Jack Ashby

And every animal is weird.

Like deer.

How strange is it that an animal grows 30 kilos of bone every year and then just drops it?

Out of its head.

Out of its head.

But no one thinks, oh, the deers are weird.

You know, if you go to...

where India or Africa are places with massive hunting as well, but safari industries, those animals are considered kind of noble and majestic.

Elephants and rhinos and tigers and lions, like majestic and awesome is the words you get for those.

No one describes, except fans like ourselves, I hope, wombats as kind of majestic.

And I think this is all tied into the way we've been socially conditioned by these years of kind of colonial,

nitpicking, well not nitpicking, but denigration of saying that they are inferior, strange beasts.

It is so regularly used that people would say platypuses and echidnas are the world's most primitive mammals.

But that makes absolutely no scientific sense.

Let aside the kind of unscientific fact that I think they are the best animals.

Every animal on Earth is an equally evolved living animal.

Every animal is equally evolved.

What it comes from is that, as I said earlier, they've retained certain features that we might consider primitive.

So in the evolutionary biology, we might call a feature primitive.

So egg-laying is a primitive feature because it's inherited from monostreams' reptile-like ancestors.