Monday, November 30, 2009
I TOOK my grandchildren to see Fantastic Mr Fox, the film based on a Roald Dahl story.
Our chicken-stealing hero is seen as a loveable rogue, a cute hoor and a chancer.
His behaviour resonates with a wild anarchic streak deep down in all of us, a delicious urge to throw caution to the winds, kick the traces and break all the rules.
Foxy is fiction but two cousins of his were not. ‘Old Three-toes’ was an American wolf who lost a toe to the lethal jaws of a steel gin-trap almost 100 years ago, her paw-prints being immediately recognisable to trackers from then on.
Accused of killing livestock and with a bounty on her head, Three-toes was pursued through South Dakota for 13 years. She was killed in 1925.
Las Margaritas, a wolf who lived in New Mexico, became even more famous. She lost two of her toes in a trap. Very intelligent, she taunted her persecutors by uncovering the traps they laid for her and spraying them with urine. A hunter named McBride became so obsessed with Margaritas he spent 11 months on horseback tracking her distinctive foot-prints over the vast distances she covered.
Margaritas seemed invincible but she had an Achilles’ heel; obsessed with burnt-out camp-fires, she couldn’t resist raking through the ashes when she found one.
When McBride tweaked this, he set a trap, lit a fire on top of it and killed poor Margaritas, one of the last wolves in the southern United States. The last Irish one was killed near Mount Leinster in 1785.
But let’s not be too sentimental about wolves; their behaviour can sometimes be shocking. When the leader of a wolf-pack dies, lone males apply for the vacant position. The interview board, composed entirely of females, may offer him the job but, if they don’t, they usually tear him to pieces!
This ancestor of the domestic dog is gone from most of its former haunts in Europe and Asia but, with more enlightened public attitudes and conservation measures, the species should survive, at least in national parks.
Nor are foxes in trouble. Despite relentless persecution everywhere, the madra rua, like Foxy in the film, is well able to hold his own.
Other wild dogs face a more uncertain future.
Africa’s hunting dog, for example, is in serious trouble. Widely persecuted by ever-encroaching humans, it’s vulnerable to distemper and competes with larger carnivores for increasingly scarce resources. Numbers have declined dramatically; there may be less than 3,000 left in Africa.
Classified as ‘critically endangered’, this canine is rarely seen nowadays which is a pity, because it’s a fascinating animal.
The adult hunting dog is about a metre long with large ears and a black face. Sometimes called the ‘painted wolf’, the coat is a mixture of dark brown white and grey patches.
No two animals have the same markings. Like most dogs, it lives in packs, roaming widely and hunting co-operatively.
Hunting dog society is exceedingly odd. Among social mammals, generally, males rule the roost, the ‘top-dog’ or ‘alpha male’ getting the lion’s share of matings. As they grow in strength and maturity, young males come into conflict with their father and are forced to leave the pack.
African hunting dogs, however, do things differently; the alpha female is boss.
She won’t tolerate challenges to her authority so it’s the young females who are forced out of the pack. Males stay on but must compete for the boss-lady’s favours.
This leads to two separate peck-orders, one for the females and another for the males. Dominance, however, is usually maintained without bloodshed which is just as well because the hunting dog’s ‘bite quotient’, the power of the jaws in relation to an animal’s weight, is the highest of any carnivorous mammal.
Yet you find none of the injuries which disfigure the bodies of other pack animals, such as the broken antlers of rutting stags or the scars on bull seals’ coats.
The matriarch hunting-dog breeds in an underground den, with subservient males dancing attendance on her and bringing her food. They act as baby-sitters when she goes hunting with the pack.
If the matriarch dies, the pack may split in two, the sexes going their separate ways.
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