HABITS AND HAIR OF CARNIVORES.
Cats.
Another large and important order of hair-clad mammals must now be
considered, and the same course as in the case of the ungulates will be
followed; the two leading families of Felidæ and Canidæ will be taken,
and a type of each examined in reference to its hair-distribution.
Lydekker gives about 100 pages to the cats and 80 to the dogs, so from
the point of view of general biology there seems little to choose
between them. The bears, racoons, weasel tribe, seals and walruses may
be put out of account. They are painfully old-fashioned or Normal as to
the arrangement of their hair.
First things first is always a good rule, and there is little doubt
where we ought to begin among the families and species Carnivores.
Among Felidæ one cannot unfortunately choose the harmless necessary
cat of tiles, areas, firesides and ladies’ laps, to say nothing of
those lovers of cats like Huxley who would never eject his cat from
his armchair if she had been there before him. It is true that we know
much of her daily and nightly mode of life--many of us too much--and in
that respect one could set to work with confidence in interpreting her
hair patterns, but on account of her long and thick coat we can only
speculate what patterns or innovations of her family uniform she might
have devised; but here we are not concerned with romance or the “might
have beens.” It will be remarked that one perforce unconsciously calls
the domestic cat “she” as sailors do their ships. I understand that in
Somersetshire they call everything of their common life “he” except
the tom-cat who is always “she.” The reasons for the use of genders in
different creatures would be an interesting little study.
Lion.
The King of Beasts will, therefore, be the hero of this chapter.
Lydekker tells us that the lion, like many heroes of antiquity who are
no heroes to their valets, in spite of his character for grandeur,
nobility and courage, has been subjected to the merciless higher
criticism of modern travellers, Selous, Livingstone, and others, and
he has been shown up as cowardly by nature and mean in his general
conduct. It remains for some learned scholar to whitewash the hyæna, as
someone has done for Caesar Borgia, and to put him in the place of the
lion. But Lydekker does not admit that this disparagement of the lion
goes very far. He _is_ the King of Beasts by grandeur of appearance,
strength and ferocity.
[Illustration: Fig. 36.--Lioness, showing by arrows the direction of
hair-streams on muzzle, parting from one another at the level of the
orbits.]
The lion’s skin is covered by close fine hair, except in certain
seasons in cold climates, and is easily studied. There are three
regions where this representative cat has departed from the Primitive
mammalian slope of hair, and the figure of a lioness shows two of
these, the peculiar _downward_ trend of hair on the muzzle and the
whorl on the shoulder. Fig. 37 shows the third, A C, on the middle of
the back as well as the whorls at D.
Snout of the Cats
The muzzle of all the cats is very short and broad, and at the level
of the orbits shows a peculiar reversal of the hair from the rest of
the head, for instead of being like that of a dog in which the hair
slopes all the way _upwards_ from the tip of the snout to the rest of
the head, it breaks away from this normal type and passes in a uniform
close stream to the edge of the wet muzzle. The arrows in Fig. 36 show
this change. One asks at once the reason for such an unexpected trend
of the hair on a small area, when the carnivores in other groups have
a uniform slope towards the head from their more pointed muzzles. The
cats have discarded the earlier family pattern and for a reason which
does credit to their self-respect. Very few naturalists know, or have
described so well the meticulous care which animals take of their
coats, as Miss Frances Pitt did in the _National Review_, where she
gave a delightful account of “How Animals Clean Themselves.” The toilet
of the lion she did not discuss, perhaps for prudential reasons. Her
account dealt chiefly with a number of small hairy mammals and lower
forms of life. Watch a dog cleaning his coat and you will see the
ingenious way in which he pushes his head and body forward as he lies
on some rough surface such as grass, or our best drawing-room mat. _He_
can thus clean his snout and other parts, but no cat adopts so rough
and ready a method. We know how long and how scrupulously she licks her
fur to clean it in the parts she can reach and cleans her head with her
paws. But with such a broad snout as she and the larger cats possess
she cannot clean the short surface of it in the manner of the dog. So
she “dresses” this little surface in a special way of rubbing it from
the neighbourhood of her eyes _forward_ with her paws. And so we may
assume does the chieftain of her clan finish off this little bit of
his toilet. We are so much accustomed to dwell on the naturally clean
habits of a domestic cat that without such an account as Miss Frances
Pitt has given we should have hesitated to transfer the character for
personal cleanliness from the domesticated to the wild cat. If this be
not the sole reason for the course of the hair-stream I have described,
I am at a loss to imagine any other.
Lion’s Neck.
On each side of the lion’s neck where it joins the shoulder there is
a well-developed whorl, and this as a rule is extended forwards into
a feathering (Figs. 36 and 37), and ends in a crest on the lower part
of the side of the neck. It is common also in tigers and leopards.
This is, as elsewhere, a record of strong and oft-repeated action in
powerful muscles which lie beneath it, and bears witness to the great
functional activity of the fore-limbs as compared with the hind-limbs
in these three formidable cats. It is not an animal pedometer, but may
perhaps be termed an _ergograph_.
[Illustration: Fig. 37.--Back of Lion, showing reversed area of hair
with whorl at A. Feathering B. Crest C.]
Lion’s Back.
The strange pattern of reversed hair (Fig. 37) is much the most notable
of the three peculiarities found on the lion’s skin. It consists of a
whorl (A) lying over the lumbar region in the middle line which expands
into a very broad feathering (B) and terminates in a crest (C) a short
distance behind the level of the shoulders. This is not found in any
of the numerous short-haired Felidæ that I have examined, and it is a
feature which demands explanation. I know no other mammal, ungulate or
carnivore, that has any pattern resembling this; indeed, if one were
to photograph the pattern in question and a few inches of the skin
surrounding it, and be told that it came from the back of a mammal
one could not doubt that it was a hall-mark of the King of Beasts. It
would not produce that thrill of intense interest which we felt at
the meeting on 7th May, 1901, at the Zoological Society of London,
when from a water colour sketch and three pieces of skin taken from
the body of a hitherto unknown mammal, Sir Harry Johnston proceeded
to reconstruct the Okapi, at first dubbed knight, as a member of the
Equidæ, but later promoted downwards to the Giraffidæ. But one could do
no less, with some knowledge of the hair of mammals, than reconstruct
from such a photograph a large, powerful and ferocious carnivore, and
where but in the lion can the greatest example of those attributes be
found? I say this advisedly, for this remarkable pattern of the lion’s
back is as much a stamp of his moral or mental quality as the Inguinal
Pedometer is of the locomotive _rôle_ in life of _equus caballus_.
I hear the sharp voice of the critic here, “Come, come, you may have
shown reason for the latter, but how on earth do mental and moral
qualities of an animal come into your scheme?” Well, we have in this
pattern of the lion’s back to deal with a unique phenomenon for the
production of which neither pressure, nor friction, nor gravitation,
nor underlying muscular traction will account. Nevertheless, it is
a result of muscular action of a rare kind. Who does not know the
striking appearance of the hair along the centre of a short-haired
dog when he bristles up with rage or fear, or both combined, at the
sight of a foe? This common event has its own mechanical cause, though
it is one strictly governed by the mental and moral qualities of
the dog, and we see the vivid proof before us of the action of the
minute _arrectores pili_, in this particular region of the dog. It is
precisely in the same situation that the special pattern of the lion’s
hair is found. It is not for nothing that Nature has provided every
tiny hair of the mammalian skin with that insignificant little band of
muscle which lies within the hair-pit, and is attached to the sloping
hair on its posterior side, and thus when it contracts serves to drag
it into an erect position. I refrain from discussing what may be held
to be the survival value, under the theory of selection, of this power
of the _arrectores pili_ to confer on the possessor an added appearance
of ferocity and general frightfulness. This is quite a likely
explanation of the presence of these little muscles. Be that as it may
the _modus operandi_ of the reversed hair which has become fixed on the
lion’s back is made clear, theory of origin apart. And I submit that
the presence of it in this region in this animal _is_ a stamp of his
persistently ferocious nature, as much as the various peculiarities of
arrangement of hair on man’s eyebrows in a previous chapter are of the
mental and moral habits of the individual man. As rulers of old used,
in their genial fashion, to brand a supposed or actual criminal on his
shoulder or forehead, so is the lion branded with an hereditary mark of
his nature and the past life of himself and his ancestors. I doubt not
that if short-haired terriers were living a wild life among numerous
foes their bristling hair would have become fixed in a similar fashion.
I would only here draw the attention of the reader to the fact that
this reversed area of hair on the lion’s back cannot be held to add to
the general frightfulness of the possessor. It would be invisible to
an approaching foe, as it lies hidden behind the great head and mane.
This pattern on the lion’s back will be referred to later in a somewhat
different connection.