Mammal Stereotypes - Walruses - 38 - Page 1

Fat, grumpy, ugly

Walruses are often anthropomorphized as fat, heavy-weight bald men with bushy moustaches. Usually they are grumpy sea captains or high society businessmen who cannot be trusted. Another appearance of the walrus in literature is in the story "The White Seal" in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, where it is the "old Sea Vitch - the big, ugly, bloated, pimpled, fat-necked, long-tusked walrus of the North Pacific, who has no manners except when he is asleep

The walrus (Odobenus rosmarus), also known as the saber-toothed seal, is a large flippered marine mammal with a discontinuous distribution about the North Pole in the Arctic Ocean and subarctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The walrus is the only living species in the Odobenidae family and Odobenus genus. This species is subdivided into three subspecies: the Atlantic walrus which lives in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific walrus which lives in the Pacific Ocean, and O. r. laptevi, which lives in the Laptev Sea of the Arctic Ocean.