CHARISMATIC ALPHA PREDATOR MAMMALS

Cecil Rhodes

Cecil Rhodes was an imperialist.  (1853-1902) Whether or not that made him a shit depends on your point of view.  Rhodesia was named for him and so was Cecil the lion, much lamented.  Whether he was a glorious symbol of kinghood (whether or not kinghood is all that glorious) or a trophy for either camera or arrow so a dentist to boast about killing him by cheating/baiting the protected and named animal and then botching it (48 hours with an arrow sticking out of Cecil, who hid, while someone else hunted for him with a proper gun) or a great money raiser for the professionals who make millions by playing on heartstrings, Cecil was a strange name for a lion.  (A better name for a seasick sea serpent -- remember that puppet?)  But the lion was a good-looking and innocent creature.

Jamalya

When I was an AC officer, there was a lion -- half-grown -- named Jamalya.  She got loose.  She belonged to the son of the King of the Gypsies -- this was in Portland, OR.  I lived only a couple of blocks away so had spotted her and talked to the son not long before.  He was treating her like a big dog on a leash, while inevitable kids stood just barely out of reach.  I don’t know whether he was strong enough to restrain her if she really wanted to lunge at a kid.  

She was loose early in the morning just as I was leaving for work as Education Coordinator for animal control and I thought maybe I could walk up to her.  After all, I’d slept with bobcats.  But scale matters and by the time I got over there, people had gathered -- all of them full of useless advice and heedless of their own safety -- she was confused and scared.  I held out my hand, she held out her taloned paw, and she won.  Rock, paper, and claws like scissors.  I backed off.  We were on the cover of the Oregonian the next morning.  We finally used the tranq gun.

Then came the problem of who would clean her cage, which was really the sick bay for the dogs.  The answer turned out to be me.  There were two chainlink enclosures, so I would open the clean empty one, encourage her to go in there (with the mop), close that door and clean the other.  We got a bag of Lion Chow from the zoo and found a source for meat.  During the switch of enclosures she could easily have torn my throat out.  My hair stood up stiff with adrenaline.  The shelter supervisor stood outside the windowed door, but she got bored and left.  She thought she was looking at a tame animal.  There were no male personnel at hand.  Finally the lion went back to the boy with orders to get it out of town fast.

Ernest Hemingway  (not a dentist)

If that miserable dentist, who has lost his comfortable life and had best change his name, wanted to prove what a great hero he was, he ought to have done it the traditional African way: hand to hand with a spear.  Or he could have done it the Hemingway way -- a big gun, a couple of bearers, and a bottle of whiskey.   These days, he had better have inquired whether there were a village with a predator that needed killing and then done a good job of it.  Village predators are not usually very good-looking.  They tend to be old or sick.

Getting back to Portland, we heard there was a black leopard in town.  A few years later there was a tiger.   But the deaths -- an average of one a year -- were due to dogs, usually it was the pet of the owner which killed the owner’s baby or the victim might sometimes be a small woman.  But it seems impossible to raise the consciousness of the sentimental public, neither the end that wants to take all charismatic megamammal predators in their arms nor the end that wants to shoot them, trundle them to the taxidermist, and never see the transition to a mounted head.  I helped do that.  I’ve skinned a lot of bears.  I know how it is -- neither as gruesome nor as magical as people imagine.  

It’s a great irony that the great-granddaughter of the taxidermist/sculptor I married is an investigator for HSUS.  I greatly value that young woman and even admire some of the other work of HSUS, but not their money-making.  In my day the outfit was run by a Presbyterian minister who had a touching speech about a pair of geese.  Bonding for life, you know.  That was before it became unfashionable for humans to do that.  And HSUS is not about animals in situ, not about real life, but about animal shelters.  Captive animals.  Zoos, farms, labs. They do not talk about street or domestic animals.

The other big recent animal story was the zoo that dissected a giraffe with kids looking on.  The mommies were horrified.  The kids were veeeery interested.  The head of the zoo claimed it was scientific -- they didn’t KILL the giraffe and they wanted to know what did.  This was true, but the head of the zoo was stupid to not predict the reaction.  Marius the giraffe became lion chow, a change from the usual cows.

In the days when I was still in the neighborhoods with a truck, I stopped to collect one of the many dead mother possoms with the babies still attached.  They are born helpless but as soon as they get hold of a nipple -- which is long like a noodle -- they lock on until they are old enough to function.  The “pouch” of a possom is not a pocket in front like a kangaroo, but two sort of jacket-like flaps, one over each row of nipples.  This animal was not playing possom -- she was really dead but her babies weren’t.  

The kids were just going home from school and they were very interested, so I was giving them a tutorial of possom anatomy when a cop showed up.  A neighborhood woman had interpreted the scene as the kids assaulting me and called for a cop.  The cop came on strong, then saw the scene was innocent, so tried to make friends with the dachshund that had come with the kids.  It bit him.  Things dispersed fast.  I couldn’t even find out where the dachshund lived so the cop wouldn’t have to have rabies shots.  If it had been the possom that bit him, he wouldn’t have had to worry.  My line was “possoms are too dumb to catch rabies.”  That seems to be pretty much true.

What always bothered me was that I had no efficient way to kill those baby possoms humanely.  They were too immature to raise, couldn’t seal onto a bottle nipple, were considered varmints -- not much charisma unless you like primitive animals with a lot of pointy teeth.  The easiest thing would have been to carry surgical scissors and cut their heads off.  Neat, quick, lab rat technique.  The mommies would have been rabid.

People don’t know stuff.  Even the ones who ought to know better miscalculate.  Hitchbot, the friendly charismatic robot, was fatally beheaded in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia.  The outcry was just like the one for Cecil.  

In the meantime, who’s looking out for the African animals?  Hunters, tourists who shoot with cameras, and the industries based on them.  Who’s looking out for the people of Africa? Who’s repairing the damage done by Cecil Rhodes and his tribe?

Incidentally, a Yellowstone Park employee was killed by a bear a few days ago.  The killing of the bear comes next.  She has a cub, but it hadn't been caught the last I heard.