Eish!

I’m not often intimidated by the animal kingdom.

Actually, this is a blatant lie. There are many species that I that I am afraid of: dodgy Thai prawns for a start; stingrays; dogs with orange eyebrows; most snails and belligerent tortoises.

It is the latter that drew my attention this weekend. As a student of Esop and with an Ephebian flair for practical philosophy I can say with some certainty that there is a subtle fallacy involved in the story of the  Tortoise and the Hare.

The tortoise is commonly regarded as the underdog in this fable. Yet when compared to the hare on a purely zoological scale, there is not much of an advantage that the hare can expect.

• The tortoise is protected by a large and solid exoskeleton. It is able to withdraw completely into a leathery world we dare not enter.
• The hare is largely furry, soft and vulnerable as any six year old girl or car tyre will attest.
• The tortoise has a sharp beak, capable of crushing whole planets, breathing fire and laying waste to a healthy set of toes.
• The hare’s maw consists largely of a gummy mass capable only of sucking on soft tissues, gnawing on the rubber linings of power cables and drooling in your stokies.
• The tortoise has beady eyes that can see through lies, cut through fear and soften butter
• The hare has eyes made of glass marbles capable only of reflecting the headlights of hurtling cars.

Tortoises are also faster than they look and it has been famously proven that a hare can never, philosophically speaking, reach its intended destination.

For the hare to reach the finish line, it would have to cover half of the distance at some point. Consequently, it would need to cover half of the remaining distance, etc. As the race progresses, there are an infinite number of halfway marks for the hare to reach that can only reasonably be achieved in an infinite amount of time. Seeing as how small children do not have an infinite amount of patience, the hare would simply never reach the finish line.

This has not, to date, been empirically proven with tortoises and Zeno’s paradox remains partially in tact.

This weekend, however, a particularly belligerent racing tortoise stormed me across a lawn strewn with melon peels. It covered half the distance in the blink of an eye and proceeded to cover the remaining halves in equally impressive fashion without stopping to consider the philosophical consequences.

My toes curled, remembering what I’d read about their beaks in a medical journal somewhere. I resigned to attempting to stare it down, my escape route being cluttered with littered fruit. Dangerously close, the tortoise skidded to a halt and tried to soften my lymph nodes with a buttery stare.

There was little for it.

I turned it upside down. That’ll show ‘em.