Wildlife By Design

By Dr. Dale Rollins, Ph.D. 

Where have all the heroes gone? The inception of color TV and politically correct sitcoms hailed the demise of Lucas McCain, but I bid him goodby only begrudgingly. "The Rifleman" was, and still is, one of my heroes. Ditto for Marshall Dillon and Beaver Cleaver. And to prove that print media also loses its legends, the list grew even longer with the retirement of "The Far Side" cartoonist Gary Larson about a year ago.

Put simply, Larson's daily dose of ecological satire was the only reason that I perused the comics page. Seems as though I'd clip at least a couple of cartoons out every week for my collection. Nowadays, I scan the page in his familiar spot, hoping he's changed his mind. But alas, there's no deer examining a birthmark, nor sheep conversing with coyotes. I'll safely wager that "The Far Side" blessed more wildlifer offices, newsletters and slide shows than any cartoon before or since.

What, you say the fellow had a warped mind? Perhaps, but I could relate to him. Larson is to wildlifers what Ace Reid was to ranchers. Been there, did that. And his cartoons, like Reid's "Cowpokes," will continue to live in anthologies and taped up on office walls or stuffed inside pickup glove boxes.

Just as "Cowpokes" often targeted drouths and bankers, "The Far Side" featured anthropomorphic cows, red-necked Neanderthals and social invertebrates. Larson could saturate a cartoon and caption with commentary just bawdy enough to be in marginally good taste, but still stand alone on the comics page as something irreverently original.

I don't know that much about Mr. Larson's background, but he'd apparently undergone some schooling in ecology, with an obvious contamination by entomology, parasitology and wildlife biology. From the fact that "nature abhors a vacuum" to predator-prey relations, he had a unique way of mainstreaming ecological principles. From his love for talking Holstein cows, I suspect he might've been raised in the upper Midwest on a dairy farm.

And the people's faces. Now tell the truth, don't you know someone who looks just like that "dorky" man with the glasses and the lady with the bouffant hairdo?

I read where Larson was retiring from the grind of a daily cartoon for fear that the quality of his work would begin to suffer. We can all appreciate that. I'm sure that concocting a biweekly column pales in comparison to conceiving an original cartoon idea 365 days a year for the last 10 years or so. In his "resignation" letter to his syndicated newspapers, he closed in true Larson-style. "The truth must finally be told," he wrote. "I never really knew what I was doing."

For wildlifers everywhere, we tip our camo caps to you, Gary Larson. Much obliged to you for lightening our loads and putting things into proper perspective.

(Editor’s note: Our favorite "Far Side" showed a man and his son gazing over the picket fence onto the neighbors’ property, where a pack of wolves had taken over the house and yard. "I know you miss the Wainrights, Bobby," the father was explaining, "but they were weak and stupid people — and that’s why we have wolves and other large predators." In skewering the eco-radical position by pointing out its logical extension, it is extremely unlikely that cartoon made it onto any Sierra Club office wall.)