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A friend writes to ask how come mammals are never green. Reptiles, amphibians,
birds and fish sometimes come in green, not to mention invertebrates. But
not mammals. Not really. Yes, I know there is the ‘green’ vervet monkey,
but as you can see from the inverted commas, it’s not really green. It’s
more yellow-brownish mixed with grey and in a certain light it may look
slightly greenish.

She writes because the Society for Process Thought, which says it’s
interested in the ‘central issues of life and the classical concerns of
philosophy’ and thinks we ought ‘to see life whole and to live it well’
(which seems fair enough when you come right down to it), held a two-hour
discussion the other day at the Regent Square United Reform Church in London
on ‘Why Aren’t Animals Green?’. As neither my friend nor I attended the
discussion, which was on ‘speciesism’, I, among other reasons, because of
the pathological hatred I bear British Rail, we don’t know what answer was
offered as to the widespread non-viridescence of mammals, though of course,
as I just said, lots of animals are green. It’s just that mammals aren’t.

Putting aside central issues of life, classical concerns of philosophy
and speciesism for the moment and concentrating our thought into some sort
of process, you’d think (wouldn’t you) that animals living in grasslands
and in rainforests would be on to a good thing if they were green. Not bright
emerald green perhaps, or turquoise, but various shades of duller green,
olive maybe, or the kind of green my wrist turns when I wear my watch with
the gold band. Mammals generally, when you come to think about it, aren’t
brightly coloured anything, green, blue, red, purple. There’s the red-rumped
baboon, and mandrills have blue muzzles, but I can’t recall any baboons,
or much of anything else in the way of mammals, that are green at either
end, or anywhere in between. Can you? Here is a puzzle for the Darwinians,
if not indeed a classical concern of philosophy.

All right, grass in the plains and savannas is more often a tawny brown
and so a bottle-green lion would stand out a mile, but this doesn’t hold
true for the jungle. In the Amazon, in central Africa, in Southeast Asia
it is green, it is green all year round, there is no escaping green! Snakes,
frogs, toads, parrots, turtles, lizards, crocodiles, fish, many of these
are green. Why no mammal? Cobalt, scarlet or puce may not be the best of
camouflage for predator or prey to adopt – but what’s wrong with a nice
drab green?

Even with aquatic mammals, where a sea-green whale or seal or grampus
or dugong would, you’d think, be de rigeur, nary a glaucous one is found.
It’s as if the very idea of being dull green in a dull green sea horrified
nature.

I wore drab green fatigues in the US Army. I suppose the idea was to
blend into the background so the sergeant couldn’t spot you that quickly.
I can’t say I disappeared into the landscape but as the landscape at Ford
Ord, California, was just dirt-brown or dust-grey when it wasn’t fog-nothing,
the colour scheme was wrong to begin with. But put me out on the golf links
at Carmel, just a few miles (and another world) away, and I’d have blended
in like anything!

There is just no reason that I can see why mammals inhabiting a rainforest
can’t, at least occasionally, be coloured green, say, light green dappled
or mottled with darker green spots and splodges, or with irregular green
stripes; it would make then next to invisible under a rainforest canopy
of sun and shadow speckling down through the leaves. It’s the perfect colour.
It’s the only colour a mammal in a rainforest should be! . . . So how come
not one is? And how come no aquatic mammal is sea green?

There are important questions here, not least, vital Darwinian ones.
Either green is not adaptive for mammals in jungles and the ocean, while
it is for other animals, forcing us to think of a good reason why, though
green is naturally selective for frogs, it isn’t for warthogs. Or it is
just as adaptive but this fact has yet to occur to nature, after over 100
million years, a severe blow to those of us who thought nature had all the
answers, or at the very least had a handle on the more obvious, self-evident
ones.

The Society for Process Thought may have inadvertently opened up a field
of inquiry far more to do with the central issues of life than even it dreamed
of in its philosophy, not to mention that philosophy’s classic concerns.
In a way now I almost wish I’d overcome my rage at BR, took the train from
Crewkerne to Waterloo, and wandered up to Regent Square to find out why
mammals aren’t green – assuming I’d have got the answer when the topic under
discussion was speciesism. The talk might never have got round to an in-depth
debate over Darwinism and its total failure to account for the anomalous
non-tendency towards verdancy among sylvan mammals. I’ll never know now.
I guess it’s another case of Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought
in a green shade. Pity.

Ralph Estling is a retired schoolteacher living in Somerset.