I've always readily concurred with Winston Churchill's remark on human relationships with animals that "Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Give me a pig. He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal."
But I've often wished that Churchill's interlocutor had caught the great man in an even more expansive zoo-o-metaphorical mood.
What, for instance, do warthogs think of us?
Although obviously closely related to the domesticated pig, warthogs hold distinctly different opinions to their homely porcine cousins, so I tend to doubt they view humans as equals by any measure.
Warthogs, if you ask me, present an unmistakably supercilious face to the world, their tusks recalling the impressive handlebar mustache of some self-satisfied Victorian colonial administrator who believes himself to be master of all he surveys.
In this respect, then, I suppose the attitude of the warthogs towards the the human could be described as similar to that of Lord Curzon's estimation of the lowest caste of Indian society.
I've no idea what that estimation was, exactly, but I'd find it hard to credit that the eminent viceroy considered a shoeless Bengali peasant to be much like himself (except both might be regarded as "untouchable," but for profoundly different reasons).
Of course, a warthog would, in its smug, dismissive way, interject that Lord Curzon did not sport a handlebar mustache, making my physical comparison of he and it fundamentally unsound, never mind my unamusing extrapolation of that comparison.
Whatever. Your average domesticated pig doesn't run around squealing at human factual errors like its found the biggest truffle in the forest, that's for sure. A pig merely oinks politely before turning its attention to other matters.
So maybe we should take a leaf out of the pig's muddy book, ignore those snooty warthogs and their delusions of grandeur, and psychoanalyze another animals instead. The giraffe, for instance.
Now, giraffes definitely look down on us.
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