To Serve Dragon

(A reference to the Twilight Zone classic episode, “To Serve Man.”)

At Shady Hills, we worry a bit about the cats’ diet since that canned-food scare last year. Most current pet food books recommend raw foods. After all, who cooked for Rosemary and Tiki in Fayetteville fields and alleys? Besides their finding handouts and garbage cans, and never mind germs and parasites, which besides predators decrease the average lifespan to 24 months — high school in people years.

Meanwhile in Western states, pet owners increasingly keep their critters inside because coyotes have started to find their good-natured and smaller fellow predators easy prey.

Monday’s Wall Street Journal front-page feature, on an Indonesian reserve for Komodo dragons (no fire-breathing or wings, kids, it’s just the largest living lizard), made me realize it’s not man’s job to restore nature’s balance.

It is humanity’s job, but it’s to modify the balance. Nature never is out of sync. Balance just shifts; it’s an equilibrium. People always are part of the balance.

Enter the dragon.

The Journal reports (may not open so try here or this ecology blog for a summary, plus a refutation by one of those interviewed) that The Nature Conservancy — to my mind one of the least radical such organizations — has turned the balance, forcing the reptiles to supplement their diet with people.

Komodo National Park houses, the article says, 2,500 dragons and 4,000 people. It’s on the coast, they’re fishermen living in four villages. They had it all figured out: Believed their Komodos are reincarnated relatives, they avoid killing them. That’s likely why this is the only place they’re not extinct, the newspaper reports. Their pet dogs keep the dragons away from their houses. When they hunt deer, they leave what they don’t eat for the dragons. They sacrifice an occasional goat, for them to eat.

In 2005, the Indonesian government asked the Conservancy for advice. It recommended fencing around the villages to keep the dragons, but that apparently is too expensive for the people. A previous deer-hunting ban now began to be enforced. Dogs were declared an “alien species” and outlawed. Goat sacrifices were stopped.

Hungry dragons.

Now, the reptiles filch goats and chickens near people’s homes — deer being hard to catch from stubby legs — and in one example, a 9-year-old boy went behind a bush to answer a call of nature, and a nearby Komodo dragon answered its own. “The [Conservancy] and its Komodo subsidiary reject any responsibility” for the child’s death. “The boy ‘shouldn’t have crouched like a prey species in a place where dragons live,’ says Marcus Matthews-Sawyer,” the subsidiary’s spokesman. In the comments section of the Mongabay blog referred to above, he explains he was quoted “entirely out of context.” The spokesman for the U.S. mother ship, James R. Petterson, said in the Journal, “Any concern expressed by the villagers will be taken seriously and we will address it if we can.”

Thousands of years of ancestors of our kitty cats did not live in the desert. They were ratters, but when they cleared the rodents for the season, they got food from people. Wolves use dens to raise their young, but is that a justification for wire cages for puppies? The true rationale for crate-training — housebreaking by small enclosure — is that properly conducted it works quickly and without traumatizing the animal.

This is the place to go nyah nyah nyah at what surely were good intentions. But NC isn’t PETA. It’s likely they really thought the dragons would stay in the jungle and eat deer. Their response should have been, “Oops.” Failing that, they should have apologized and called for immediate re-evaluation of the policies. What actually was said to a prominent newspaper by professional spokesmen can’t be too surprising.

Meanwhile, we’re adding a little premium canned food to Tiki and Rosemary’s diet of meat-flavored cereal nuggets. When we get a puppy, I’ll forget the rolled newspaper for swatting, which books taught me was the height of proper house training when I was a boy working on George the Australian terrier.

We live and learn. Except when we don’t.