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A Short Passage on Mammals     Mankind's rise to a position of dominance in life on earth has been inextricably meshed with the lives of his evolutionary classmates, the mammals. Even in the highly technological societies of today's world, men still use mammals to provide food and drink, clothing and cover, transportation and power, and a myriad of other services from chemicals to companionship. Despite this dependence upon mammals, man has confined his interests in these creatures largely to the few dozen kinds that are of direct use to them. But what of the other thousands of species of mammals? The majority, unobtrusive creatures are "neutrals", which man has neither interest in nor knowledge of and the others are enemies. Against the latter, mankind has waged a ruthless and relentless war with little success with questionable results. Shooting, trapping, gassing, poisoning, flooding and bulldozing are but a few of the techniques that have been used in attempts to eliminate certain species such as wolves and bears, but even after years of such measures, some are still "control problems" - and a few like the coyote, have actually increased their ranges. The real victims have been the neutrals - the innocent bystanders that stumbled into traps or ate poisoned bait. In fact, the majority of the species of mammals that have become extinct in the past 2000 years were just such neutrals, some of which were exterminated indirectly by man's activities without even his knowledge of their existence. Obviously man's interactions with mammals have been as egocentric as the pre-Copernican European's concept of the universe. For all his technological sophistication, man is still a newcomer. It is only in the past century that he has been able to cross land, water or the air faster than a cheetah, porpoise or bat, which could claim mammalian speed records in these media for millions of years. Man's electronic sonar is far from the minute, refined echo-location mechanism of bats and even atomic submarines cannot yet dive as deep as sperm whales. Man's technology has far to go to equal the efficiency and the variations of mammalian mechanisms. Whole areas are uninvestigated or beyond man's ken - for example, the use of odours for communication or the disease resistance of hibernators. Above all, man is a mammal; as such he faces the same problems of food, housing, reproduction and social behavior that other mammals do. This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page