Stuff of nightmares
2022; Wiley; Volume: 20; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1002/fee.2572
ISSN1540-9309
Autores Tópico(s)Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
ResumoI was 10 in 1968 when the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, and despite not understanding any of the famously unintelligible closing sequence (you youngsters check the internet: people are still trying to explain it over 50 years later!) I was entirely captivated by the opening images depicting our early ancestors’ struggle for existence. Our future hung by a thread in a parched desert where our forbearers were the prey of leopards, where a pool of water was an asset to defend, and where there was nothing to eat but a few dry twigs shared with tapirs (Figure 1). Tapirs? South American lowland tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) to be exact – and somehow well-fed in this sparsely vegetated, cinematic corner of prehistoric Africa! But I willingly forgave director Stanley Kubrick, for I understood that, in this scene, “ancient-looking beast” was more important than paleo-wildlife accuracy, and he had me wide-eyed and slack-jawed by his depiction of our nightmarish life before knowledge (https://bit.ly/3xdR00E). If only those ancient hominins had known that those tapirs could have driven their nightmares away. E Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0) I’ll get to that – but first, the caveats. Far from dispelling bad dreams, tapirs can also bring them. In his 1930 book Bring ‘Em Back Alive (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster), Frank Buck, an animal collector for zoos and eventual star of films recounting his own adventures, describes what could have been a fatal attack by a Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus). After capturing the creature in a wooden enclosure, Buck noticed it had badly scraped the skin off its back while trying to escape. Later, in a safer pen, he approached the animal he thought “probably the least dangerous of all…in the Malayan jungle” with a handful of ointment. But when he slapped it on, the 600-pound captive butted him to the floor, and then spent some considerable time trampling him and trying to bite his face off. His assistants eventually heard his cries for help and managed to get the tapir to desist, but Buck couldn’t get up for three days. And that’s not the scariest example. In 2005, a paper entitled A fatal attack caused by a lowland tapir (Tapirus terrestris) in southeastern Brazil appeared in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine (16: 97–100). “A 55-year-old man was attacked by a Brazilian [lowland] tapir after surprising and stabbing the animal in his corn plantation” reads the abstract. “The victim received deep bites in the thighs, neck, and cervical areas, resulting in severe hemorrhage and death. This is the first report of a tapir incident resulting in death.” But there could well have been one in 1998 when a captive Malayan tapir with a young calf severed the arm of her keeper in the Oklahoma City Zoo; or another in 2006 when a Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii) attacked – and broke a rib of – Costa Rica’s Minister of the Environment during a trip to Corcovado National Park; or yet another in 2013 when a two-year-old girl was severely injured at the Dublin Zoo, where for some unfathomable reason the child and her mother were taken inside an enclosure where a female lowland tapir lived with her new baby. The animal attacked, severely wounding the little girl and badly injuring her mother (see Scientific American; https://bit.ly/3d5qr6Y). But back to the removal of nightmares. That, a clever Japanese child will tell you, is achieved by asking “Baku” to eat them. Baku is the Japanese name for an originally Chinese mythical chimera with the power to devour disturbing dreams, who, by the Edo Period (starting 1603 CE), was well established for this ability in Japanese folklore. He is an odd-looking animal spirit, apparently made from the bits left over when all the other creatures were created. Those bits include an elephant’s head with a small trunk and a cow’s ears, and although some scholars suggest otherwise, does that not sound rather like a tapir? Indeed, in Japanese, the word baku means tapir, and in years gone by it was written on headboards to keep bad dreams away. Even now, some Japanese children may keep a picture of a tapir by their beds, or share their sleeping quarters with a soft, cuddly, Malayan tapir toy charged with the same task. And if that doesn’t work, all they need to do is ask Baku (some say three times) to take away their fear and all the disturbing images they have suffered. And that’s exactly what he does, by gobbling those dreams up (apparently with water chestnuts). In Kubrick’s film, human intelligence is stimulated when one of our ancestors touches a monolith sent from across the galaxy by an alien race. With disappointing predictability, however, that ancestor’s new power is first used to make a weapon – a nightmare for a rival clan. Although largely untreated in the film, his act also fashions a recurring sleeplessness for us all – the threat of annihilatory war – perhaps because the first thing he envisions killing is a tapir. Adrian Burton
Referência(s)