Cats Big and Small - Page 2
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The conditions of jungle and plain and forest are not more frightful to animals than the traffic dangers of
New York to a New Yorker, born to elude such perils.
We must imagine that a cheery gazelle is not more worried by the possibility of an encounter with a lion than
we are by the possibilities of cars, wasp-stings, and bites from the mad dogs we may never meet. New York
would be more horrifying to a lion or an antelope than the jungle or the forest to us. Life is anxious, full of
responsibilities to all that inherit.
Lion, tiger, leopard, lynx, the domestic pet on the hearth-they are all cats, with the lion at the head of the
family as the king of beasts and like the other carnivores, they have claws, not nails, and teeth that tear and
chop or shear like scissors, but do not masticate. The majestic appearance of the male lion is crowned by a great
mane, sometimes black, but always darker than the tawny skin.
This is its armament:
Teeth that can crush at one bite the bones of a buffalo's, an eland's, or a zebra's neck;
Claws like grapnels of yellow horn, which can hold a horse from its gallop and strip the flesh from its flanks;
A gape which admits a man's' head into its mouth;
Strength that enables it to leap a fence when hauling a dead bullock in its mouth;
Speed that makes it, for a short distance, a kind of flesh-and-bone thunderbolt.
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