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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Totally engaging with a sardonic message, 12 Jul 2006
This is without doubt the most gruesomely graphic book on predation that I have ever read. The predators are: the black widow spider, the praying mantis, the rattlesnake, the tarantula, the pig, the dog, and the brown recluse spider. Another half dozen or so ghastly creatures also make their appearance such as the crocodile, a bizarre "cricket-beast," hawk wasps and wolf spiders, not to mention humans.
Gordon Grice, who is a gifted amateur naturalist who teaches humanities and English at Seward County Community College in Kansas is the kind of guy who collects crickets and spiders and beetles in jars so he can feed them live creatures and watch them chow down. He is the kind of guy who goes to rattlesnake roundups and breathes deeply. He is the kind of guy who stops for road kill and likes to attend vivisections. He's like the guy who goes to the top of a tall building just for the thrill of looking down; but what excites Grice's fancy is to watch how predators kill and devour their prey. The creepier the predator, the better. You can put those quick, clean and "humane" lion kills back in your VCR and watch it on TV. What Grice wants us to experience is exactly how the mandibles of the "cricket-beast"sound as they crunch through the beetle's exoskeleton and just how it feels to die, or nearly die, of rattlesnake or black widow venom.
He's not particularly interested in scholarship (there are no footnotes or references), although he is careful about letting us know when he thinks a certain report, say of a nine foot rattler, is probably an exaggeration. He is an excellent writer who knows the value of concrete detail, tersely put; and he has the scientist's love for finding out exactly how something happens. What he does that no other writer in my recall has done is to emphasize the disgusting and revolting details of predation without euphemism or the use of any fig leaves.
Be forewarned then that this is NOT the sort of nature book your eight-year-old grandson needs to read before going to bed--although if he gets his hands on it, he will! And he will have nightmares.
The question that might be asked is why is Grice so intend on rubbing our faces in the brutality of nature? Clearly he has an agenda over and above grossing us out. I get the idea that he thinks a lot of what we hear about ourselves and our fellow creatures is so much pollyannaish tripe. He doesn't say as much directly but consider this from page 245:
"There is actually nothing your average scientist hates more than information from nonscientists, all of whom he assumes to be unwashed, idol-worshipping degenerates good only for working on cars. The thing your average scientist despises second most is a fact that doesn't fit his theory..."
Grice is able to dazzle us with his own observations about the animals he studies, but being an English prof he knows that his standing in the scientific community is (or before he wrote this book, was) zilch. It's easy to identify with his frustration in this matter, and acknowledge that it is a shame that scientists tend to run the other way when they see a nonscientist coming, or that they will not give credence to ideas that come from nonscientists. And it is especially true that nothing is worse for a scientist than a fact that doesn't fit his theory!
Grice's inclusion of dogs and pigs as predators goes toward making what I see as one of the messages of this book. Simply put, we humans are domesticated animals. We have--helped along by our dogs, pigs, sheep and cattle, our grains and fruits, our social and political structures--become "tamed." Grice darkly hints, as H. G. Wells did in his novel The Time Machine (1895), that this may not be all to the good. With our effete fussiness about the vulgarity of the animal world we are becoming like the Eloi who will be eaten by the brutal Morlocks. If we lose our ability to act without inhibition as the creatures Grice describes do when in pursuit of their dinners, we may indeed become something akin to sheep. Grice doesn't mention it directly but there is some considerable evidence that domesticated animals are not as smart as the wild kind.
After advising us of just how horrid dogs can be, especially as pack hunters, Grice presents the counterpoint: "The care of animals, along with the tending of crops, is a root of our social structure. It dictates our need for permanent homes, our construction of walls and fences, ultimately our economy and culture. The dog makes this possible, because it was the dog, with his keener nose and ears, that made it feasible for us to protect livestock from nocturnal predators. Our tools, intelligence, and eyesight complement his senses; we share a territorial instinct that gives us a common goal." (p 231)
He adds, "This bond [between man and dog] distinguishes the dog from other canids. It also distinguishes modern humanity from its older branches, because it is an essential element of the change from hunter-gatherer to the settled life." (p. 232)
Finally, in a kind of summation, after observing the collapse and then rise again of the brown recluse spider populations in his shed, Grice writes, "Serial murder, war, genocide, and even witch hunts have all been linked to population changes and competition. We let ourselves off the hook ["kid ourselves," I would say] when we define such killing as 'abnormal.' We put the behavior at a distance, letting ourselves think of it as something alien, something we normal folk could never do.... But the capacity to murder, to become demonic, is in our nature.
"One of our natures, anyway." (p. 258)
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