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Chester Zoo is celebrating the birth of one of the rarest animals on the planet: the Persian onager, a wild Asiatic donkey. They've named him Jasper. Picture a creature that combines the mournful look of Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh with the bouncing exuberance of Tigger.
But I shouldn鈥檛 oversell Jasper鈥檚 charms. Though he鈥檚 a quirky blend of sturdiness and elegance, wildness and gentleness, he doesn鈥檛 demand your attention like the fierce beauty of a tiger, or the stateliness of an elephant, or the telescopic neck of a giraffe.
Beside such many-splendored things, Jasper is unremarkable, even scruffy. Why then the big fuss over his birth?
Preserving species from extinction is important for maintaining a balanced ecosystem, scientists advise, and they may also be useful to study.
And there is sentimental answer too. While donkeys don鈥檛 have the looks and speed and strength of their aristocratic cousins, the stallions, they have an endearing dignity as they go quietly about their business. As beasts of burden, they are poignant symbols of humility. Christians especially feel the force of this sentiment, given the traditional inclusion of a donkey within the nativity scene, and the biblical account of Christ鈥檚 own choice of one for his entry into Jerusalem.
But to be honest, reading about Jasper last week, I wasn鈥檛 thinking about any of these things. I was thinking instead about the fact that I鈥檇 never heard of an onager before.
Learning about new creatures can be overwhelming; the more you study the book of nature, the more there is to find. The diversity is dizzying. Scientists estimate that the total number of animal species on earth ranges from 5 to 30 million. We simply don鈥檛 know how many new creatures there are yet to discover.
It has been said of Charles Dickens that the characters of his novels are wonderfully memorable, but still more wonderful is that he created so many of them. His genius was not expressed in a single character, in other words, but in his inexhaustible capacity to keep creating.
The 17th-century Jesuit Robert Bellarmine made the very same claim for God. In a remarkable treatise from 1614 called The mind鈥檚 ascent to God through the ladder of created things, he argued that it is not the perfection of any single creature in the world, but the sheer variety of creation itself that best leads to knowledge of the divine power who made it all possible.
Jasper may only be a small, perhaps even a dull piece of the mosaic of creation, but he may yet have an essential role in revealing the wonder of the whole. Let鈥檚 hope he goes forth and multiplies.