Every year, on February 2, groundhogs all over North America are woken up, chased from their nice warm beds and we then demand they tell us what the weather will be for the next few weeks.
Groundhogs are notoriously bad at weather prediction, but that doesn’t stop us. We wake them up anyway.
Just imagine for a moment what you would feel like. Most of us would not be happy. It would be far more likely to hear us mutter a string of words that had absolutely nothing to do with weather if we were dragged from our beds early on a February morning. In fact, it is very likely people would only do that to us once, then skip it in subsequent years because of things we had said and done something in our sleep deprived state that just did not go well with a family friendly activity.
And yet we continue to subject groundhogs to this. And then blame them when their predictions are wrong. It’s not their fault. They probably not even awake yet. But yet we expect them to do something that a well equipped meteorologist would find nearly impossible… predict the weather beyond the next couple of days.
I say it’s time we let the groundhogs sleep in. They deserve it. Instead, we should get a bunch of quokkas to put on display.
They’re no better at predicting weather and won’t even pretend to. But they are cute. And they have a sort of smile on their face all the time. So for at least one day in the middle of a dark cold winter season, we will awaken to a happy face.
There are issues. Quokkas live in a small area of Australia and probably would not be thrilled with our climate. And they are really more of a wallaby than any sort of ground dwelling creature. In fact, they are known to be pretty good tree climbers. So they wouldn’t really replace the groundhog. Except for one day in the year.
And instead of waking up to a weather prediction that will most likely not come true, we just wake up to a smiling marsupial. And since we know smiles are contagious, there would be one day that everyone would start out in a good mood.
Really, we don’t need to actually have quokkas. We could just flood the world with pictures of them. And let the groundhogs sleep.
