jamieproctor.ca

As per usual, I have completed a course.  As per usual, I believe that my final exam was 85% desperate floundering and 15% filling out simple definitions while feeling smug.  In this case, it was on aboriginal cultures of North America.  So a little depressing, but interesting.  Also as per usual, I will generously share my misconceptions and useless notes that did me so much good a few days ago. Quite a lot of these will be from things I haven’t known of or cared about for over four months, so there’s an added fact-filter there too. 

You have failed to impress Sitting Bull in the slightest.

First off, let me tell you about culture areas.  Culture areas are what you get when you take a map and divide it into big lumps, then stand back, squint, and say “I guess the guys in there sort of live similarly kind of really.”
Okay, not really.  Culture areas are based around a few ideas that work together.  First off, in an environment, people will probably use the stuff in it.  Second, they’ll probably use it in a way that’s useful.  Third, if they find out someone else is doing something neat (“GRINDING the acorns for flour, as opposed to stuffing them in your ears, you say?….”), they’ll probably try it out themselves.  The upshot of this is that groups living in the same broad vicinity of each other, within the same environment, will likely exploit the same resources and share certain methods of doing so through diffusion.  That’s the concept of culture areas, really – you live in sort of the same place as some other people, you’ll all probably have broad similarities.  Naturally, this isn’t as easy as it looks, don’t try this at home kids, etcetera, etcetera, excrement. 

Now that we’re all up to speed and sped up, here’s a vague overview of the culture areas within North America.  Probably.

The Arctic

These bears can't imagine why someone would need so much metal to go swimming in subzero water.

The place: The Arctic is a fun place to live.  There’s not much to eat, so if you CAN eat something you’d damned well better.  A lot of it’s going to be meat – there’s a reason the polar bear is the only real pure carnivore of its family, you know.  Plant life on the tundra packs everything it’s got into a neurotic and paranoid summer of buoyant growth before dropping into a pathetic coma afterwards. 
The people: You can lop the Arctic’s inhabitants into three big crude groups: Aleuts (who lived in…well, the Aleutian Islands, and part of the Alaskan Peninsula), Yup’ik (south-southwest Alaska and the Asian shore of the Bering Strait), and Inuit (the entire top of North America, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland’s coasts).  The Aleutians and Pacific Yu’pik liked a lot of seafood – and they had a lot of seafood, enough to get some complex society going, with chiefs and slaves and commoners and everything! –  and the inland Yu’pik and Inuit less so, with more caribou and such in their diets. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Global warming and the Arctic are playing happy funtime pals, and there’s oil in them thar hills. 

The Subarctic

Too pretty to be funny.

The place: Strictly speaking, what you’re in if you walk south of the little dotted line that says “Arctic” on it.  The Subarctic covers a lot of Canada, with forests being more and more evergreeny the farther north you go (near the top, lots of spruce).  Usually there isn’t a lot of rain or other precipitation.  The eastern Subarctic is heavily defined by the Canadian Shield (the hugeass rock base that surrounds Hudson’s Bay on all sides), and has all sorts of bogs, swamps, lakes, and rivers, speckled with fur-bearing animals, fish, moose, caribou, and all sorts of other stuff (like blueberries – everybody loves blueberries).   The western side of the Subarctic in Canada wanders a bit north of the treeline into tundra territory, with lots of lich and nary a tree to be found.  Caribou are all over the place, making their meat a must over here, spiced up with fish and migrating birds and whatever else you can find.  Which includes musk ox.  Everybody loves musk oxen!
The people:  From here on we’re running on examples of one or two cultures per area.  In this case, the eastern Subarctic has the Cree, the western the Chipewyan/Dene (“Chipewyan” being a Cree word for “pointed skins,” which apparently refers to the dangling points on poncho-like thingies the men wore), who lived spread thinly across tundra eating lots of caribou and a good deal of fish.  There are quite a lot of Cree – their geographic territory has actually increased since contact, and they’re one of the largest First Nations groups in North America – but they’ve rubbed elbows with Europeans for so long that figuring out their precontact lifestyles and beliefs in any sort of great detail is like searching for semidigested food in Gandhi’s gullet. The Chipewyan were and are a lot less numerous, and it took quite some time for any Europeans to run into them – none of whom managed to get back really reliable input.  After a while they migrated into trapping as a business, some of them went a bit farther south, and they absorbed a rag-bag of miscellaneous concepts, beliefs, and attitudes – notably from the Cree. 
How they’re/have been screwed: The James Bay Cree in particular are stuck in an off-again-on-again-off-a-hahahahaha-no-it’s-on-again dispute with the federal government and Quebec over why exactly they would prefer not having giant honking hydroelectric dams built near them, which they’ve kept on top of (which may sort of kind of not really have been possibly worked out..to a degree).  The Chipewyan are spared such issues, because they already went through the whole decimated-by-disease-and-forced-schooling-of-children-far-away-from-their-parents things (in the 1800s and 1935+ respectively) and have decided they’re through with it. 

California 

Once upon a time, this was in no way associated with Hollywood.

The place: California’s geography is all over the place – high, low, desert, forest, barren, fertile.  Depending on where you’re living you’re grinding mesquite beans into nutritious mush, gathering acorns to make a deliciously gritty flour, fishing for salmon, or maybe hunting sea lions.  Surfing, however, simply was not done. 
The people: The California culture area is pretty varied, so the Cahuilla end up as the  standard example simply by dint of having more information about them than anyone else.  Such as about the vast, fresh harvest of money the Palm Springs Cahuilla reap every day from thousands of suckers entering their casinos.  There’s three rough population divisions of Cahuilla – desert (Palm Springs), mountain, and pass.  The desert Cahuilla own billions of dollars worth of land, two casinos, a spa hotel, and whatever other stuff they feel like. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Exactly the way you’d expect any minority group owning a lot of money to be.  Technically they’re tax-exempt, but there’s an awful lot of pressure to give more and more cuts to the state and such.  There’s also the fun situation of being a major gambling player in a state that sends around $9 billion worth of business to Las Vegas every year.  They aren’t friendly competitors. 

The Great Basin

Not quite Mars, but the next best thing.

The place: The Great Basin is named for a fun little feature of its geography: not a single one of its waterways flows into the sea.  Instead, it’s pretty much evaporation or nothing.  Alas, the culture area of the Great Basin extends slightly outside the basin itself, which takes up a big chunk of the American West including most of Nevada, lots of Utah, and bits and pieces of Mexico, California, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon.  It’s not all hot sagebrush and steppe though – just nearly all.  The higher the land, the more precipitation and coolness it gets, and there’s some highland trees that make a decent living partway up the mountain ranges, to say nothing of the flora you’ll get along the waterways. 
The people: Our item today is the Western Shoshone, who were one of those peoples that weren’t let in on the whole “Hello, melanin-deprived individuals are taking over your stuff” thing until a bit of the way into the 1800s – around 1828-1829, to be precise, when the Ogden party came along the Humboldt River to do some trapping.  They said they were a bunch of poor, wretched jerks that had to eat roots or starve to death, then their livestock ate some of their edible foods and they left.  When the next bunch of trappers arrived, the Shoshone were somewhat annoyed, and told them to give them food and horses or else.  The trappers politely disagreed by killing some of them, and relations didn’t exactly go anywhere mellow from then on. 
To be fair, the Shoshone DID eat roots..and seeds, and hares, and rabbits, and antelope, and nuts, and just about anything else that was around, from migratory birds to bighorn sheep.  They were very flexible. 
How they’re/have been screwed: The Ogden party was really the best indicator of things to come the Western Shoshone could’ve recieved.  Miners and settlers passed through to California and Oregon, using up resouces along the way, and both they and the Shoshone had their hands full quietly murdering each other out of resentment.  Salt Lake City sprung up, and ranchers and farmers started taking up good food and water.  The 1862 Homestead Act sent more and more people after land, and a lot of it was Western Shoshone land.  Shoshone collecting silver at Battle Mountain for crafts were displaced without compensation in 1862 up until the early 2000s – during which time the miners at the silver deposits were piping in lots of local water, using vast amounts of charcoal, and heaving around heavy equipment.  A reserve at Ruby Valley was made, was crappy, and was abandoned, and the solution was apparently to build a fort (Fort Ruby, naturally) and systematically kill Shoshone to make them calm down a little.  The Treaty of Ruby Valley eventually gave the Western Shoshone some sort of half-assed right to their own land and some supplies every year that often were stolen or stolen and sold back to them, in exchange for agreeing not to molest any settlers, which they grudgingly abided by. 
On the bright side, smallpox wasn’t as nasty as it could’ve been.  Its 1860 arrival was blunted by the Western Shoshone living mostly in small, disparate groups, and a quick federal vaccination program.  

The Plateau

Yep, that's a plateau all right.

The place: The Plateau itself consists of the Interior Plateau of British Columbia – the continuation of said plateau into the states is the Columbia Plateau.  Plateau, plateau, plateau – yes, by now I believe it’s lost all meaning in my head. 
The Plateau is a diverse, higgledy-piggledy environment, with a continental climate and vegetation gradiating from forested Upper Columbia to mixed coniferous Fraser River grasslands and down to sagebrush steppe in Middle Columbia.  The main connecting features between its many peoples, tangled up as they are in its diverse environment, are as follows:

3 there corresponded nicely with Columbia and its river systems (the Fraser and the Columbia), so for the most part that worked out. 
The people: The plateau’s peoples, as said above, were nicely diverse.  In Upper Columbia you had the Northern Okanagan and the Ktunaxa/Kootenai; in the Fraser River area the Salishan, and Middle Columbia had the Sahaptians and some Salishan outliers.  Most of them weren’t living in enormous groups – a chieftain would lead a large village, or a few connected small ones.  Beyond the salmon, plant harvesting was a biggie – and the acquisition of them was half-gathering, half-horticulture – such as yellow avalanche lilies, which were harvested before having their bulbs and tips replanted, often in good soil where they wouldn’t be able to find their way naturally, or at least with any ease. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Well, the BC gold rushes of the 1850s-1860s didn’t exactly do ANYONE any good, but it was especially hard on the St’at’imx, Secwepemc, and  Okanagan.  The smallpox epidemic of ’62 wasn’t a helpful followup, and by the time the gold rushers finally left in the 1870s settlers had followed along.  By the 1880s the locals had been turfed out of most of the most fertile land. 
The Kootenai of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, as a small example, were encouraged to relocate from their prime, luscious valley bottom land to the Flathead Reservation of Montana.  Those who weren’t quite gullible enough to leave were grudginly allocated their land by 1887, which was divided into tiny little allotments that they were told to farm, ignoring the issue of it being too small for farming or their more traditional gathering practices.  By the time a few generations of inheritance had passed by, the allotments were tiny beyond belief and mostly leased to farmers in what were occasionally bills of sale. 

The Plains 

Back in MY day, we HAD to walk through the tall grass. And beat off the 'raptors with HALF a stick.

The place: The plains that are permanently known as “great,” these formerly-grassed stretches of absolute Flat occupy a nice core of North America, from Texas to Alberta.  You can also call them “prairies” because that is much more stylish and Canadian*.  Whatever.  They consist of lots and lots of rolling grasslands, or did, before we wandered in and replaced an awful lot of it with crops.  To do this we had to evict an awful lot of people. 
The people: A grossly abbreviated list of peoples that at one time or another have been on the prairies would include the Crow, Blackfoot, Bungi, Assiniboine, eventually the Plains Cree, the Comanche, and about seven zillion others, give or take a few.  Some roamed around the shortgrass plains (sometimes with dogs to haul stuff), some farmed along the eastern edges. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Well, there’s the obvious issue of loads of them rather enjoying bison, leading to the whole attempted extinction of them and such, but there’s a bit more.  Interestingly, part of the issue was horses.  The shortgrass nomads took to them like ducks to water, and it’s interesting to note that the word for horse in many plains languages means something along the lines of “big/great/better/AWESOMETASTIC dog.”  A horse was like a dog, but better in every conceivable way – it hauled more, could carry you, made travelling miles a breeze, and hunting bison was a chore no more.  The less nomadic villagers agreed, used it to hunt buffalo, and were promptly beaten to a pulp whenever they tried that shit by nomads, who weren’t tied down to stupidly vulnerable houses and crops and didn’t appreciate the competition. 
So, the nomads got nice toys at least?  Wrong.  The farther north you got, the more likely your horses wouldn’t make it through the winter.  The Blackfoot in particular got it hard – only the southernmost branch of them, the Piegans, got anything near parity, and they did it with help from living in the warm-wind’d chinook belt by the Eastern Rockies.  The Crow were similarly advantaged, living in a cold, northern area near the Rockies that nevertheless had the Windy River Basin and some woody riversides for overwintering.  Everyone else near them (like the Blackfoot and Gros Ventres) just had to deal with replacing horses constantly, and tended to take it out on them.  In general, horses were so valuable that raiding for them was common and war became common as hell – not only did those other dicks have horses YOU should have, but they were taking up grazing ground YOU should use!  Oh, and the Crow had to get guns to fight back, got guns with a free microbe bonus, died in droves, and then were nearly obliterated when the Lakotas moved into town.  Their existance from then on largely depending on clinging very closely to other people – Gros Ventres, Assiniboine, and Americans. 
Well, it was better for the southerly tribes…right?  Alas, no.  They could get loads of horses – the Comanche were veritable horse emperors for a time – but they competed fiercely for grazing ground with the very buffalo that, thanks to the horses, was being overhunted.  To throw another wrench into the bargain, the previously eglatarian societies had realized that everyone being equal worked only when everyone was poor, and now they had tons of horses.  Societal stratification went from zero to through the roof. 
Pretty much the only people that got pure mileage out of the horses was the Lakota Sioux, and that was because they had the lousy luck to live in an unusually chilly spot with a shitty growing season.  This kept their herds on the small side – not stunted, but small – and prevented any buffalo-based collateral damage.  At least until the US army stepped in, and well, past that I think we know what happened.

(*Canadians are always stylish) 

The Northeast

The gorgeous telephone poles of the New England autumn.

The place: Or the Eastern Woodlands, if you would be so kind.  Lakes, rivers, richly mixed coniferous AND deciduous forests, teaming with game, fruits, nuts, roots, and even wild rice.  Good growin’ foods include maize, beans, and squash.  Fish and all other manner of life aquatic were eminently devourable. 
The people: Two ultra-broad groups for the most part: Algonquian-speakers and Iroquoian-speakers.  The Iroquoian-speakers farmed a little more, and the Algonquian-speakers hunted, fished, and gathered a little more, although they both dabbled in one another’s specialities quite heavily.  Groups included the Mi’kmaq (who were highly maritime-based hunter/gatherers – much more productive than land-based gathering), Huron/Wendat (Iroquoian-speaking horticulturists), and the groups of the Iroquoian Confederacy – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora, which formed the Six Nations (ditto).  Technically, the Huron/Wendat were a similar assemblage, and this kind of confederacy of tribes was sort of a thing in the area in general. 
How they’re/have been screwed: The entire Northeast coast was pretty much ground zero for most of North America’s colonialism, or at least some of the fiercest bickering over it.  The Iroquois played a game of balance-the-powers for a long time, between British, French, and American, and although they were damned careful at it, sooner or later there were always gaps in the warfare, and whenever the European powers weren’t beating each other up they were perfectly happy to start sniping at them.  The Huron allied themselves a little too closely to the French, and were sufficiently weakened by smallpox from their good missionary friends that in 1648-1649 winter attacks from the British-backed Iroquois absolutely destroyed all of Huronia as a nation and united people.  The Mi’kmaq also fell in with the French, were encouraged to strike out against the British, and in return recieved systematic genocide and some accidental bacterial fallout from their own allies (deja vu).  Peace agreements made at Halifax in the mid-1700s weren’t long-lasting or nearly enough, and the bounties on their heads thinned them down farther still.  Food and land pressure became unbearable post-1775.

The Northwest Coast

The Northwest Coast's primary artform consisted of beautifully hand-carved inadvertant stereotypes.

The place: The temperate rainforests of the Pacific coast stretch from the northish edge of California into south Alaska, and they’re filled to the brim with salmon spawning routes and more shoals, schools, and beaches of marine food than you could toss a net over and devour messily.  Add in the gratuitous quantities of red and yellow cedar prime for the chopping and shaping into, well, practically ANTHING, and you’ve got yourself a pretty serious spot to settle down and make some excellence.  Which many people did. 
The people: The first Northwest Coasters were probably among the very first people to wander into North America.  The easiest route past the glaciers that were busy throttling most of Canada (uncovering the Canadian shield from underneath all that troublesome soil in the process) was the coast, which was relatively ice-free.  The common languages of the area show some signs of age too.  The Haida, the Tlingit, the Tsimshian… all of them shared a lot in common, most notably a desire to get their hands on as much salmon as humanly possible.  Salmon was THE food, salmon oil THE condiment and preservative, and getting ahold of as much as possible every run was SERIOUS BUSINESS.  No matter how much salmon might flow, there was something like a 1,000% peak variation in salmon frequency over the four-year cycle they followed, and you can’t really risk under-fishing when you’re all clumped together using up tons of food and the winters are harsh.  Plus, if you lived in the interior, you were getting oil-poor salmon that had tuckered themselves out getting all the way inland, so you had an extra handicap. 
The Northwest Coast societies had quite a lot, and like all societies where people have a lot, some people ended up with QUITE a lot and others merely a lot.  Ranking was based on household positioning, clan segment, and clan, aided by personal merit.  There weren’t exactly classes, just lots and lots of ranks (bar slaves, but, as is the case with slaves, no one especially cared about that). 
How they’re/have been screwed: Once salmons canneries opened up on the coast (and my goodness, there were a LOT of them opening up on the coast), someone noticed that there were these uppity savages out there taking all the salmon by gumdrops and gumption we can’t have that.  Throw in abrupt efforts at controlling fisheries, reservations out of nowhere, gold mining pouring from every orifice, and in the US’s case a serious overdose of rapid “MANIFEST DESTIIIIIIIIINYYYY!” and you’ve got nothing but acres and acres of troublesomeness. 

The Southeast

There is no way to say anything about the South that is both funny and nonoffensive.

The place: The Southeast is pretty much where you’d think it’d be, and the environment likewise.  Some hunting, some fishing, some farming beans, squash, and gourds. 
The people: The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek Confederacy, and Chickasaw are jointly referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes.”   The Cherokee, who covered the most land, certainly met any standards being thrown at them – they reacted to the strange things being thrown at them (“Wait, you think every one of our villages is responsible for what the others do?  OKAY GUYS, TIME TO CENTRALIZE GOVERNMENT!”) with flexible adaptation.  They already had political parties (the reds and whites – the former expected to be war-happy young idiots, the later older and mellower) of sorts, and they organized a sort of centralized priest-state during the 1700s.  Along the way they ran into slavery, decided it bore some similarity to the way they treated war captives, and adopted it, carefully learning from escaped Cherokee slaves the best methods to squeeze the most labour out of theirs – the men became skilled slave catchers.   In 1827 they founded the Cherokee Nation, with a government modelled after that of the US.  A man named Sequoya/George Gist had invented an entire syllabary a few years earlier in 1821, and it was adopted as the nation’s written language – within no time at all, almost everyone was literte. 
How they’re/have been screwed: Unfortunately, the Cherokee still lacked the most important facet of civilization, which was being white people, and so in 1829 most of the Cherokee Nation was made into state holdings by Georgia.  In 1838 soldiers shoved whatever leftover Cherokee they could find in stockades and shipped them out to Oklahoma, or “Indian Territory.”  4,000 out of 15,000 died in the Trail of Tears.  The Qualla Indian Boundary, land purchased for them in North Carolina by allies (they couldn’t buy it themselves; I’ll let you guess why), was pretty much their last eastern holdout. 

The Southwest

If you want a more classic picture, go watch a Roadrunner cartoon or something.

The place: The Southwest is made up of bits of Utah, California, Colorado, and Texas, along with almost all of New Mexico and Arizona.  As you might guess, it’s a little hot.  And dry.  And rocky. 
The people: Groups include the Navajo/Navaho and the Pueblo peoples, which themselves include the Eastern Pueblos (Isleta, Zia, and Taos among them) and the Western Pueblos (including the Acoma, Hopi, and the Zuni). 
The Hopi didn’t move around much; their villages were small, but very stable.  To the point of insanity – Oraibi/Old Oraibi, their central village, has been settled for something like over a thousand years continuously, which makes it among the record-holders if not the record-holder of North America.  They farmed all sorts of plants (various beans, gourds, and sunflowers, maize, squash, and others), looked after wild species, and really liked the hell out of maize, because it was either that or eat about one third as much as everyone else. 
The Navaho, by contrast, only appeared as a distinct people until somewhere around 1725.  They’re numerous, highly well-known in general, and resilient – which, given where they chose to take up subsistence, seems a necessary qualification.  They’re well known for their blankets and silverworking, the former of which they help along by owning lots and lots of sheep,
How they’re/have been screwed: The Navaho EARNED that label of “resilient.”  They were pestered by slavers for ages, and when the US got ahold of New Mexico it also inherited a lot of angry Navaho, which it utterly failed to placate.  Fort-building followed, and around 1863 they gathered up 9,000 or so Navaho and herded them 300 miles to Bosque Redondo, a distant fort.  Approximately 2,000 died on the Long Walk itself or at the fort, and an equal number evaded capture – quite a few of which were nabbed by slavers.  Then the livestock reduction policies of the 1940s cut down harshly on their sheep herds to prevent erosion, jobs went flying everywhere, the herding economy went belly-up, and in general things sucked. 
The Hopi had fun under the thumb of the Spanish from about 1540 to 1680, when they joined in the Pueblo Revolt and then ran for it.  After that they lay low, about eight hundred at their lowest ebb near 1755, many surviving only by living with the Zuni.  Navaho land disputes, erosion, and lots of smallpox followed the removal of the Spanish and the arrival of the Anglos in the mid-1800s.  Oh, and from 1964 onwards strip mining on Hopi and Navaho land for coal has been in the sort of swing best described as “full.”

Picture Credits

• Sitting Bull: Public domain image from Wikipedia, 1885, D. F. Barry. 
• Bears on a sub: Public domain image from Wikipedia, taken by US Navy Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs, October 2003. 
• Tundra: Public domain image from Wikipedia, Kongsfjorden from Blomstrandhalvøya, Kongsfjorden, Spitsbergen (Svalbard), August 18th 2005, Sphinx.
• Razorback Mountain: Image from Wikipedia, Black Rock Desert, August 6th, 2005, Ikluft.
• San Jacinto Mountains: Image from Wikipedia, July 25 2009, Florian Boyd from Palm Springs, USA.
• Interior Plateau: Public domain image from Wikipedia, July 31st 2006, Skookum1.
• Plains: Public domain image from Wikipedia, 1897, US geological survey, Haskell County, Kansas. 
• New Hampshire Woods: Image from Wikipedia, October 17th 2009, Werner Kunz, Grafton County, New Hampshire. 
• Tlingit Totem Pole: Public domain image from Wikipedia, prior to Jan 1st 1923, Alaska. 
• South Carolina: Image from Wikipedia, March 21st 2007, Lake Moultre, VashiDonsk. 
• Arizona: Public domain image from Wikipedia, 2005, Doug Dolde, Mongollon Rim above Payson, Arizona. 

Happy crack o’ dawn to you.  I’m Joey Fishlips, and this is OMG’s Not Really News: dredged up from the seabed in massive trawls that cause nigh-irreparable damage to precious corals, then sent right to your table in little bitty cans. 

Today’s headliner is sports-related and political, the killer combination.  An African dictator who shall remain anonymous challenged a sack of potatoes to a boxing match, which he then lost.  Eyewitness reports from the several thousand forced onlookers, many of whom were being menaced by big shiny guns at the time, claim that the tyrant’s downfall was his inability to compensate for his dangerous habit of punching himself in the face when he wasn’t looking properly.  “I sure am glad that we toil fruitlessly and die futilely without an ounce of joy under our Glorious Leader, Sir ******,” said our interviewee.  “He’s so charmingly klutzy and clueless that you can’t help but chuckle whenever he orders another ethnic purge, the lovable little scamp.”  Upon being informed of his loss, the despot attempted to have the government-appointed referee executed, but found to his dismay that it is extremely difficult to hang a bull elephant.  We’ll follow up on his whacky, dictatorial attempts to make the official standardized rope of his country four-inch-thick titanium chain tomorrow. 

The Vancouver Winter Olympics have ended, but they aren’t the last word in this year’s sports.  The perennial Angriest Man in the Whole Wide World competition (located at its traditional site: Disneyworld) took place last week.  The event consists of airdropping the contestants over the Epcot centre, equipped with parachutes and megaphones, which they are encouraged to use to engage each other in casual, harmless conversation.  Up to 20% of the competitors are eliminated in the five minutes before reaching the ground, and the remainder of the event typically lasts about half an hour, give or take ten minutes depending on whether or not someone landed near a toolshed and was able to quickly acquire some sort of crowbar, sledgehammer, or otherwise blunt instrument.  The winner this year was Franklin N. Trepan, who incapacitated his final opponent by squirting high-pressure blood from his eyes in a manner not unlike that of the horned toad, if it were fuelled by single-minded rage and hatred towards all that lives.  Mr. Trepan was unavailable for comment, as we believe he may have eaten our camera or cameraman. 

A heartwarming story of success: bit actor Harlan Spinner has, as of the completion of his last acting role, officially played over forty separate gratuitously offensive stereotypes.  “Muchos gracias senor!” said Spinner, eyes comically rolling around like crazy on being presented with his large, ugly trophy.  “Mamma mia, this shit’s a-heavy!  Real gold-painted lead?  For moi?  C’est impossible, zut alors!”  His acceptance speech, though dramatic and visually compelling, was somewhat indistinct, marred as it was by half of it being delivered in an ultra-thick gangsta rap, the other half in guttural vaguely Nordic screaming, and a small case of stuffiness due to his cold.  All was set well again by the post-awards ceremonial lynching of Harlan; committed by nineteen different ethnic groups, the angry mob was a moving and uplifting gesture of joint effort and community. 

Anger is not the only emotion of the day of course – its polar opposite is love.  Which we’re very short on, so here’s a story about something else.  An anonymous North American man realized last week over his morning Cheerios, with dawning comprehension accompanying each laborious spoonful, that he was in fact the most boring person he’d ever known.  Confused, he sought verification, phoning up each and every one of his sluggardly slaggard friends, all of whom confirmed that he was the most boring person they’d ever known.  They asked their friends, who agreed, and they asked their friends, and so on.  This chain of events slowly wrapped itself about the globe over the past week, and apart from a four-hour period when there was thought to be a man in Chad that was substantially duller (disqualified when it was revealed he was a malnourished and taller-than-average chicken), no challengers emerged.  The misfortunate champion of the apathetic and unrelatable was crowned “king of the dullards” yesterday at an Iowa yard sale, in a ceremony attended by half a flock of pigeons and one old man who wished to complain to someone.  His first edict was to go home and nap. 

An elderly woman and grandmother of eleven finally revealed her true, sinister colours in Chicago today, when she successfully tricked her entire family into forfeiting their souls to her during a Monopoly game in a crafty and complex gambit involving dark magic, several contradictory and fiendishly-worded agreements and pacts with horrifying nether-powers, and a palmed “Chance” card.  Doreen McIntyre, 94, says that she just needed the souls as a starting point.  “I’ll wager I can parlay a few of them into eternal youth, maybe some blasphemous sorcerous powers, and then just buy-and-sell my way up,” the thrifty diabolist said as she carefully stitched the wailing spirits of her kin into a sampler displaying some kitties.  “The way I see it,” she continued, hexing charms of death and destruction to humankind into the edges, “if I take it slow and steady, I should be in the clear to be an archfiend by the next centennial sabbat.  A soul saved is a soul earned.” 

As we wrap up our news segment, we’d like to issue a correctional statement: one of our movie reviewers described an action film as “a rip-snorting” adventure.  Clearly, as was pointed out in over eighty pounds of angry spam, he meant “rip-roaring.”  Reviewer Eddie Jubbles has been suspended from service for eighty hours and had his larynx pawned.  I believe I speak for all of us when I say this is great, except for maybe Eddie.  But we’re not sure, since none of us here at OMG speak sign language except for the gorilla, and she’s on vacation. 

Finally, a word of encouragement: the northern coast of the nation of France has finally returned from its duel with Pluto, eyes bloodshot, splendid quantum-singularity armour in tatters, and with a pronouncedly funny walk.  When asked what had occurred between it and the renegade not-a-planet, France said “Oh fuck, I don’t want to talk about it.  It’s just, just too much of a deal to go over right now, okay?  Ask me later.”  An anxious request to know if France had triumphed in its goal, the country paused in its exit long enough to shrug its shoulders and say “Yeah?  Yeah, I guess so.  It’s pretty good, sure.”  France then departed for San Francisco, stating its intent to “get drunk and hook up with something.”  This may be connected with the overnight absence of the Golden Gate Bridge, and its apparent hangover this morning. 

None of this happened, but it’s very possible that, if you wished upon a star at the right time in the right place with the right person, it still never would’ve, ever.  I’m Joey Fishlips, and if you’ll excuse me, I have to see a man about a carp right now.  

(Copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor)

In our ongoing efforts to plunder, loot, and pillage the class Reptilia for everything it’s worth, this week we’ll be look at the svelter, slighter, and somewhat more-demonized snakes.  Yes, I know modern media hasn’t been the kindest to crocodiles either, but it’s harder to beat them up. 

If you can wish harm upon this face, you legally have no soul.

As always, we’ll open the playing field with some useless information upon the denizens of the suborder Serpentes.  They don’t have any front legs (some of the more primeval species, like the boas and pythons, have fun little doohickeys called “anal spurs” that are the vestigal remnants of the hind legs and located exactly where you’d expect).  The exact moment that a bunch of lizards decided that having limbs was a mug’s game and went off the rails and into the flat, squirmy yonder is unknown (delicate skeletons make the fossilization process cry inside), but our earlier snake fossils pop up around 150 million years ago in South America and Africa.  Also, in an unrelated but highly excellent fact, the mosasaurs (which arose in the Early Cretaceous and pretty much took over as the dominant marine reptile from then on to the K-T extinction) are extraordinarily close relatives of theirs. 

Seventeen metres of snakoid goodness.

This isn’t to say that the snakes themselves weren’t up to any great shenanigans.  They trotted along (figuratively speaking), persisted quietly through the Mesozoic and so on and so forth, but their real glory was kicked up a notch in the Paleocene, lasting just after the Cretaceous extinction to about 56 mya, where they discovered that (A) most of the big things that competed with them for food were gone and (B) hey there’s an awful lot of those little furry tasty buggers running around.  It was a sumptuous time. 

Modern-day snakes mostly fall into three broad groupings, two families and a superfamily, to be precise.  There are outliers, many of which are blind or burrowing snakes and eat earthworms, so we’ll be looking at some of the more “classic” examples.   As a final note before we embark, there will not be a single case of elongated “s’s” in this entire demi-article.  They are silly and stereotypical and you should be ashamed of yourself for ever associating them with anything as slithery and noble as the snake. 

Despite the anaconda having no proven human kills, it CAN eat crocodiles, caimans, and tapirs. So hands off.

Boidae
The Boidae family has, well, boas and their relatives.  None are venomous, and the family itself has a decent backlog of primitive features (that is, older ones – not outmoded).  The anacondas, including the friendly and ginormous (weightiest of all snakes, with a current record of 214 sinuous pounds), are boas, and the most charmingly aquatic of the lot, spending much of their time doing the reptillian version of snorkling.  Rule of thumb has boas in the New World and pythons in the Old, but that isn’t as accurate as it could be (boas in Madagascar and Fiji, among others), so just stick with “isolated areas.”  Elsewhere it’s pretty much all…

How can you resist that expression? If you'll fall for those evil little grins dolphins wear even as they kill younger dolphins, this should be easy.

…the Pythonidae family, which lazily suns itself from Africa to across Asia and all the way to Australia.  Again, non-venomous, and has the same basic feeding strategy as the boas: constriction.  You wrap yourself real fast around your unfortunate meal item, then hold tight – but you don’t really squeeze.  No, you just tighten yourself to the same degree of firm-but-as-unyielding-as-steel-wire every time it exhales, resulting in inability to struggle, move, breathe, or stay alive.  Then you eat it.  The reticulated (or “regal”) python is the longest of any snake, capable of wandering north of 28 ft.  It also, as I have said before, is surprisingly unlikely to kill you.  Many things are.  In fact, on this planet, the only thing that’s more likely than something not killing you is something killing you. 
Wait, what?

A surfeit of snakeage

Xenophidia
The third grouping breaks the mould and the entire point of my attempt at pretending we have three equalish groups here by being a superfamily, a name well-earned because it has over 3,000 species in it (combined, the boas and pythons have well under a hundred).  Xenophidia has almost every poisonous snake, from the rear-fanged Colubridae family (home of two-thirds of all living snakes), the hinged-fanged Viperidae (including “pit vipers”), the sea-going Hydrophidae (that’s “sea snakes” to you and me and the man standing behind you very quietly right now), and the Elapidae, which boast the cobras.  We’ll be giving the lot of them quick comb-overs, which are exactly as useful as the other sort. 

A boomslang should seldom be confused for a boomerang, and never more than once.

Sluggish, grumpy, and prone to biting. Just like many of our relatives, I'm sure.

One of the world's most affectionate and venomous creatures. Can't you see all it needs is love?

To end this useless monologue on a helpful note, here’s some advice: don’t screw around with snakes.  It’s better for all involved, especially the snake.  And barring the odd asshole species like the puff adder (which likes to sit in the middle of trails being camouflaged, is too lazy to move when something comes near, and announces its presence by biting whatever annoys it), for the most part they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. 

Picture Credits:

• Garter Snake: Taken in North Ontario, Canada (near Cache Bay, Sturgeon Falls), Shemszot / http://www.studioepic.com
• Hainosaurus: Public domain image from Wikipedia. 
• Green Anaconda: Taken August 27th, 2006, by LA Dawson. 
• Indian Python: San Diego Zoo, USA, by “Tigerpython.”
• Boomslang: Snake centre, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania, April 04, 2008, William Warby
• Puff Adder: Photo by Al Coritz. 
• Banded Sea Krait: Wakatobi, Indonesia, Sept 9th 2009, Craig D
• King Cobra: Febuary 1st, 2006, by en:User:Dawson

This is not an alligator.

There are several important basic facts about the crocodillians in general that we should brush over.  First, they have easily the most powerful bites of any living animals – 5,000+ pounds per square inch, five times that of the hyena, whose hobbies include crushing bones in its mouth for marrowy goodness.  Second, they (and birds) are the only remaining Archosaurs (infraorder Archosauromorpha), the “ruling reptiles,” whose name is rather hard to argue with when you consider that it also included dinosaurs and pterosaurs.  Producing the largest land animals and flying creatures of all time along with some pretty damned impressive watergoers is no small thing to sneeze at.  Third, they are not armadillos. 

This is not a crocodillian. Remember that.

Beyond this, the order itself can be shoved into two major families: Alligatoridae (Alligators and Caimans) and Crocodylidae (Crocodiles and Croquet mallets).  Neither contains armadillos,  who are members of the mammallian superorder Xenartha, which also contains sloths and anteaters, giving its members a notable tendency towards being dumber than a brick sandwich and twice as ugly, yet strangely adorable in an utterly grotesque and dopey fashion.  They also all have prominent claws, whether for burrowing and grubbing (armadillos), tearing apart gigantic termite mounds (anteaters), or dangling upside down from branches while expending no effort or brain cells. 

Now that that’s over with, let’s get down to nitty gritty details.  Specifically, we’ll be specifying the specific differences between alligators and crocodiles.  They’re well-known by everone under the age of fifteen or so, but I’ll restate them for you.
ALLIGATORS:
-Have wide, blunt, broad snouts with an almost U-shaped tip. 
-Have wider upper jaws than lower ones, so their lower teeth are almost never exposed when their mouths are shut.
-Tend to be darker coloured.
-Prefer freshwater slightly more, though they can live in seawater.
-Are less bitchy, cranky, and testy.

CAIMANS:
-Are slightly more agile and crocodile-oid than alligators.
-Live in Central and South America.
-Have longer and sharper teeth than alligators.
-Have bony back scutes as armour.
-Have a bone septum betwixt the nostrils

CROCODILES:
-Have longer, narrower jaws with V-shaped snouts. 
-Lower teeth often exposed when mouth is shut, due to equal-jaw-width.
-Are less concerned about salty water than alligators, due to specialized glands. 
-Are tetchy bastards.
ARMADILLOS:
-Are not crocodillians.
-Eat just about anything, although some prefer to eat almost solely ants.
-Are named from Spanish: “little armoured one.”
-Range in size from the pink fairy armadillo (4-5 inches) to the giant armadillo (5 ft.). 
-Are not crocodillians in any way, shape, or form.  Get this straight.

Now, on to the species!

 The Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis and Alligator sinensis)

This IS an alligator. Write it down.

 The alligators are a less common lot than the crocodiles – there’re only two species around at the moment; the American (A. Mississippiensis) and the Chinese (A. sinensis), both of which are found pretty much where you’d expect.  Average size for the slightly bigger American is 13-14.5 ft. and 800-1,00 lbs, while the Chinese is hard put to broach 7 ft (especially in the wild, where they’re fairly fucked at the moment.  Prolific breeders in captivity, though).  Both species change diets as they grow (somewhat necessarily – although it’d be interesting to see a six-inch hatchling try to bring down a deer), but eat approximately similar things: starting out small with fish and invertebrates of all sorts, then working their way up to bigger fish and practically anything else that’s large enough to interest them.  Big Everglades alligators (that place sounds like a location in one of Tolkien’s notebooks) bring down black bears and cougars from time to time when they’re bored or peckish, so they’re pretty much at the peak of their game wherever they live.  Interestingly, they don’t automatically regard humans as food, although habituation, that feckless and careless whore, once again makes life difficult for everyone – an alligator used to people is no longer shy and that much likelier to try out your munchiness.  The other factor is carelessness: harass an alligator or go anywhere near its nest and you might as well write your will before you go, just to make things easier for everyone involved. 
The American alligator, as an aside, can handle cold the best of any crocodillian – weathering out winters underneath the surfaces of frozen ponds if needs must. 

American Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus).

This is not an alligator, and neither is the thing in its mouth.

One of the most prominent of the American crocodiles – of which there are quite a few, surprisingly.  There’s the Orinoco, Cuban, and Morelet’s crocodiles, plus this – although to be fair, none of them are in that great condition, population-wise.  All of their habitats lie within an area covering Central and South American to the Caribbean. 
The American crocodile itself can get larger than its alligatorish relatives – vile hearsay insists on up to 20 ft., although these individuals recieve food at bridge crossings regularly and thus can be considered to be on the crocodillian version of ‘roids – and is much more tolerant of salty water, although they suffer greatly from cold and are incredibly reluctant to head north of Florida.  No matter what size or age, fish is most of their diet – although they can eat pretty much whatever they damned well please. 

Nine-Banded Armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus).

This is not an alligator and whoever told you so was a damned liar with a forked tongue.

The nine-banded armadillo is absolutely not related to the crocodillians and is the most common member of its species.  Like most omnivorous, opportunistic, garbage-eating, carrion-savouring creatures deemed pests it has profited admirably from our presence and has extended its range substantially since the mid-1800s.  Originally prolific through Central and South America, it has since expanded across the Rio Grande and through Florida via some helpful idiot.  It can’t go much farther north, but it’s spread from Texas to Tennessee.   They eat all manner of burrowing insects and invertebrates, small amphibians and reptiles, and carrion, thus giving them terrible breath.  Sometimes they’re hunted for their habits of eating eggs, sometimes for their apparently pork-like taste. 
The nine-banded armadillo is the state mascot of Texas as of 1995, and can most often be found there lying dead besides a highway.  Some Texans objected to this decision.

Black Caiman (Melanosuchus niger).

Caiman babby. Note that it is, in fact, a member of the Alligatoridae.

Most caiman species max out around nine feet and a bit.  The black caiman reaches the 14.5 ft. length of the larger American alligators on average and the big fellows can hit 16 ft. – and those are just the known quantities; there’s talk of bigger still lurking somewhere out there in the Amazon river.  Speaking of which, it’s found all over the Amazon basin – or was, before someone realized its hide was valuable.  Now it’s fairly rare and treated as such.  Like most large crocodillians it’s pretty much the apex predator of its zone, capable of ignoring or even eating the anacondas and jaguars that prey upon its young and other, smaller caiman species.  They’re likely dangerous to humans, but given the quantity of black caimans left, let alone the number of larger males (the usual suspects), it’s not really an issue at this time.  Besides, the Amazon has plenty of other ways to kill you.  16-foot caimans are just overkill when a poison frog or a random, horrifying disease will do. 

Nile Crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus).

NOT AN ALLIGATOR.

The best way to enter the Old World is to meet one of its most notorious killers, shake it politely by its foot, realize about 0.01 seconds afterwards that cross-species communication does not work that way, and be messily devoured.   The Nile crocodile has killed more people than God, more than any other crocodile (who as a group kill and eat more people than any other animal), and when it goes for you, like most good crocodiles, it does it because it is hungry.  No mistaken identity needed.  No provocation wanted.  It is hungry, and you are perfectly viable as food.  Like almost everything else within arm’s reach – Nile crocodiles will eat things up to giraffe size, eat leopards and lions if they’re getting hungry, and at maximum adult size (11-16 ft. average, old males can reach over 18 ft.) there is nothing on the continent that will try to go for them.  As with any crocodillians they begin small, and they’ll still eat fish even as adults, but their first preference is always large prey – something Africa still has plenty of, in spite of all we’ve done for it.  Sadly, much of said large prey is also us, and the Nile crocodile has a bad habit of living in and around water that people would rather like to use for other things.  After vigorous hunting from the 1940s to 1960s it’s been prevented from a full bounce-back by pollution, accidental fishing net entanglements, and annoyed people with rifles who don’t want to be eaten.  This is more of an issue than it sounds, since like any good apex predator, removing the crocodiles from the ecosystem shakes things up badly all the way down to the roots as whatever they’ve been eating booms like a post-war baby. 

The Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus).

These are not alligators, crocodiles, or caimans. And they're especially not alligators.

The teeniest of all armadillos, the pink fairy armadillo (or “pichiciego”) lives in central Argentina, where it spends its time burrowing rapidly through loose soil, dirt, and sand, eating invertebrates, averaging 3.5-4.5 inches in length, and being as cute as the dickens.  Their incredible tininess and ability to quickly dig a hidey-hole make knowing anything about them an absolute bitch, even if they’re endangered or not.  We don’t even know precisely what effect cattle ranching has had on their home territory, but who cares because they are eensy-weensy adorablewho’sagoodarmadilloden?!  Yesyouare!

Gharial/Gavial/Indian Gavial (Gavialis gangeticus).

Don't stare at it. It's a fully functioning crocodillian adult and you should treat it like one.

The gharial’s ancestors split off from the rest of the Crocodillians in the late Cretaceous, leaving the gharial (and its close personal relative the false gharial/malaysian gharial/tomistoma) the only surviving members of the Gavialidae family.  Upon separation, the gharial’s ancestors did what anyone else would’ve done and grew a really long goony-looking jaw to grab and spear loads of fish with.  Unfortunately, now it can’t eat anything larger than a fish unless it’s already dead – anything more exhuberant than a corpse is liable to injure those spindly little jaws and snap off needle-teeth.  They’re timid and also the second-largest of all crocodillians, mostly due to their absurd length (12-16.5 ft. average, 20 ft. lengths not unheard of in the slightest).  Its fishy diet is part of an evolutionary package deal: the gharial has become the clumsiest of all crocodillians on land, unable to even raise itself off the ground fully for a rapid walk, but it’s easily the most maneuverable and speedy in the water, with an overdeveloped and laterally flattened tail that gives it great propulsion. 
The wild population of gharials in India is estimated to be something like 1,500, with around 400 breeding pairs.  They’re under threat from pollution, accidental death, and the occasional idiots with weaponry who can’t tell them apart from the smaller, more feisty Mugger crocodiles

The Saltwater Crocodile (Crocodylus porosus).

Don't be fooled by its apparent docility. It is NOT AN ALLIGATOR.

Giant Armadillo (Priodontes maximus).

Is an alligator.

The giant armadillo lives across the easternness of South America in all manner of habitats nowadays, and can also be found as far south as northern Argentina, where it is legally and biologically an alligator.  They average 62 lbs and roughly 3 ft. in length as adultigators.  Mostly feeding upon termites and ants (the mounds of the former are veritable feasts), it isn’t shy about eating larger prey, like mice and rats and those alligators that are younger than itself.  Its larger size has led it to not fare as well as its relative, the nine-banded armacaiman, and it is considered to be endangered, a fate it shares with almost every other extant species of crocodillian worldwide. 
It’s an alligator, you know. 

Picture Credits:

• Saltwater Crocodile: Public domain image from Wikipedia. 
• Nine-Banded Armadillo: Taken at Palm Coast, Florida, by Vlad Lazarenko, August 6th 2009.
• American Alligators: Florida, USA, October 26th 2005, Matthew Field http://www.photography.mattfield.com. 
• American Crocodile: Taken in La Manzanilla, Jalisco, Mexico, by Tomascastelazo. 
• Nine-Banded Armadillo: Taken near Granger Lake between Taylor and Granger, Texas, on March 1st, 2008, by Brian E. Klum
• Black Caiman: Taken in Peru, 1998, by Mokele. 
• Nile Crocodile: From MathKnight and Zachi Evenor.
• Pink Fairy Armadillo: Illustration by Friedrich Specht, Brehms Tierleben, Small Edition 1927, image from Wikipedia.
• Indian Gharial: Taken at the San Diego Zoo by Justin Griffiths and released to the Public Domain, taken from Wikipedia.
• Saltwater Crocodile: Taken outside Cairns Queensland, January 9th 2006, MartinRe. 
• Giant Armadillo: Taken at Villavicencio, Colombia.  From Wikipedia. 

I’m going to give you all a brief, merciful break from my terrifyingly awkward fiction to give you a tour of my horribly rambly nonfiction.  Today’s subject, in addition, is one which I’m less than well-versed in, yet something we all enjoy: KITTIES! 

OHMIGODIT'SAKITTEH!

Except we’ll be looking at all the kitties that are big enough to kill and eat you. 

Nummy.

Admit it, it’s more interesting that way.  We’ll be doing this in order of rough body size, because that’s the way real manly insecure men do things. 

The Cougar/Catamount/American Lion/Mountain Lion/Puma/Panther (Puma concolor)

Yes, that’s all just one species.  Cougars are the largest cats in North America (115-198 pounds for males 64-141 lbs for females, 60 to 76 centimetres at the shoulder).  In the incredibly informal lumping of the Felids (the taxonomical Family of the KITTIES, in case you were an ignorant lout and didn’t know this – hence, “feline”) into the twi groups of the “big cats” and “small cats,” cougars are technically “small cats” – the requirements aren’t size, but membership in the high-falutin’ and exclusive genus of Panthera.  A more literal interpretation of “big cat” adds in the cougar, snow leopard, and cheetah, but that’s newfangled and therefore for those tiresome young people that keep yapping on about saving the whales. 
Cougars are solitary, bar when they’re raising their kittens, which, of course, are extremely adorable (a solitary cat – my GOODNESS GRACIOUS AND BEANS).  They’ve lived over almost every inch of both the Americas, from tip to top, although now for some strange reason totally unconnected with testy land-hogging plains apes with gunpowder weaponry they’re inexplicably scarce across a lot of their former range.  In particular, the Eastern seaboard is pretty cougar-less – a far cry from the old days (which hasn’t stifled the odd sighting or sign of them – there may very well be mountain lions about there again, if in small numbers.  That reminds me of the time what possibly could have been a cougar studied our cat with avid curiosity from about thirty feet away in our backyard before idly trotting away, but hey, back to the topic at hand here….KITTIES). 

The most adorable cases of bed head you're ever likely to see.

Being as far-ranging as cougars are (or were) naturally means flexibility, with regards to habitat, food, and just general adaptiveness overall.  They eat deer, birds, small mammals, bighorn sheep, cattle, horses, even a moose now and then or insects – whatever there is lying about at the time.  This requires a fair amount of individualized learning and experience; dump a South American cougar into the Yukon, and it would be highly puzzled on meeting a moose.  Nothing really returns the cougars the favour – bears, wolves, jaguars, alligators and caimans alike may share the top predator position, or even exceed the cougar’s claim, but they don’t particularly seek out and eat them as a matter of course.  As a rule of thumb, few predators enjoy the prospect of hunting down something that’s very likely to hurt them, and other apex predators are seldom meek and willy prey.  Speaking of which and turning back to the point above, cougars are fairly unlikely to go for humans – they rely on learned prey recognition, something that usually isn’t formed for us in particular.  They’re most likely to attack if they’re starving or feel threatened – and even then,  they prefer to go for children, with their usual method of downing prey: a bite right in the neck.  Attacks like that are almost always fatal.  Scientists say it’s probably because of the canines severing your spinal cord, or your vertebrae crunching, or windpipe collapse, jugular spurting apart, or something else sciencey like that. 

The Leopard (Panthera pardus)

The leopard would like to tell your cats that sleeping on pillows is for wussies.

The smallest of the “big cats” of Panthera, the leopard is part of an exclusive club – this older, more restricted definition of the group is also deemed the “four who can roar.”  That’s right, outside the Panthera big cats, not a single kitty can roar (although they scarcely need that to alarm you – cougars have a scream that resembles a woman’s, just the thing to put you to sleep on a lonely night in the wilderness).  Speaking of the cougar, despite occupying opposing continents, the leopard isn’t all that different from it in quite a few ways – it’s lean rather than bulky, and it’s approximately the same size, maybe a little bigger (45-80 centimetres at the shoulder, 82-200 pounds – for males, which are about 30% bigger than females).  They can also produce runty, messed-up hybrid offspring called pumapards, but back to the leopard here.  Its legs are a tad stubby for its body length (to keep from getting tangled up in branches and such), and it’s got a pretty powerful and massive set of jaws on it for its size.  This, incidentally, works well with its after-hunting strategy, where it often drags deceased prey up a tree for safe keeping – the only cat known to do this, and all the more impressive when you realize some of the things it eats are up to thrice its weight.  If you find a gazelle dangling from some branches somewhere, go away before you piss off its owner.  They’re even more far-ranging than cougars, and can be found from Subsaharan Africa all the way into Southeast Asia in scattered populations. 

Note that leopards have never once used different levels of melanin as an excuse to eat each other. I'm just saying.

Leopards share with jaguars an interesting little habit of occasionally cropping up melanistic rather than spotted – or, to put it more plainly, black.  It’s most common in rain forests and mountainous areas, where it possibly allows slightly better blending-in.  “Black panthers” like these are still spotted, but it’s very hard to make out the markings against their darkened “un-spotted” fur.  On a more humanitarian note, leopards are less likely to go for humans than their larger neighbours, but when they do (via those good ol’ pair of reasons: age or injury forcing them to easy prey) they are regarded as absolutely terrifying – smaller and stealthier than lions or tigers, but just as dangerous and much, much bolder, thinking nothing of waltzing straight into a settlement and yanking someone out in the middle of the night. 

The Jaguar (Panthera onca)

Regal, with a touch of staring-right-through-your-skull.

The third largest kitty on the planet, the jaguar gets a bit less publicity than the lion and tiger (hey, the three biggest cats live on three different continents – there’s some shallow and meaningless meaning there).  It’s got a lot of variation in size – females are 10-20% smaller than males, which meander from 67-76 cm at the shoulder on average, and weights can vary from scrawny (80 lbs) to average variation (124-211 lbs) to as big as a female tiger or lion (350 lbs!).  A large part of it seems to be regional – jaguars from along the Mexican Pacific coast are around as big as cougars, but those in parts of Brazil average over 220 pounds and elder males can end up over 300 lbs without being freaks. As to body build, jaguars are quite different from the svelte and agile cougars and leopards we’ve examined thus far – they’re built thick and powerful, with additional appropriate words being “robust,” “stocky,” and “compact” (unacceptable phrases include “midgetized,” “badger-like,” and “thicker than mother’s oatmeal”), which makes them good swimmers and climbers in the rainforests of South America.  Its bite is incredibly powerful, and if adjusted for body size may be greater than any other felid’s – which may have something to do with its habit of noshing on turtles now and then, to say nothing of armadillos, caimans, and occasionally even an anaconda or two. 

Tip: those cute little prickles on your cat's tongue are meant to be used to scrape meat directly from the bone. And knowing is half the creep-out.

The Jaguar’s killing method is also noteworthy – no other kitty uses something quite like it.  They take their prey’s head in those big crusher jaws of theirs, and then bite right into the brain – something that’s thought to have a connection with cracking turtle shells.  They tend to use this most often on mammallian prey – but no need to fear.  Of all the big cats, the jaguar has the least human deaths on its conscience, and all of those are either from aged and near-helpless specimens that couldn’t catch anything else or aggressive self-defense.  A final note on its patterning – jaguars, unlike leopards, have small spots inside their “rosette” markings – and leopards have rounder and smaller rosettes. 

The Lion, or “The King of Beasts” according to twits (Panthera leo)

When smugness and utter boredom collide.

Definitely the most well-known and overrated of all the big cats, the so-called “king of beasts” is only the second-largest, although it’s the tallest at the shoulder.  It’s also among the most visually distinctive, thanks to the impressive manes the males sport.  Unusually for kitties, lions are social animals.  Size-wise, males meander from 330-550 lbs, females 264-400 pounds, with shoulder heights of 4 foot and 3 foot 6 inches respectively.  As is becoming common, these measurements depend largely on environment – both local habitat and global location.  Other notable lion characteristics include nice long canines (8 centimetres), strong legs, burly jowly jaws, tufted tails (unique among kitties), and oh yeah, that huge honking head of hair the males get.  Lion manes make them look much more intimidating when confronting hyenas or each other, but they also make the males as well-camouflaged as a bowl of white rice and tofu in a candy factory.  This is why the big lazy bastards let the females do all the hunting for them.  AND THEN THEY REFUSE TO LET THEM EAT FIRST. 

Adorable as they seem, this lioness and her cub are trapped in an abusive, one-sided relationship.

The exact target of the lioness’s hunts varies, again, with region, but lions in general eat mostly large mammals – they’re big animals, and most of the time they’re hunting not just for themselves and their fellow huntresses but for those big, selfish, greedy chauvinist pigs back home too.  They tend to avoid prey outside the weight range of roughly 420-1210 pounds – smaller, and it’s often not worth hunting, bigger, and it’s liable to get very dangerous – but there are exceptions to this.  The lions of Kruger National Park go for giraffes quite often, and the lions of Chobe Park in northern Botswana make a virtual habit out of going for the park’s elephants – the largest concentration in Africa.  Apparently they started resorting to calves when times grew tough, then moved on to adolescents and even adults, all done at night, when they can’t see it coming as well as they should. 
Whatever they’re hunting, lionesses are usually in wide-open areas with good sightlines, making it essential that they work together to bring down prey that could very well see them coming.  The favored execution method of lions is suffocation via clamping those big jaws around something’s windpipe and slowly throttling it to death, unless it’s small enough to have its spine swatted apart.  Few creatures can return the favour; spotted hyenas have high dietary overlap with lions and are often in competition with them, but lions are simply too big to be bullied unless they’re alone – rather rare for a social species.  Leopards, cheetahs, and African wild dogs are even more easily dismissed, bullied, and occasionally eaten.  The one predator on the African continent that can make a lion wary is a Nile crocodile; a lion might be able to handle one out of the water, but it’d be a rare and stupid crocodile that’d let itself be caught so easily, and it’d better be a small one.  A lion that’s unfortunate enough to run into a crocodile in its element is very unlikely to make it out alive. 
As a final note, lions are indeed more than willing to eat humans – provided the motivation is there.  Again, the old saw of “if-it-is-sick-or-injured” comes into play, but more important yet may be the amount of prey available.  If humans are moving into the area, and humans and their livestock are now more prevelant than bush species, then hey, what do you think the lions are going to eat?  As said previously, lions won’t hesitate to modify their diet according to regional peculiarities, and if this particular peculiarity is “there’s no more wildebeest and lots of chattering plains apes,” so be it. 

Oh, and when a male lion takes over a pride, he often kills all the cubs so the females get horny again and can have HIS kids rather than some other guy’s.  You know what?  This asshole deserves the title of King of Beasts.  Perfectly. 

The Tiger (Panthera tigris)

Despite what you may know about cats, tigers like water. See where stereotypes lead you?

The tiger is both the largest cat of all and possibly the most visually distinctive – fie upon your manes, they have magnificently striped sides!  Body size varies wildly – there are seven remaining subspecies of tiger, ranging from the (relatively) “small” Sumatran tiger (220-310 lbs for males, 170-240 lbs for female – an adaptation to Sumatra’s dense forests) to the positively enormous Siberian tiger (males 43 inches at the shoulder and 420-670 lbs, females 220-370 pounds).  Tigers could be found all across Asia before the 19th century, but nowadays they’ve vanished from Western Asia and aren’t exactly numerous anywhere, even their most favored of old stomping grounds.  Their most distinctive features are extremely powerful legs that let them bring down animals much larger than themselves, and of course, their stripes, which tend to average somewhere around one hundred an animal. 

Tiger stripes can break up their outlines against a forest or long grass quite nicely. Although the middle fellow there doesn't seem to be impressed.

Tigers hunt like most big cats – stalking and then pouncing, with massive bursts of speed that can only last for a brief time.  Water buffalo, deer, tapirs, gaur, and all manner of large prey are brought down like a lion – neck-biting and slow suffocation.  Smaller prey typically has its neck bitten, or possibly a whack with a paw – which can crush the skulls of cattle with one shot.  Other predators for the most part stay the hell away from tigers – even crocodiles won’t chance a confrontation often, and tigers are more at home in the water than any other kitty.  Sloth bears can harass adolescent tigers, but adults prey upon them with ease, wolves have been found to steer clear of tiger territory, and the dhole (or “red dog”) of India, while occasionally capable of mobbing a tiger over food in big groups, usually does so only at risking losing massive numbers.  Even brown bears fare no better than fifty/fifty against Siberian tigers in Russia, with the two species stealing kills and young from each other, and occasionally Siberian tigers there will actively prey even on adult bears.  You know you’re dealing with a hardcore predator when now and then it will decide it wants to eat a mature brown bear. 
Tigers are responsible for more human deaths than any other cat, but show no real preference for humans as prey whatsoever.  Most man-eating tigers are sick, old, have broken teeth, or some combination of the above.  In some cases, it’s believed sufficient exposure to the concept via human carrion can cause tigers to register people as “food, of a sort.”  Interestingly enough, man-eating tigers are among the most timid of all man-eating big cats – seldom venturing into villages or settlements, and almost never going for anyone that isn’t alone.  Even something so trivial as being spotted before an attack can be made may be enough to forstall them.  This in no way has prevented them for racking up truly epic individual bodycounts – and in one case, the bengal tigers of the Sundarbans, an entire population of tigers is noteworthy for using humans as a secondary food source.  Theories on their renowned tetchiness range from having to constantly drink saltwater to inability to properly mark territory due to constant flooding to habituation towards human flesh thanks to frequent death tolls from hurricanes and tsunamis in the region.  Plus, the Sundarban tigers are approximately 500 in number, and are one of the largest single tiger populations in the world, which is a high density of large, aggressive kitties. 

Things we’ve missed include cheetahs, lynxes, bobcats, wildcats, ocelots, and much more.  Ah well, I’m sure they’ll turn up in good time. 

OH SHIT THEY’RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU.

Picture Credits:

• Sleepy cat: Public domain image from Wikipedia, taken January 9th 2009 by “David.”
• Lions and a Zebra: Wikipedia Commons, taken December 09, 2005 at 11:21 by Jeffrey Sohn. 
• Cougar: Public domain image from Wikipedia, from USDA National Wildlife Research Center media archives.
• Cougar Kittens: Public domain image from Wikipedia, taken by WL Miller. 
• Leopard on a tree: Public domain image from Wikipedia, from U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 
• Black Leopard: Wikipedia Commons,  from the Out of Africa Wildlife Park in Camp Verde, Arizona, uploaded by Qilinmon at en.Wikipedia. 
• Sitting Jaguar: Wikipedia Commons, October 6 2006, Milwaukee County Zoological Gardens, by en:User:Cburnett. 
• Yawning Jaguar: Wikipedia Commons, August 19 2007, Toronto Zoo, Marcus Obal.
• Lion waiting in Nambia: Wikipedia Commons, 26 July 2004, yaaaay. 
• Lion cub with mother in the Serengeti: Wikipedia Commons, Tanzania 2007, David Dennis. 
• Sumatraanse Tiger: Public domain image from Wikipedia, August 30 2007, Dick Mudde. 
• Tigeress with cubs: Public domain image from Wikipedia, March 11 2008, Kanha National Tiger reserve of central India, Wikigringo.