We Play Because
We Know We Otter

Posted on January 26, 2006 in Hope and Joy Reading

Kay Jamison shares this anecdote in her book Exuberance: The Passion for Life:

Irrepressible playfulness has been observed in river otters….Gavin Maxwell, who wrote Ring of Bright Water and for whom one race of otters is named, described the zestfulness of the otters living with him in the Scottish highlands. The principal otter characteristic, he came to believe, was perpetual play. Otters, whom he depicted as “extremely bad at doing nothing,” were mesmerizing, if often exhausting companions. Maxwell recounted one otter playing for hours at a time with “what soon became an established selection of toys, ping-pong balls, marbles, india-rubber fruit, and a terrapin shell that I had brought back from his native marshes. The smaller among these objects he became adept at throwing right across the room with a flick of his head, and with a ping-pong ball he invented a game of his own which would keep him engrossed for up to half an hour at a time. An expanding suitcase that I had taken to Iraq had become damaged on the journey home, so that the lid, when closed, remained at a slope from one end to the other. Mij discovered that if he placed the ball on the high end it would run down the length of the suitcase unaided. He would dash around to the other end to ambush its arrival, hide from it, crouching, to spring up and take it by surprise as it reached the drop to the floor, grab it and trot off with it to the high end once more.” At other times, Maxwell wrote, the otter “would set out from the house carrying a ping-pong ball , purposeful and self engrossd, and he would still be at the waterfall with it an hour later, pulling it under water and letting it shoot up again, rearing up and pouncing on it, playing his own form of water polo, with a goal at which the human onlooker could but guess.”

Elsewhere, Jamison describes weasels as “hair-trigger mousetraps with teeth”.