LOL
And I bet you were expecting a fantastic primate!
The animal was said to have a head like a bear and a tail with a kangaroo.
This animal was captured somewhere in Central China. And it has gone viral. They are calling it the “Oriental yeti,” which I thought was a bit redundant, but it was found to the east of where we typically think of as the yeti’s range. So maybe it is okay to use that term.
After all, this isn’t really that much of a zoological discovery. They could call it the great pink lynx or the rat/cat hybrid. It is not anything new.
It is without a doubt a civet of some sort.
Without hair.
It seems that too many people don’t know what a mangy carnivore looks like.
But a civet is a Feliform Carnivore that is closely related to hyenas. Most of them are very small, and my guess is this animal is about cat-sized. It’s not really all that amazing.
One does need to be a bit careful of Chinese civets. They are vectors for SARS.
***
I thought it was established that the yeti of legend was the Himalayan race of the brown bear.
And that is a rare animal in its own right.
But it is not a primate.
And certainly not a bipedal ape.
However, this is the first time I’ve heard of someone trying to promote a hairless civet as a yeti.
And although they may be elusive and nocturnal, surely everyone in that area would know what one is.
And China has civet farms where they are raised for public consumption. Because of the SARS outbreak, these farms have been outlawed, but they still exist underground.
So maybe a new rule should exist in zoology.
Call this Westfall’s rule:
Whenever a common animal loses its hair, it becomes something unbelievably fantastic to the world media.
*See the Montauk monster and the chupacabra.
Gross!
This is sad. What is likely to happen to this poor animal? I suspect they’ll destroy it rather than treat it. Do we know the outcome?
If they wanted to continue to promote it as a yeti, I’m sure they wanted to keep it in its current unhealthy state. I hope it didn’t suffer for too long.
Wasn’t it a Chinese zoo that managed to kill off ELEVEN extremely rare Siberian Tigers because they were feeding them nothing but chicken bones? http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/12/world/main6292326.shtml
There seems to be a real problem with basic animal care and knowledge over there in many places. So I’m not surprised that a civet is either being sincerely BELIEVED to be a Yeti, or else the people who caught it really think the rest of the world is so ignorant that folks would actually buy their attempt to pass it off as one.
Then again, when we have people in the U.S. trying to pass of a mangy coyote as a Chupacabra, I guess we really can’t cast stones.