this is arguably the back end of the design of animals
the reason i put this up here is because when i was in africa last year
my wife and i were driving around we had this wonderful guide who showed us something that surprised both of us and it was very revealing in terms of the
to spread the word of christianity to teach english to the natives and they brought blackboards and chalk and i'd like you to imagine that that's a blackboard and i just used some chalk on there
and they brought quite a bit of this stuff but over the years the blackboards were fine but they ran out of chalk and
this is a real crisis for them and that's where the hyena comes in the hyena is probably the most perfectly designed scavenging animal
in the world it strip mines carcasses and it has amazing teeth because it enables the hyena to essentially eat bones now
the end product of that action is up on the board here and what the missionaries would do is they'd walk around
and they'd pick up hyena shit and the incredible thing about hyena shit is it makes great chalk
now that's not what i'm here to talk about but it is
had an amazing experience with a camel
we were in the desert in wadi rum
in a small jeep there were four of us two bedouin drivers
hundred and five degrees one water bottle and we were driving in what they told us was their very very best
didn't look like it to me and as we started to go through the desert the jeep broke down
desert and eventually our worst nightmare happened they flooded the engine and they said ah no problem we just get out and walk
walk we'll find some camels
and they started slashing away at the back of the camels and they started galloping and if you've ever been on a camel it is a very very uncomfortable ride
there's also one other aspect about these camels about every ten steps they lean back and try to take a chunk out of your leg
so we kept on going and this camel kept on trying to take a chunk out of my leg and eventually three miles later we arrived at
where a jeep was supposed to meet us and the camels come down again like elevators we sort of clumsily get off and they obviously try to take another chunk out of my leg
and i've developed a very wonderful relationship with this creature by this point and i've realized that this is a mean son of a bitch
and much meaner by the way than the bedouin who greeted me and tried to sell me one of his twenty six daughters to take back to the states
so as we talked richard and i i said you know maybe i should bring a camel i think the camel is the best designed animal in the world
i went to the washington zoo richard said
i want you to get up close and personal with this camel i want you to inspect its mouth look at its teeth go underneath it go above it go around it pull its tail up take a look in there i want you to get as close to that camel as you possibly can
so i got a national geographic film crew
i took one look at this camel it is a two thousand pound creature who is in
if you've ever seen a two thousand pound camel in a rut it is a scary scary thing to behold and if richard thought i was getting in the ring with that camel someone was smoking bedouin high
so we got as close to it as possible and i'm going to share this chris if you want to roll this film and then i'm going to show you a little bit more about the design of camels
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what i didn't show you was you got that swinging thing going well
and you're glad i didn't show you this one of the other things about the camel 's beautiful design is that its penis points backwards that way the camel can dip its tail in the stream and just whacker the entire
area around him and that's how he really marks his territory now what you also didn't see was that and you may have noticed in the pen beside him
and by the way the camel 's name is suki in the pen beside him is jasmine jasmine has been his mater for some time but on this particular occasion it was very very clear that
as horny as suki was jasmine was having none of it and so we started thinking well
this animal truly is a sort of the suv of the of the sand the ship of the desert it's so vital to
the inhabitants of the areas in which the camel is found largely mongolia and sahara that there are one hundred and sixty words in arabic to describe
the camel and if this is a creature that was designed by committee it's certainly been no like no committee i've ever been on so
here 's what suki would do in search of a mate
you with one last thought which is probably the most important thing to take away humans the animal
are pretty lucky creatures because by and large we really don't have to adapt to our environment
we adapt our environment to us and we've seen that repeatedly through this conference not just this year but in past years but this creature that you've just seen
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