The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

What immortal hand or eye dare Photoshop thy fearful symmetry?

A tiger's scientific name is Panthera tigris. There are several subspecies, though not so many as there used to be, and one is the South China tiger, Panthera tigris amoyensis. It's said to be the “stem tiger,” the one from which other subspecies diverged. (Which doesn't imply that it has stayed unchanged since then.)

Sadly for the South China tiger, Mao Tse-Tung took against it in 1959, called it an enemy of the people, and instituted eradication programs. He didn't like flies or rats, either, but they resisted eradication better than tigers. “Paper tiger” is an old Chinese phrase for something that only looks scary. (Mao famously used it to describe the US and the Soviet Union.) Actually, real tigers never qualified as enemies of the people of China. The threat posed by real tigers was a paper tiger that Mao used as a propaganda device. They made great posters.

By the time the Chinese government, long after Mao, decided to preserve the magnificent South China tiger, they couldn't find any, except in zoos. It was said that a few survived. China had tiger expert Ron Tilson do a survey to tell them how many were left. The answer: zero.

The government also offered a reward for evidence of a wild South China tiger.

Not giving up, China's State Forestry Administration planned a system of tiger preserves. The idea is to set up protected areas, stock them with suitable tiger prey, and then add captive-born South China tigers from zoo stock. Programs were started to teach captive-born cubs hunting skills, one in Fujian province, one in South Africa. (Perhaps you have been told that there are no tigers in Africa. There aren't, except the ones doing junior year abroad.) The plan includes releasing tigers into preserves as part of the 2008 Olympic Games ballyhoo.

Then, last October, exciting news came that, despite Mao (and poachers), there were still wild tigers in South China. Zhou Zhenglong, a farmer and hunter in Shaanxi province, came forth with photos of a tiger in the woods, and of its footprints.

Wow! Press conference! Cash prize for Zhou!

Experts at the Shaanxi Forest Administration Bureau confirmed the pictures were authentic.  "[T]he tiger has been found again after more than 20 years." It was inspiring news.

But some people in China's internet community weren't so inspired. They pointed out certain discrepancies. Why did the tiger look so shiny? Why was its pose identical in each photo? Shaanxi officials stood by Zhou and their South China tiger. The internet investigators kept clamoring. Why did the tiger not only look exactly the same in each photo, but also, excuse us, why did it look exactly the same as this tiger poster?

Alas, it turns out that Zhou Zhenglong, that simple farmer, had employed his humble computer graphics skills, an old poster, and a fake tiger foot to produce his pictures and claim the prize. The Shaanxi forestry department backed down.

Ugh! New press conference! Jail for Zhou! Bitter references to paper tigers!

The South China tiger continues not to roam Shaanxi province, wild and free. But there are wild tigers in China. Up in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, bordering Russia, a few North China tigers roam. Their subspecies is Panthera tigris altaica, also called the Amur tiger or the Siberian tiger. They are beginning to get protection.

I'd like to see both the North and South China tigers protected. The South China tiger will first have to be reintroduced, a pathbreaking event. Since this zoo-bred population, deriving from few animals, will surely have slightly different bloodlines than the population that used to range South China, I suggest designating it a new subspecies. In honor of its history: Panthera tigris papyrus, the paper tiger.

Brother Wolf, You're Not Eating. Aren't You Hungry?

The Italian wolf, Canis lupus italicus, is doing better than it was before. In the 1970s there were guessed to be only about 100 wolves surviving in the mountainous parts of Italy. Now there are more like 500 or 600 and they're fanning out into France and Switzerland

An Italian wolf likes to hunt medium-sized prey like deer, boar, and chamois. If those aren't available, sure, rabbit is fine. And Wikipedia says of the Italian wolf  that it has “adapted well in some urbanised areas and as such, will usually not ignore refuse or domestic animals.”

This is clearly accurate, not only because St. Francis of Assisi made a deal with the sheep-killing, man-eating Wolf of Gubbio that it would stop its destructive ways if the townspeople of Gubbio would give it food instead, but in light of an observation I found in a paper about Italian wolves and foxes in the Abruzzo. The authors were remarking that the foxes seemed to be nervous around wolves. “Uneasy.”

They gave as an example an account of a wolf, a fox, and a cat all eating at a garbage dump outside the village of Caramanico one November day. The cat carefully stayed out of the way of the fox and the wolf. The fox carefully stayed out of the way of the wolf. The wolf, one gathers, strolled calmly wherever it chose, despot of the dump. The fox was jumpy, constantly looking up to see what the wolf was doing. Whenever the wolf moved, the fox rushed over to the place where the wolf had been, to see what it had been eating.

Eventually the wolf, the fox, and presumably even the cat went away, and the researchers inspected the dump, seeking dietary data. They found that all three predators had been eating from a giant heap of discarded spaghetti.

Okay, I like spaghetti, but that is sad. I figure those Italian wolves invading France and Switzerland are young wolves looking for better territories, asking themselves where the vast ancient forests are (the ones full of deer), and grumbling that pasta is good, pasta is great, but you know what? After a while you don't want to eat pasta for every. single. meal.

Let's Lurk Behind these Ecotourists

It's hard work being high on the food chain, and predators are always looking for labor-saving ways to catch prey. In national parks in Kenya, the lions have not only gotten blasé about trucks full of ecotourists, they've started to use them as cover. They'll sneak around behind a vehicle and then rush out to lunge at a wildebeest. Imagine you're the wildebeest – one minute you're making sure they get your good profile, and the next minute you're running for your life.

In the Canadian Pacific, biologist Alexandra Morton was observing killer whales. She was disconcerted by the way one of them, Kwatsi, kept surfacing directly behind her boat. “No matter how I tried to alter my course, his 5-foot fin stayed right behind my engine. After a while I realized what he was doing: Kwatsi was using my boat and its engine noise as a moving hunting blind.”

Great minds think alike. “These humans mean me no harm. They are friendly! Friends help friends catch dinner.”

I performed a similar function once, without actually being a human shield. Driving across Florida, I pulled over to eat lunch at a picnic table, and tossed crumbs from my sandwich to minnow-sized fish in the waterway next to the road. The tiny fish were thrilled with the crumbs and mobbed them enthusiastically. As I gazed at them I heard a small clomp! and then another clomp! Two minuscule alligators had cruised up, disguised as minuscule floating logs, and were snapping up the fish I had lured to their doom. Oh yeah, they call this road Alligator Alley.

To be fair, I should have thrown the fish an alligator purse. They could have nibbled on it after it decayed a bit. But I didn't have an alligator purse. That's how it is. You try to pack everything, and you pack all this stuff you never use, and then the one thing you don't pack, you wish you had. It's hard to be a responsible ecotourist.

She's My Mother and My Sister: The Hidden Lives of Mountain Lions

Often when a cat does something in secret, it's a wicked thing. A certain cat belonging to a relative recently discovered how to enter a lidded hamper full of clean folded laundry, urinate on the laundry, and leap out without knocking over the hamper or otherwise being detected. Until my relative wanted a clean shirt.

But sometimes a cat does a good thing in secret.

Cougars are amazingly secretive creatures. You can spend years in cougar country without spotting a cougar, though chances are good that cougars spotted you. (Cougars are the same as mountain lions, and the same as pumas. Puma concolor.)

So there's not nearly as much information about the customs of cougars as there is about the customs of wolves or the folkways of bears. But new technology is helping. In Wyoming, biologists who put radio collars on cougars are learning things that change the picture of the species.

There was a nice story in the  Jackson Hole News & Guide about a female cougar they call F27. She was leading her invisible life, raising three 8-month-old cubs, in wild terrain along the Gros Ventre River. Biologists couldn't watch her, but because she wears a GPS/radio collar that reports her location four times a day, they knew what she was up to. Nearby, another female cougar, F1, was raising her own three 20-month-olds, until she was shot by a hunter. (How do hunters find cougars if they're so elusive? Dogs.)

F27 adopted the orphaned kittens, giving her a sit-com family of six. Because most of the cubs had been collared too, researchers could tell that they all ate, slept, and played together. Since then, one of the adoptees (F69) has declared herself an emancipated minor and gone out on her own, but the rest are still one family.

Biologists used to think cougars were almost perfectly solitary animals, but the more we learn, the more convivial they turn out to be. “This solitary carnivore is actually pretty social when it comes down to it,” researcher Howard Quigley told the News & Guide.

Naturally, there may be selective advantages to this kindly behavior. For one thing, it's likely that F1 was related to F27, so that F27 wasn't adopting perfect strangers, but biological kin. It's possible that F1, an older cat, was F27's mother. If so, F27 has adopted her half-siblings—and she's promoting her own genes. But that doesn't mean that's why she did it. I find the idea of adopting cougar kittens very tempting, and yet there are no cougars on either side of my family.

Quigley also hypothesizes that a large cougar family, especially one including the two hulking male cubs from the adoption, might be able to defend their kills from local wolf packs. It often happens that a cougar will kill a deer or an elk, eat some, step away to nap, and get up repeatedly to eat a little more. But if wolves find it, the pack will gobble it, and a cougar won't dare to rush up yowling “That's mine! Get your own!” Five cougars, though—a cat pack—might able to hold onto their kills.

It's virtuous to do good deeds, and even more virtuous to do good deeds by stealth. (Most of the time.) By this standard of Maimonides, F27 deserves double praise, once for good behavior, and again for being furtive with it. She's not in it for the glory. The only reason we know about it is the GPS data – and it wasn't F27's idea to wear a radio collar.

The truth, I suspect, is that F27 didn't adopt those children because it was the right thing to do. She adopted them for the same reason I would have been tempted – because she liked them and wanted to have them around and take care of them.

So maybe it's not pure virtue. But at least F27 stays out of laundry hampers.