Friday, April 11, 2008

What does this mean about how animals were created?

Recently, we had a discussion in class where Robson brought up the discussion with a story about a camel and llama cross-breed, called a cama. I thought this was absolutely weird beyond words, so I looked up this "species" and found a lot more information that I had bargained for.

In addition to "camas," there are tigers, ligons, yattle, yakalo, crossed animals between horses and zebras, and even a wholphin?!? What??

Yep, it's true! The wholphin was obviously the most interesting animal to me, so I read on... it was a cross between a false killer whale and a bottlenosed dolphin that happened at Sea Life Park in Hawaii (both animals were leads in the show "50 First Dates"... the offspring turned out to be both bigger and darker than a bottlenosed dolphin, but smaller and fatter than a false killer whale. It also does not have the defiend "bottlenose" of the bottlenosed dolphin, so its appearance is quite interesting. Kekaimalu, the wholphin, was born 19 years ago. In Kekaimalu's lifetime, she has now given birth to three calves. One died days after birth, one lived for nine years, and the most recent one born on Dec. 23, 2005 and is still alive and healthy.

I thought that most animals that were products of cross-breeding were sterile, but obviously in this case, that isn't always the outcome. Well in our discussion after Robson mentioned the "cama," we talked about how this affected the morals of life, and where life begins, and it got me thinking, "Did God mean for this to happen? Did God intend to have animals cross-breed, or was that purely accident?" And then I got to wondering how often this type of thing actually happens in the wild, or is it mostly due to human factors such as purposely for entertainment, or naturally due to human's placing the animals in close proximity. Nonetheless, I think the idea is strange, yet fascinating because it's very interesting to see how the crossbred animals still carry traits from both of their parents. One good example is the liger, which looks like a lion, but yet it has stripes? Very odd...

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