Every once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a foal, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child). Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that the authorities exercise “lethal control" over the big cats. Killing catamounts is neither hard nor dangerous. They were hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth century. Dogs chase the animal up a tree. The brave hunter takes aim and shoots.
But Is it a good idea to extinguish the mountain lion? In the United States, there’s an average of one death by mountain lion a year. Here in B–ld-r county, there’s been one such death in the last hundred years. One is a very low number, especially when, in the country as a whole, snakes cause a dozen deaths a year, lightning claims seventy-five, bee and wasp stings a hundred. Dogs, when they’re not out hunting mountain lions, account for between twelve to twenty deaths a year –- a couple of hundred a decade– many of these, it's sad to say, infants in the crib. Given the numbers, It’s hard to believe that calls for the extermination of mountain lions aren’t motivated more by fear than by facts.
Domesticated dogs are responsible not only for a dozen to a score of deaths, but also for an estimated 4 to 7 million (that’s right, million!) cases of dog-bite a year, almost 800,000 of which require medical attention. Dog bites cause 368,000 emergency room visits, or (do the math!) one thousand such visits a day. The social cost of dog bites is estimated variously, but the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that the direct medical costs of dog bites per year is $165 million, with many more millions in ancillary expenses.
Mountain lions, which are relatively harmless, inspire terror, but dogs, which are far more dangerous, are our sacred cows — loved, in my opinion, beyond all propriety. It’s hard not to cringe when otherwise sensible people –- good decent people –tell me in all seriousness that Towser is a full member of their family, or that Fido is about to undergo an expensive hip replacement. The run-of the-mill doggie in America enjoys a better diet and better medical care than 90% of the human beings on the planet — a situation which I consider to be a thoroughly indefensible skewing of resources. Dogs are not human beings, and it’s immoral sentimentality to treat them as such. It’s embarrassing.
The ancients, following Aristotle, divided their possessions into three categories: an object was an instrumentum mutum, an animal was an instrumentum semivocale, and a slave was an instrumentum vocale. By eliding the differences between humans and animals, the Greeks and the Romans made slavery both easy and natural.
I used to worry that people who treated animals as humans would be tempted to treat humans as animals. But it's not true; the people I know who are sentimental about animals and "animal rights" are extraordinarily sensitive to human rights — but then, perhaps my sample is skewed. All of my friends are sensitive to human rights; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be my friends.
I wonder whether the love of dangerous dogs and the fear of the cats who are by and large indifferent to us isn’t an instinct acquired over millions of years. Our ancestors, armed at best with flint-headed spears, spent countless millennia at the mercy of feline predators larger, more powerful and more terrifying than 100-pound mountain lions (the extinct European lion, panthera leo fossilis, was taller, stronger, and and a foot and a half longer that the modern African lion). Some 50,000 years ago, an ancient Einstein conceived the idea of domesticating wolves and selecting their population for useful traits. Humans and proto-dogs started to cohabit; dwellings and caves came to be littered with coprolites. Co-evolution began, and over the course of time, dogs and humans came to be sensitive to each other's traits. Those early dogs were our first allies on this lonely, hostile planet. They could raise a ruckus when a couple or three lionesses prowled about the cave door.
We're indebted to dogs and so we tolerate their bad habits. By the same token, the over-hasty cry to kill the mountain lions is also an inheritance from our fearful ancestors.
Leave a Reply