Was a real-life monkey Dr. Seuss' inspiration for the Lorax? New research suggests that may be the case for the star of the children's writer's book of the same name.
The Lorax, who was “shortish and oldish and brownish and mossy,” and who possessed a voice that was “sharpish and bossy” has remarkable similarities to the patas monkey, with which the author had more than a passing acquaintance, researchers wrote Monday in Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
According to the article, Dr. Seuss — real name Theodor Geisel — and his wife visited Mount Kenya Safari Club in 1970 to clear his mind of writer’s block when he was attempting a children’s book on environmentalism.
The researchers belive it was there, where the exclusive resort’s guests could watch animals cavorting along Kenya’s Laikipia plateau, that the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees,” sprang from the imagination of Dr. Seuss and much of the manuscript was written.
“Dates, physical similarities and probable encounters underlie our proposal that patas monkeys inspired the Lorax. His physical appearance postdates Geisel’s trip to Kenya, evolving into a short, ‘sort of man’ with a signature mustache; his mossy pelage was blue before it was orange,” they wrote.
In Seuss' book, the Lorax confronts a businessman called the Once-ler over his deforestation of the Truffula trees. The Once-ler ignores the Lorax and is eventually left with a decaying factory and an empty landscape. It closes with:
Unless someone like you
Cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.
Because of its impact, the logging industry tried unsuccessfully to have “The Lorax” banned in the 1980s.
“It really set the tone for how environmental messages should be done,” said lead author Nathaniel Dominy, a professor of anthropology and primate biology at Dartmouth University, Smithsonian magazine reported.
Dominy penned the article together with Sandra Winters, Donald Pease, and James Higham.
But whether the Lomax was actually based upon the patas monkey isn’t the important thing.
“Ecosystems are communities, they’re assemblages of species that are interacting, and if you affect one, you affect all of them,” Dominy said, The New York Times reported. “That’s what’s important, and he nailed that beautifully.”
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