Peter Rhodes: Cheetahs no match for human endurance
Columnist Peter Rhodes on chasing cheetahs, sefies and the challenges for small businesses.
TALKING of crime, in a slumbering moment yesterday I heard on the radio that Birmingham University has a department of applied criminology. Do the cops know?
OUR local butcher and the car dealer have closed in the past few weeks and now the DIY shop is going. After 32 years of selling timber, kitchenware, garden tools and a thousand widgets, this one joins about 300 small shops closing down every single week in Britain. It's not hard to see why. A few years ago, a new Robert Dyas store opened just down the road and a couple of years later Wilkos opened a branch. Our little hardware shop was caught like a nut in a nutcracker. It goes without saying that plenty of us who mourn its passing have been eager customers at the cut-price competition.
MAYBE there should be no shame in shopping where things are cheapest but I felt a complete toad buying a teapot at the old shop, and then having 20 per cent knocked off the price because it was in the closing-down sale.
INCIDENTALLY, December 7 has been designated Small Business Saturday. By then, at the present rate, about 700 more shops will have vanished. Use them or lose them.
GOOD to see David Dimbleby looking scared as a swell sent his sailing boat Rocket rolling in the waves in Britain and the Sea (BBC1). Take the unexpected terror out of sailing and all that's left is the wet, the cold, the ruinous bills and getting somewhere rather slowly.
HERE'S a story that should make you proud of your race – the human race, that is. Two cheetahs were recently killing goats at a village in north-eastern Kenya. A local farmer and three young villagers decided to pursue the big cats. This may seem optimistic, given that the cheetah is the fastest land animal and can exceed 60mph. But humans are blessed with endurance. So in the hottest part of the day the humans chased the cheetahs. After four miles the cheetahs were exhausted. The Kenyans captured them unharmed and handed them over to wildlife rangers. This was an example of something called cursorial hunting, a strategy used by a handful of species including wolves, wild dogs and humans. The chasers may be slower than their quarry but, as long as they can keep it in view, they will eventually catch it. Wolves and dogs have evolved over millions of years to hunt this way. Quite why we humans, wimpish, naked tree apes with weak jaws and dodgy backbones, should have the same ability is anyone's guess. We are born with the potential to run cheetahs to exhaustion. The shame is that some of us stuff this amazing body of ours with so many pasties that we can barely keep up with a pekingese.
MIND you, most of us are fit enough to overtake a hedgehog, with only a little effort. Must be the Olympic legacy.
THE best new word for 2013 that Oxford Dictionaries can come up with is "selfie," a photograph taken by oneself. How dull real-life lexicography is compared to the brilliance of the radio quiz I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue whose vast collection of definitions includes: Doughnut (eccentric millionaire), Fondue (affectionate sheep) and Granary (old folk's home).
