Meerkat Toys

MEERKAT MANIA - LOVEABLE MEERKAT FACTS
Meerkat Mania has been sweeping across the World as our Meerkat friendss spread their image of their cute furry faces and their alert inquisitive hawkeye poise and demeanour. These upstanding furry gangs from the Namibian Kalahari desert have tunnelled their way into the British public's hearts and minds with their unique inquisitive behaviour,initially largely due to the success of the BBC's Meekat Manor series and more recently the Compare the Market / Compare the Meerkat TV ad series.
Everywhere you look these days it appears that meerkats with funny expressions are looking back at us from billboards, TV sets, Cinema screens and newspaper & magazine adverts. The world has literallly gone Meerkat mad!. But when and how did this Meeerkat madness begin? The meerkats' star has reached new heights but the animals first peered into our lives over 20 years ago when the BBC's wildlife chief reporter, David Attenborough, introduced us to a large gang of Meerkats in the short film Meerkats United. Recentl;y BBC film crews revisited the suricates in Meerkat Manor, the story of the Whiskers, one of more than a dozen families of meerkats in the Kalahari. The short film below shows some of the BBC's baby meerkats, often indistinguishable from our own meerkat toys!

MEERKATS

But there is one personality that has done more to propel the meerkat into the celebrity stratosphere than any wildlife documentary. You will probably know him by the one-word catchphrase: "Simples!" Aleksandr Orlov, the computer generated graphics Russian aristocrat with a thick accent and a smoking jacket, appears in a series of TV ads for comparethemarket.com The fluffy creature with the raised eyebrow has mastered the impossible - he's made car insurance interesting. The advert features the upper-class meerkat, complaining that people are swamping comparethemeerkat. com, by typing the wrong address into their internet browser. The use of a meerkat in the adverts, which have nothing to do with car insurance, has seen the animals rocket in popularity. . Aleksandr now has 60 thousand followers on Twitter and more than half a million fans have befriended him on Facebook.
Other fictional meerkats include Timon from The Lion King and Aleksander Seemples Orlov.

MORE ABOUT MEERKATS
The Latin name for Meerkats is Suricata suricatta and they are often known as suricates. Alpha females can give birth to up to 70 pups, usually producing litters of three. Other females are forbidden from reproducing for the good of the clan.Standing on their hind legs, they use their tails for support as they take it in turns to scan the horizon for predators. They live in burrows, which they use for sleeping, breeding and protection.
"Meerkat" is a word borrowed from Afrikaans. The name has a Dutch origin but by misidentification. Dutch meerkat refers to a monkey . The word "meerkat" is Dutch for "lake cat", but the suricata is not in the cat family, and i not attracted to lakes; the word possibly started as a Dutch adaptation of a "monkey", perhaps in Africa via an Indian sailor on board a Dutch East India Company ship. The traders of the Dutch East India Company were likely familiar with monkeys, but the Dutch settlers attached the name to the wrong animal at the Cape.
According to African popular belief mainly in the mre eastern Zambian Zimbabwean region , the meerkat is also known as the sun angel, as it protects villages from the moon devil or the werewolf which is believed to attack stray cattle or lone tribesmen.