The Great Chain of Life

8. Undeveloped Potentialities

8. Undeveloped Potentialities THE CIVILIZED ANIMAL "THERE ARE many arguments, none of them very good, for having a snake in the house." So Mr. Will Cuppy once wrote, though he was gracious (or is it cynical?) enough to add: "Considering what some do pet, I don>t see why they should draw the line at snakes.» Nevertheless one of my friends and neighbors has k.ept reptiles since he was seven years old and at this moment he has in his house a whole roomful, including some of the largest and most venomous of our native species. I have seen him stopped suddenly during a casual evening walk in the desert by a faint whir; seen him drop to the ground with a flashlight and then rise after a few seconds with a three-foot rattler held firmly and triumphantly just behind the head. But it is some of his other pets - not of the sort to which Mr. Cuppy rather seems to be alluding - which concern me at the moment. The doorknob on his snake room is placed 130 THE G REA T C H A I N 0 F L I F E too high to be reached by his three children, of whom the eldest is now five, but he has reared free in the house two Arizona wildcats which, until they got too big, the children lugged about as though they were unusually phlegmatic tabbies . Despite the dire prophecies of neighbors, nothing untoward happened to the children; and as for the cats, they went the way of many a domestic Tom. They took to staying out all night; then to staying away for several days at a time; and, finally they did not come home at all. The last time my friend saw one of them he was up a telephone pole about a mile from the house and the other came out of the brush to the call, "Puss, puss." Their current successor is an eleven-pound, five-month-old male of the same species who is even more completely a member of the family. He is housebroken and most of his behavior is precisely that of a domestic cat. He is very playful and, like many house cats, he walks about the edge of the bathtub while the children are being bathed, apparently fascinated by the human being's strange lack of distaste for water. When he makes a playful leap from five feet away to land on your chest or lap, the impact is considerable; but in many ways he is gentler than a kitten, or, perhaps one should say, seems more aware that his teeth and claws are potentially dangerous. Unlike most kittens, he makes "velvet paws" the inviolable rule and when he kicks with his hind legs in response to being tickled on the belly he keeps the murderous claws of his hind feet carefully sheathedas a house cat usually does not. I am not suggesting that always and for everybody a wild- U N D EVE LOP E D POT E N T I A LIT I E S 131 cat is a safer pet than Felis domestica. It may very well be that the adults are undependable; that they may, as is often said, be capable of sudden flashes of savagery; or, that at the best they are likely to have an inadequate idea of their strength and weight. But to play with so gentle a specimen of what is commonly thought one of the wildest of wild animals is to wonder just how much justification there is for loose talk about "natural ferocity.~~ What is the "true nature" of this beast? Or is the question as badly phrased as it is when you ask about the "true nature of man"? In both cases the only proper answer may be that both are capable of many different things and that to judge the potentialities of the wildcat by what he is like when truly wild is as misleading as it would be to judge the potentialities of man by studying only the behavior of an Australian bushman. I have never agreed with those enthusiasts who maintain that a man is "nothing but" what his social environment has made him. But I most certainly do believe that such environment has a good deal to do with his behavior. And though the extent to which the same thing is...