Giraffe up. The calf emerges head and front legs first, having broken through the fetal membranes, and falls to the ground, severing the umbilical cord. The mother then grooms the newborn and helps it stand up. A newborn giraffe is tall. Within a few hours of birth, the calf can run around and is almost indistinguishable from a one-week-old. However, for the first 1–3 weeks, it spends most of its time hiding; its coat pattern providing camouflage. The ossicones, which have lain flat while it was in the womb, become erect within a few days. Mothers with calves will gather in
Tears of the Giraffe the brilliant evenhandedness with which McCall Smith plays the two cultures against each other, here is a conversation between Mma Potokwane and Mr JLB Matekoni that takes place in "Tears of the Giraffe", the second book of the series." She quotes the conversation in "Tears of the Giraffe" between Mr JLB Matekoni and Mma Potokwane, matron of the orphan farm, after she has been reading some of Freud's works, finding them not wholly useful. She says that "The passage is a tour de force of double-edged irony" and she considers some of the remarks in that dialogue worthy of Mark