate to. With your superhuman energy levels and interest in philosophy, Chris, perhaps you’d choose the newly discovered Skywalker hoolock gibbon. We often capture in our language similarities between human traits and those of other species. We may describe someone being stupid as a bit of an ass, or say that a person’s bark is worse than their bite. If I speak of someone as a slippery fish you’ll know what I mean, and how many of us have ‘cheeky monkeys’ for children? What distinguishes human beings from other creatures is our capacity to intelligently reflect on our experience as well as instinctively react to it. Perhaps that’s why in the biblical stories of creation God gives Adam and Eve dominion over all other life forms, not to ride roughshod over them but to be responsible for them because we have the capacity to think things through with care and compassion. Or at least that’s the potential. In reality Tian’s lemur is one of many species now close to extinction because of thoughtless human actions. When our hearts and minds are out of balance with each other it leads to tyrannies of all kinds, as the daily news offers many examples. If we and other creatures are to flourish, we need to rediscover the art of ‘thinking our feelings and feeling our thoughts’. Hopefully that way, we’ll start making better decisions, and lemurs will continue not only to survive but to thrive in Madagascar, if not on Primrose Hill.