Kim Jaye Logan, age 11, of Sarasota, Fla., for her question:
What kind of animal is the mongoose?
It would be a mistake to call this fellow and his wife a pair of mongooses. The plural of mongoose is mongooses. The mongoose was named by the Indians of Asia with their word for mouse. He is not a goose, but he is a champion mouser.
In our part of the world we share our family lives with cats and dogs. People who live in the tropical regions of certain eastern countries often keep a mongoose as a pet. He has some of the good qualities of both our cats and dogs. In appearance you might mistake him for one of our weasels or martins, and in the wilds he often displays the fierce hunting instincts of the hungry weasel.
A dozen or more slightly different mongooses enjoy life in the tropics of Asia and Africa, and one member of the family is a native of southern Spain. They are classified in the family Viverridae, a name taken from an older word for ferret. Their first cousins are the musky civets and the gaily-spotted genets that make their homes in the tropics of the Old World. Members of the Viverridae family have five claws on each hind foot, a feature that excludes them from the cat family. Some of them can sheathe their claws like a cat, but the mongoose is not one of them. All of them are hungry meat eaters, but unlike the cats and the weasels their diet includes vegetables and they often enjoy fruit for dessert.
Most mongooses are gray or reddish brown, and their fur may be grizzled or speckled with lighter tones. A few wear noticeable spots, and at least one wears stripes across his back. The most famous mongoose is a native of India. His long supple body measures one and a half feet and his bushy tail adds another 15 inches to his total length. He has a pair of small rounded ears, and his little red eyes are always bright and alert. His tapering nose is accented with a set of stiff white whiskers.
The mongoose may be taken young and brought up as a pet, or he may decide to put himself up for adoption and move right in with a human family. Wherever he lives he is the sworn enemy of rats and mice, and as a pet he keeps the household free of rodents. He is the enemy also of snakes, and when cornered the Indian mongoose will fight a seven foot cobra. Often the mongoose wins this contest, but not always.
The mongoose's rat catching and snake killing qualities were admired by people in other parts of the world. In the 1870s he was taken to live in the West Indies. It was hoped that he would control the pesky rats in the sugar plantations, but after devouring a few rats the slinky hunter turned his attention to the local poultry and soon became a pest himself. Later he was introduced to Hawaii, and there, too, he became a mixed blessing. After sampling the rats he took to eating the native ground birds and wiped out several species.