That’s not a gopher

Driving out of the car park at my new favourite drinking spot (which shall remain nameless so I can avoid the vast numbers of vigilante groupies that went after the unfortunate Fireman’s bouncer I mentioned yesterday), I happened to spot a Toyota RunX.
This one had one of those personalised number plates that I don’t really like, but at least this one was for business purposes. Almost excusable, then.

Here it is (you can see the whole car here):

Obviously, Gopher can like to be your number one choice (or close to it) when you’re looking for industrial property in Cape Town.
But not, it seems, if you are looking for accurate descriptions of small mammals. Because that thing under the ‘X’ of ‘RunX’ is not a gopher, Geomyidae spp.. It’s a meerkat, Suricata suricatta.
Which is all nice and African, since gophers are only found in the Americas and meerkats are far more local, but that’s like Hippo insurance brokers advertising their services with a picture of an elephant. Just foolish.

         
One gopher, Two meerkats. It’s not difficult.

Look. See how different they are? OK, so they both appear to have the ability to stand on their hind legs, but I once saw a bear do that on some BBC documentary programme (although, to be fair, it was chained by its neck to a pole and was being beaten with a big stick by a vodka-drinking Siberian bloke with a wild beard and an even wilder temper).

Up! Get up, you bastard!
Up! Or I’ll have you made into carpet slippers!

Hell, sometimes I can even manage to stand for a few brief seconds after 8 pints of Stella, so it’s nothing special.
And look how much bigger the gopher is than the meerkats. How anyone could ever confuse the t… sorry?… Ah, ok. Thanks.
Sorry – apparently the gopher just looks bigger because it is nearer the camera. The meerkats are far away….

But seriously – noting that the car has Irish badges all over the back windscreen – talk about reinforcing the stereotype…

</small mammal basic identification post>

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