Lioness

You may think it is not very polite to read unrelated things during a meeting.

I must say I fully agree. Nonetheless the temptation was irresistible.

Alas, in an international expert committee, even if I try to pretend to be attentive, I would think of Aesop's fables.

Well, as what Hercule Poirot told Dr. James Sheppard (in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), I was actually only thinking of one of the fables.

Here you go:

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There was a heated argument amongst all the beasts in the forest, as to which of them had the largest family. So they came to the lioness.

"And how many," they asked, "do you have at a birth?"

"One," said she, grimly, "but that one is a lion."

As the old Chinese sayings: A parrot that could speak remains a parrot; a gorilla that could speak is, after all, a gorilla.

鸚鵡能言，不離飛鳥；猩猩能言，不離禽獸。

《禮記˙曲禮上》