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A Fascination Bordering On Love For The Black Widow Spider?
By Gregory McNamee
The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators,
by Gordon Grice (Delacorte Press). Cloth, $18.95.
GORDON GRICE, A naturalist whose "Black Widow"
was anthologized in Best American Essays 1996, is a longtime
resident of rural western Oklahoma, where, as in southern Arizona,
creatures like spiders, coyotes, and rattlesnakes abound.
He gives all of them respectful due in this collection of natural
history essays. For the black widow spider he professes a fascination
bordering on love, although he recognizes their danger to unwary
humans; for the brown recluse, a more dangerous creature still,
he exhibits a healthy respect; for all the creatures who fall
under his survey, he has many sympathies. Grice is not afraid
to commit the naturalist's no-no of anthropomorphism--in his view
caterpillars are stupid, wolves intelligent, tarantulas sneaky.
Neither does he shy from making sweeping judgments about the human--and
animal--condition, as when, without venturing into the murky realm
of sociobiology, he likens people to the hunting creatures of
whom he's so clearly fond. "We're not pure predators like
the mantid, but we have the equipment to be," he writes.
We also, he continues in a later essay, have a feral and fearsome
capacity "to murder, to become demonic," much more so
than any other creature. A viewing of the evening news bears him
out.
Grice writes with ironic humor, especially when his investigations
take turns that are of questionable taste. Pigs eat just about
anything, he writes, including the runts of their litters. Most
humans are more selective, but as a species we do eat 88 million
pigs each year, for which quantities we employ specialists who
ensure that boars and sows mate more effectively than nature intended--a
tale not for the easily offended, and which Grice clearly delights
in relating.
This book is for readers who like their pets on the hazardous
side--and those readers are in for a treat.
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