When I was a child, I wanted more than anything to adopt a pushmi-pullyu. Anyone who was raised on the Doctor Dolittle books will know what a pushmi-pullyu is and what it is like to desire one.
It is part gazelle, part unicorn and its great-grandfather was the last unicorn. Or so they claim. One of their characteristics may be a propensity for stretching the truth. I don’t know whether their unicorn horns grow, like Pinocchio’s nose when they tell a fib, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They have a head at each end of their body.
Pushmi-pullyus are notoriously difficult to catch because one head sleeps while the other head keeps watch. One head does the eating, the other does the talking. This enables it to talk while eating, which, in formal circles, would be the height of bad manners.
Pushmi-pullyus speak a dialect of camel, which, fortunately, Doctor Dolittle speaks. I was fairly sure that I could learn to speak camel. I was certain that, should I ever be lucky enough to come across a pushmi-pullyu, I would be able to talk to it, achieve fluency in camel, and convince it that I meant it no harm. Then I could take it home and ride it about on the lawn, although it has just occurred to me that, given the two heads, it might just go round and round in circles.
I would feed it carrots and hay. Actually, I have no idea what pushmi-pullyus eat. They could be partial to egg and chips with lashings of HP sauce for all I know. In my fantasy, I became firm friends with the animals. Also, I would become the most popular girl at school. Who wouldn’t want to be friends with a girl who kept a pushmi-pullyu?
You can tell me pushmi-pullyus do not exist until you are blue in the face and I will still refuse to believe it. I am getting one. It would be a most exotic addition to Lush Places. This is my newest money-spinning plan. I will charge top dollar for people to come and take selfies with them.
This is a genius idea. The only downside I can anticipate is that the sheep might not get on with pushmi-pullyus and might butt them. They barely get on with each other, and when one sheep gets another sheep’s goat the annoyed sheep butts the annoying sheep. Sheep can be surprisingly bad-tempered.
I know of a woman who lives in the country who is afraid of sheep. She finds them “unpredictable”. I attempted to cure her of this phobia by getting her to feed my pet sheep. She shrieked and threw the tub of apples in the vague direction of the ewes. She knows who she is.
I also have reservations about the two species being able to communicate. I’m pretty sure sheep don’t speak camel and that a pushmi-pullyu doesn’t speak sheep. I’d need to get Doctor Dolittle in to translate.
The reason for thinking about Doctor Dolittle again after all these years is that the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication has been launched by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. It is offering a $10 million (NZ$16.3m) prize. “Just as the Rosetta Stone unlocked the secrets of the hieroglyphics, I am convinced that AI can help us to unlock interspecies conversation,” Jeremy Coller, a British private equity entrepreneur, told the Guardian.
I am claiming it. When I say to my cats or my chickens or my sheep “What do you want?” They reply, usually in unison, “Food. And now.”
Actually, I wish I’d never started thinking about that damn Doctor Dolittle because now the idiotic song from the 1967 film starring Rex Harrison is buzzing around the inside of my head. A verse:
“I would converse in polar bear and python,
And would curse in fluent kangaroo.
If people asked me, can you speak in rhinoceros,
I’d say, ‘Of courserous, can’t you?’”
What whimsical nonsense. Much like this column. You’re most welcome.
