A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

There is a better reason for studying zoology than its possible ‘usefulness’, and the general likeableness of animals. This reason is that we animals are the most complicated and perfectly designed pieces of machinery in the known universe. Put it like that, and it is hard to see why anybody studies anything else!