Deadly kingdom: The book of dangerous animals - Gordon Grice

How does a tiny box jellyfish, with no brain and little control over where it goes in the water, manage to kill a full-grown man? What harm have hippos been known to inflict on humans, and why? What makes our closest cousin, the chimpanzee, the most dangerous of all apes to encounter in the wild? In this elegantly illustrated, often darkly funny compendium of animal predation, Gordon Grice, hailed by Michael Pollan as "a fresh, strange, and wonderful new voice in American nature writing," presents findings that are by turns surprising, humorous, and horrifying. Personally obsessed by both the menace and beauty of animals since he was six years old and a deadly cougar wandered onto his family's farm, Grice now reaps a lifetime of study in this unique survey--at once a reading book and a resource.

ALSO BY GORDON GRICE

THE RED HOURGLASS: LIVES OF THE PREDATORS

For Tracy, Parker, Beckett, Griffin, and Abilene

Philosophy is really there to redeem what lies in

an animal’s gaze.

—THEODOR ADORNO

6 SHARKS AND THEIR RELATIVES

7 THE BONY FISH

8 THE WHALES

9 AN ASSORTMENT OF AQUATIC DANGERS

THE REPTILES AND BIRDS

10 THE SNAKES

11 THE CROCODILIANS

12 THE LIZARDS

13 THE BIRDS

THE ARTHROPODS AND WORMS

14 THE ARACHNIDS AND MYRIAPODS

22 MONKEYS, APES, AND THEIR KIN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FURTHER READING

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

“BUT WHY CAN’T WE GO LOOK AT IT?” I asked mymother

“Because it’s dangerous,” she said

“We could watch from the car.”

“We’ll go back into town and letGranddad handle it.”

“We never get to do anything fun,” Isaid, but the argument was lost already,the red cedar fence posts clicking byfaster and faster outside the car window Ipicked at the threads in the greenupholstery of the backseat Mom wasputting miles of safety between us and thecougar treed in front of our farmhouse

My grandfather had waved us down as wedrove home from errands and told us to

proceed no farther I was six; it didn’toccur to me to worry about mygrandfather I only knew I was missingout on something.

The next time I saw him, Granddad wasthe same as always, tossing his silver head

as he told his jokes, smiling in his broadbut mysterious way, like the man on theQuaker Oats box He had little to sayabout the fate of the cougar Only withthe distance of years do I understandwhat must have passed among the adults

of my family, how they must have felt tosee a predator like that in the elm tree mysister and I played beneath each day

We lived in the Oklahoma Panhandle,where the soil was black as co ee andcould be coaxed to grow anything if onlyyou could pipe enough water to it It was

a land of extremes, of tornadoes anddroughts and dust storms, and the sense of

history I absorbed from my family wascentered on the apocalypse of the DustBowl It was a land where things thatought to seem strange happened as amatter of course One clear summerafternoon, we felt a rumble low in ourbones, and then the house seemed toquiver like a drop of water thinking offalling It was over in a second.

MY GRANDFATHER ON HIS HORSE, OLE CHARGER.

“Earthquake!” my sister Meg and I

shouted as one Mom was dubious;whatever it was had made a sound, andthe sound had seemed to come from thecorral Granddad sipped his tea calmly.Meg and I tore out to the corral, shoutingback to Mom that we promised to becareful.

Near the cattle tank we came upon asmoking scatter of stones, clearly thebreakings of a single rock The originalmass must have been bigger than abasketball

“Volcano rocks!” I said

“But where’s the volcano?” Meg said

We looked all around us The horizon was

at in every direction There were nopeaks, nothing that might have passed for

a volcano, even with imagination Wecame speeding back into the house toreport our findings

“It must be a meteor,” Granddadexplained It was a new idea for us.

“Don’t touch it,” Mom said “It’sprobably still hot.”

The pieces looked di erent after theycooled—smooth green wedges, like slabscut from mint ice cream They wereheavier than they looked, heavier in factthan any rock I’d ever hefted Meg and I

used them when we played Star Trek; they

were moon stones, valuable ore, sometransmutative substance Meg came homefrom school with a set of terminology—meteor, meteoroid, meteorite—that shedrilled into me, and when we next sawour cousins, we all went out to watch formeteorites and make fun of people whocalled them falling stars And we went onwith our lives as if nothing much hadhappened

But the Panhandle oddities that

interested me most were biological: a headed Hereford calf at the local museum,plagues of grasshoppers and rabbits,mastodons dug out of the elds, the tracks

two-of allosaurs found in stone Carnivalscame through, displaying ve-leggedsheep and three-legged hens and, once, apickled two-headed human baby Onesummer when I was ten, prodigiouscongregations of black crickets rose fromthe soil They seethed beneath the outdoorlights Once they came pouring over theedge of our front porch, where a friendand I had just squashed a grasshopper Itseemed, for a panicky moment, likeretribution

Only as I write this do I realize howforbidding the Panhandle must seem tooutsiders To us, it was home My father’sfamily had lived there since 1904, whichwas virtually as long as cattle and

railroads had been there in place of bisonand mustang herds The lives of myancestors were riddled with ghost townsand vanished homesteads, but here theyhad made the earth yield All of mygrandparents were farmers, and thatoccupation was understood to call for akind of integrity others couldn’t muster.But we were a family falling away fromthe land My mother would have beenhappier in town My father liked thecountry, but not the life of a farmer Bythe time I was a teen, he owned a eet oftow trucks, and my mother held an o cejob They’d become townies I still spent alot of time in the country with kinsmenand friends, but I’d lost something Inever got it back.

THE REAL COUGAR passed from my life

permanently I never even glimpsed him.But the memory of him was written in

re It seemed a special cruelty for myelders to deny me his company, for I wasalready obsessed with wild animals andwanted to see him more than I canperhaps make clear Already I had heardthe voice of the bobcat and followed thedelicate and sinuous track of therattlesnake; soon I would begin to keepinsects and spiders in jars; within a fewyears I would ll notebooks with myobservations and drawings of wildlife Ihave spent much of my adult life in thesame pursuits

A COUGAR BEGINS BY OPENING THE BELLY….

It was decades before I encounteredanother cougar in the wild As before, Inever laid eyes on it I had to use othersenses to detect it I came into theterritory of this particular cougar byaccident when friends invited me to spend

a few days at a ranch in Wyoming.

My friends and I went out for a ride.Our horses’ shoes clapped against thesteep granite as we worked our wayaround the mountain’s shoulder Then wewere into a stretch of open eld Myhorse, a big, unruly bay, trudged through

a clattering pile of bones I reined him inand asked Virgil, the wrangler, about thecarcass We dismounted

Virgil handed me the skull It was about

as long as my hand, equipped with broadmolars for chewing vegetation The front

of the mouth lacked teeth

“Pronghorn antelope,” Virgil said,untying his ponytail to bind it tighter

“They don’t have front teeth They usetheir lips to pull in grass and leaves.” Heused his own lips to hold the rubber bandwhile he worked on his hair

The horns themselves were gone Welooked the bones over to see if we couldgure out what had killed the pronghorn.

We found plenty of marks, but what tomake of them?

“These look like something chewed onthem,” I said, holding up a femur and anuncertain fragment

“Could be,” Virgil said “We’ve gotcoyotes and cougars Of course, anythingcould chew on it once it was dead Godknows how long it’s been here.”

Some soft gristle and a ap of hideremained on the skull It had too muchheft to be empty I didn’t think it was old

I tied it to my saddle to take back to thebunkhouse A pair of sluggish insects builtlike gray bullets emerged from an eyesocket and crawled down opposite sides

of the nose: carrion beetles

At the ranch house I scrounged a gallon bucket and lled it with water.When I immersed the skull, dozens ofbeetles came struggling out from the eyesockets and the in nite paperycomplications of the nasal cavity A three-year-old boy with a disconcertingtendency not to blink watched me Thissmall kinsman of my hosts turned towhisper something to his uncle I had seenthem earlier hiking a little way into thehills They had stood over the leg bones of

ve-a deer ve-and tve-alked ve-a long while The unclereported the conversation to me: the boyasking how the bones “fell out” of theanimal, the uncle trying to explain death

as “going back to the earth.” Now theyhuddled again, apparently discussing thepronghorn skull and its colonizers

I went to work cleaning the skull andforgot about the little boy When I looked

up I found him standing on the porchabove me, staring I had just plunged theskull into a fresh bucketful of water, and

a new set of carrion beetles came out in apanic, as if they had slept through therst dousing They struggled over eachother to stay above the surface The boystared at the troubled water, the skullgazing back from the bottom of thebucket

“The bugs help him go back to theearth,” the boy said, ngering a toy six-shooter

As I walked to the kitchen the nextmorning, led by the smell of bacon, I had

to pass a pigpen I stopped to lean on itsrails and look the pigs over There were

ve, all patched with brown and whiteexcept for one plump pink hog Iwondered what pigs think of that savorysmell

Virgil came up and leaned on the railnext to me I declined the bent Marlboro

he o ered A fresh piece of lumber stoodout among the weather-beaten planks andposts; I kicked it idly

“I put that on last week,” Virgil said

“Cougar tore the old board off.”

He told the story, pausing three times tolight the recalcitrant cigarette He’dwoken one night to the screams of thepink hog The cougar had it by the hindleg and was trying to drag it through thebreak in the fence Virgil red a shotgun

in the air to scare the cat o I could see adeep black seam of healing wound on thehog’s leg I asked whether the cat hadbeen back since

“Not up here close to the house,” Virgilsaid He’d gone shing at a stock pondthe day before yesterday When his horsestarted acting spooky, he packed his gear

and headed for the ranch house Hereturned to the pond later that afternoon.The cougar’s tracks led down to the fallenlog at the water’s edge where he’d satfishing.

Near dusk Virgil asked me to help himdrive a few head of cattle into theirevening pasture The cattle knew the drill;all we had to do was keep them moving

We did it on foot

We were walking a dirt road Thecattle, with their hides of rust and cream,hustled ahead of us On our left was afenced pasture; on our right was a bank

of heavy brush The road changedabruptly from hard-packed dirt to a patchwhere frequent runo from a hill had leftsoft, smooth undulations of dirt On thissofter ground the cattle kicked up a littledust It was on this stretch I spotted thepugmarks of the cougar They dappled the

road for several yards, obscured in twoplaces where the cattle had crossed them.

A good rain had fallen about two hoursearlier The tracks must have been madesince then

Soon we had the cattle in their pasture.Virgil needed a minute to wrestle thebroken gate shut Suddenly we bothlooked toward the brush, then at eachother, then back at the brush I scannedthe ditch tangled with grass and stuntedtrees

Virgil whispered a long string ofprofanities He told me later he had heardsomething at that moment, a subtle clickthat might have been the breaking of atwig I wasn’t aware of hearing anything

I just suddenly got a cold feeling in myscalp, and I knew I was being watched

We started toward the ranch house, Virgilcursing steadily We walked slowly I

pu ed myself up to look large Virgil wassmaller than I and would make a moreinviting target, I re ected I noticed hekept me between himself and the brush.

“Wish I had my damn shotgun,” he said

We stopped simultaneously No signalpassed between us, but we must havebeen thinking the same thing A thickclump of brush jutted into the road ahead

of us, and neither of us wanted to go near

it I stomped on a branch that lay in theroad, breaking o a manageabletruncheon Virgil picked up a chunk ofsandstone We walked past the clump,and suddenly we were talking about theweather in loud, angry voices, agreeingthat it was nice but a little damp in tonesthat suggested we meant to kill eachother

We could see the ranch house up theroad Soon we could see our friends

lounging on the veranda We walkedslowly, taking turns proclaiming thedamn niceness of the weather over ourshoulders.

A conversation about politics drifteddown from the veranda; someone quippedand several laughed Why couldn’t theyshout down the road to us? Or decide tomeet us halfway? Finally we were in theyard and away from the brush Ourfriends told us we were the victims ofimagination

The next day I followed our tracksalong the road to the evening pasture Afresh set of pugmarks led toward thehouse They ran between Virgil’s printsand mine, and occasionally turned a circlebefore rejoining our path One pugmarkfell neatly within the spade-shapedimpression of my left boot, four blunt toesand a trapezoidal foot pad deepening the

dent of my print.

I took the pronghorn skull home when Ileft the ranch A zzing denture cleanerhardly changed its dirty exterior I had tothrow it out after a couple of days, when

it began to smell like bad chicken broth.That incident provoked me to theinvestigations that led, eventually, to thisbook It was not the rst time I had feltthe sensation of being watched by apredator, nor the rst time I had foundmyself in some danger in the country.What was di erent here was the clash in

my head between instinct and learning Ihad spent much of my indoor life readingbooks and scienti c articles about animalbehavior Those sources claimed that, nomatter what my granddad might think,the cougar is not a predator of humans Ihad met them in other settings: in zoos, in

a sideshow attraction where people were

invited to pose with a chained andlanguid specimen for a picture, even in ajunkyard where a big haggard tom wasset loose to guard the place at dusk All

my reading and experience made methink cougars weren’t dangerous And infact I might have been safe enough Onebiologist later told me I might have beenthe object of mere feline curiosity Still:I’d felt a cold mortality in my belly underthe scrutiny of the cat

It was lucky for me that I’d beenignoring the news for a few years, inanother of my periodic ts ofdisillusionment with my own species If Ihad been up to date, I would have knownwhat happened to an eighteen-year-oldjogger near Idaho Springs, Colorado InJanuary 1991, this young man was founddisemboweled and literally defaced One

of the searchers who found the body

assumed he was looking at a murderscene—until he spotted a cougar veyards from the body.

When I looked into the matter further, Ifound that the relation between humansand cougars traced an odd U-shapedpattern From the earliest Europeansettlements in the Americas, the animalwas considered dangerous In the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries,writers as diverse as Ambrose Bierce andLaura Ingalls Wilder mentioned cougarattacks as ordinary events But by thetime James Clarke came to write his

classic study Man Is the Prey in the 1960s,

authentic cases were hard to come by Hejudged cougar attacks rare, and he couldproduce only one case of a cougar eating

a human Around the same time, RogerCaras turned up several attacks, butcalled them “rare” and “abnormal.” This

wasn’t, as some suspected, a mere case of

a myth debunked It represented a realchange in behavior

Recently, writer Kathy Etling found norecords of fatal attacks between 1949 and

1971, and only a few in the decades oneither side Then, starting in the late1980s, predatory attacks on humansbecame an undeniable reality There were

a dozen fatal attacks between 1988 and

2001 Naturalists had been in the habit ofblaming the rare fatalities on the aberrantbehavior of rabid or starving animals Butthese new cases made it clear cougarswere treating humans as prey Theattacks happened in widely separatedplaces—California, Colorado, BritishColumbia It was not a commonoccurrence, of course, but it used to bealmost unheard of What to make of thisodd trend?

Thanks to the work of scientists like LeeFitzhugh of the University of California,Davis, we can make some sense of it.Fitzhugh’s investigations con rm thatcougars really have changed theirbehavior over the decades The reasonsfor this change are complex, and theybegin with human culture.

There was in North America, and still is,

a culture of extermination Our ancestorshere didn’t simply hunt down speci canimals that had killed human beings ortaken livestock; they killed all animals ofdangerous or undesirable species Theyorganized “drives” to round up and killcoyotes, for example It’s still commonpractice in some rural areas to shoot anycoyote, cougar, or bear on sight

The result of these practices, besidesreducing the numbers of such animals,was to teach the survivors that human

beings are dangerous The large predatorymammals learned to fear humans Andbecause big mammals learn a lot aboutlife from their parents, this fear waspassed down Zoologists call thistransmission of knowledge, whichparallels our own, “culture.” We havestrong evidence of culture in great apes,crows, killer whales, and others Amongthe species potentially aggressive toward

us, each population varies in itsfamiliarity with, and response to,humans In North American wolves, thecultural distrust of humans seems to beholding rm A wolf will often go milesout of its way to avoid the smell of ahuman being Among cougars, the case is

di erent, because they are less social andspend part of their youth, when theirtastes and habits are developing, solo.When a surge in cougar population in the

1990s pushed the cats into closer contactwith humans, older cougars typically kepttheir established territories, away fromhumanity Presumably they also kept theirestablished de nitions of what constituted

a decent meal, and this did not includehumans, because when they were youngsoloists, they rarely encountered humansand never experimented with the notion

of eating them As adults, they were set intheir ways and unlikely to consider newdietary options

But younger cats, forced to seekterritories in human country, tended to bemore adventurous in culinary matters.They saw no objection to eating people

At the same time, a shift in the culture ofAmerican humans was under way Thepractice of exterminating predators gaveway to a more environmentally conscioushabit of appreciating wildlife People

even chose rural or suburban homes fortheir proximity to wildlife Unarmedpeople met cougars unfamiliar withhuman violence A few people, and agreat many cougars, died.

To consider animal behavior withouthistory is to misunderstand it

HERODOTUS, THE FIRST true historian, was alsothe rst human being we know of to writeempirically about the habits of dangerous

animals In his Inquiries, written more

than 2,400 years ago, he tells us howvenomous snakes limit their ownnumbers The female bites the male in theneck while they mate, delivering a mortalwound The young, in turn, eat their wayout of the womb, killing their mother Thewise gods supplied vipers with thesehabits to keep them from overrunning the

These ideas are wrong, of course, butsound observations lurk behind them Themating of the vipers in the Mediterraneandoes involve a lot of thrashing about thatlooks hostile, and the young do eventuallyissue live from the belly of their mother,already equipped to deliver venomousbites It’s only the interpretationHerodotus got wrong We now know thatthe apparent death struggle is a harmlessritual combat between rival males or, inother cases, a courtship dance betweenthe mating pair; that it’s not a bite, but aharmless ritual licking of the neck, anddelivered by the male rather than thefemale; and that the live birth of theyoung doesn’t harm the mother Theinterpretation Herodotus (or hisinformants) gave these observations musthave come from a prejudice, a preexisting

belief that vipers are all about violenceand harm.

This, in a nutshell, is what hashappened in reports about animals eversince, from travelogues to newspaperstories to scienti c papers We start fromobservation, but even as we’re seeingsomething, we’re seeing it through eyestrained to take a certain perspective.Belief is a part of seeing It’s hard to lterout the interpretation and leave merefacts Even the words we use can betray

us into error For example, I look back on

my correction of Herodotus and see thatI’ve used words such as “courtship” and

“ritual.” “Courtship” is a quaint Victorianeuphemism “Ritual” is hard to de ne; wehardly understand the meaning of ourown rituals Even careful scientists arestuck with a language that can skew theirobservations

The violence some animals in ict onhumans would seem hard to skew Eithersomebody got hurt, or he didn’t But infact, this aspect of zoology has been moreliable to distortion than most The trouble,besides our usual biased views of all theparties involved, is that violence rousesstrong emotions We are almost forced totake sides with the injured humans or theslandered animals Many accounts ofviolence simplify on one side or the other.For example, I often read accounts thatpoint out what the human victim did

“wrong” before she was attacked by abear or a shark Many writers depictvirtually all animal attacks as “provoked”

by the victim On the other side, somewriters are at pains to paint dangerousanimals as monsters of cruelty All ofthese views are simplistic

Subtler distortions are a problem, too

When I was a child with an avid interest

in animals, the prevailing view was thatnatural selection had sculpted eachspecies to respond to a given stimulus in apredictable way If you studied a fewwombats, you understood them all But,

as the case of the cougar shows, animalculture complicates behavior Individualanimals also di er because of theircircumstances, their stressors, and eventheir genetics A mother bear tolerant ofhuman presence may become aggressivewhen she has cubs; she may become evenmore aggressive when she scents a malebear in the area, since he’s a danger toher cubs We now know that manyanimals, from elephants to dogs, live indominance hierarchies, and that we canunwittingly become involved in thesehierarchies with disastrous results Forexample, the training of elephants as

work animals or circus performersinvolves impressing on them, throughphysical punishment, that the humantrainer outranks them socially But when

an elephant sees his chance to move up inthe hierarchy, he can give his trainer analternate impression

All of these new insights guided me as Iinterviewed scientists and read journalarticles, talked to hunters and ranchers,reviewed the old literature, and evenwent to see and touch for myselfwhenever I could My aim here has been

to survey the dangers our fellow animalspose to us I wanted to be complete; as far

as I know, nobody has even tried that

since Roger Caras wrote Dangerous to Man

(1964; revised 1975) Many species haveproved as changeable as the cougar, and Iwill draw on cases both historic andrecent to show what we now understand