Of Creatures Great and Small: Beauty and the Wart Hog

In writing recently about visiting the Los Angeles Zoo with my family, I wrote disparagingly of the wart hog:

“This thoroughly disgusting creature is proof again of nature’s diversity and its lack of moral and aesthetic considerations.”

Camron Cooper, chairman of the board of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Assn., writes that she was dismayed by my supercilious dismissal of what she calls a “noble critter” and pleads for its restoration in my esteem.

“As you beheld them,” she writes, “you saw no beauty in their crumpled, pebbled faces. . . . Actually, there is much to admire about wart hogs. OK, maybe they are not God’s gift to mental acuity or pulchritude. They are, however, courageous, efficient, determined, family-oriented and nearly indomitable.

“When they move about in the wild, they trot purposefully as if headed to some important meeting. . . . Next time you visit our outstanding zoo (which I hope is soon), please remember the old saw about beauty being only skin deep. What’s not to love about wart hogs?”

It seems to me that the appropriate old saw in this instance would not be “beauty is only skin deep,” but “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

If one looks at the wart hog’s skin alone, he is indeed ugly. His face, as Cooper says, is crumpled and pebbled. To those who love him, his beauty must lie in his character.

However noble a beast he may be, though, I should think one wouldn’t care to encounter him in the wild. As Cooper says, he is family-oriented and nearly indomitable. Imagine approaching a wart hog that was protecting its young. (In using the generic he, of course, I include the female wart hog, which is, I have no doubt, as indomitable as her mate.)

Cooper notes that the wart hog trots purposefully, as if headed to some important meeting. That suggests a social engagement or conference. Being the beast he is, I suspect that he is more likely heading for a mating.

The wart hog not only has two large, ugly warts on his face but also two sets of ferocious-looking tusks, which he uses as weapons. The two on the lower jaw are short and deadly, like daggers. The two higher ones curve like scimitars toward the wart hog’s eyes and give him a particularly fierce countenance.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that the wart hog is a gregarious and generally inoffensive animal and a vegetarian--traits that are certainly in its favor. By gregarious, I suppose it means that the wart hog is playful with its own species, but I don’t believe I’d care to have one as a pet.

I certainly don’t blame Cooper for coming to the defense of the wart hog. In the eyes of the Maker, I suppose, all animals are equally beautiful. I doubt, also, that the wart hog would consider us human beings especially comely.

Surely, as Omar Khayyam suggested, the hand of the Potter sometimes shook when he was creating the Earth’s many species. His genius showed when he was shaping Eve, but what was he thinking of when he made the snake? That creature plunged us all into eternal sin.

As I also wrote of our trip to the zoo, “Two camels stood side by side, looking utterly ridiculous. I don’t know which is sillier--the camel or the kangaroo. Like every other animal in the zoo, they demonstrate the incredible versatility of life on Earth.”

I don’t know why Cooper didn’t come to the defense of the camel and the kangaroo; perhaps because my description of the wart hog was more demeaning. Perhaps we humans, in our outlandish costumes, look ridiculous to the other species. I have seen some tourists mounted on camels who looked sillier than the camels.

Another beast that wins no beauty contest in my book is the rhinoceros. He is grossly fat, with stubby legs and one or two horns, depending on the species. He is notoriously ill-tempered and may charge a human being or any other object without provocation. What purpose the rhinoceros serves in the greater scheme of things I can’t imagine, but he is among our endangered species; if we treasure the versatility of life on Earth, we must protect him.

By the way, I said the rhino could weigh up to 30 tons and run 30 miles an hour. Of course, the 30 tons was a typo. It should have been three tons. But he can run 30 miles an hour.

Perhaps the ugliest animal of all is the chimpanzee. But that may be because he resembles human beings so grotesquely. We can’t help thinking that except for 2% of our genes, we ourselves would be chimpanzees. Maybe it’s because they caricature us that we find them so endearing.

Anyway, my apologies to the wart hog.