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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M. Krishnan: A tongue a cubit long : The Sunday Statesman :22 February 2015
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A TONGUE A CUBIT LONG

" IN many Indian languages, a long tongue signifies impertinence, especially the young, the lowly and others expected, by a fading tradition, to observe a respectful silence while their elders and betters gabble. Not so in Tamil, length of tongue something different, an epicurean love of food, particularly in the phrase, "a tongue a cubit long" that denotes a shrewd discrimination in things to eat.

Judged by that Tamil phrase, the HIMALAYAN BLACK BEAR in the picture must be a regular gourmet - and it is! It wanders far in search of titbits, climbs trees for honey, knows where the market-gardener has grown his peas and often indulges a taste for red flash and choice insect fare. The much wider distributed SLOTH BEAR, too, is choosy in its feeding; it will dig a foot-and a half into the soil for the sake of a beetle grub, excavate deep into an anthill to finally at the queen and climb the wild date palm to drink the toddy from the tapper's suspended pot (in places where Prohibition does not obtain, of course!) It has aptly been called an expert field-botanist for it knows just where and when to find the fig and the ber and the jamoon fruit and mohwa flowers.

Both these bears are bulky beasts and need plenty of sustenance and to find the varied titbits they like they often travel far and work hard. But of course they do guzzle more easily obtained food as well and indulge in a great feast when they strike it rich, as when they find their way into an orchard or a field of corn.

Talking of gourmets among our wild animals, I would leave out those creatures, like the Pangolin ( though the pangolin does have a long tongue! ) that are highly specialised in their feeding habits - they are faddists, not gourmets! Most of the predators may also be left out for they have limited choice of food - raw flesh is much of a muchness and even when it is something they fancy especially, predators usually bolt their food and do not chew and relish it. However within these limitations they do have strong preferences. Cattle-lifting TIGERS like a well-fleshed cow or bullock if they have the choice and both TIGERS and LEOPARDS ( which, like all hunters, have to keep very fit to find and to kill their prey and instinctively avoid all risks of potential injury ) lose their habitual caution when they sight the prickly, plump porcupine - at times they get quite badly stuck and are disabled or even die, in consequence.

It is among the herbivores and omnivores that we find the real epicures. Most of the herbivores need plenty of food and crop or browse steadily with little evidence of leisured relish. However, they do have decided tastes. Many of us like the bitter gourd in a curry and some like its bitterness unmitigated by too much spicing or jaggery, but no man is as fond of the fruit as the BLACK BUCK is. In the Tungabhadra area, it was by setting snares for them in patches of wild bitter gourd that the trappers exterminated local buck. Many ANTELOPES and DEER have powerful likes in the matter of herbs, leaves and fruits they eat, but none, I think, is as particular as the MUNTJAC or barking deer.

Incidentally, the deer has a tongue almost a cubit long, which it wraps around a twig and then draws down to strip it clean of tender leaves! It has been said that occasionally this deer will eat the dead meat. Once I watched a muntjac feeding for almost an hour; it never stopped long at any place, and covered much ground with a nibble here and nibble there, seeking and finding choice buds and shoots and herbs.

Even the ELEPHANT, which needs such quantities of fodder everyday, can be quite a gourmet. Pad-elephants which I got to know loved ripe bananas, wood-apples dried dates and sugarcane but rejected guavas and the nelli fruit (amla). Incidentally, wild elephants are very fond of the jackfruit which they crush open to get at the sweet, pulpy segments within, leaving the spiky, glutinous rind.

It is among the omnivores that we come across some of the nature's choosiest eaters. Many RODENTS are omnivorous, eating a certain amount of animal food besides plant food. The common PALM-SQUIRREL, is given to a much more varied diet than most people think and uses much cunning and climbing skill to get what it wants. I hope to make a report on its feeding habits in this column in due course, but the point I now wish to make that we know little about the gustatory preferences of even such a common and garden creature.

Sometimes observation reveals unexpected tastes and experiments yield quite surprising results. The ''MUSK-RAT '' which runs about our homes is really the MUSK-SHREW, and a true insectivore, subsisting on cockroaches, crickets, termites, worms and such small fry.

Intrigued by finding it so often in rat-traps baited with coconut or sweet biscuits, I carried out an investigation, only to discover that the musk-shrew has a decided sweet tooth and loves anything with sugar or honey in it!

MONKEYS, specially the omnivorous macaques, are sometimes fastidious in their feeding. Though the Bonnet Macaque feeds on many kinds of grain, fruit and herbage (including tender leaves of the tamarind) which it has little difficulty in finding, when it comes to the corrinda (and the closely allied Carissa caranadas) fruit it will spend hours in going from bush to spiky bush carefully picking each purplish ripe berry between fore-finger and thumb and then stuffing it into the cheek-pouch.

And I have seen this monkey climb a tamarind to drink the water held in a hollow high up the tree by the laborious process of flipping the water up with a hand and catching the droplets in its open mouth when there was a pond with stone steps close by at which it could have slaked its thirst much more comfortably - water that has been in contact with the wood of tamarind or nelli trees has a sweetish taste.

But of course no animal goes to the lengths that man does in his gustatory orgies. I may be mistaken but though I can find nothing definite about it in books I have, is n't it a fact that both human history and dentition go to show that man is essentially an omnivore? "

- M.Krishnan

This was first published on 21 December 1958 in The Sunday Statesman


# The photograph of the Himalayan Black Bear is not reproduced here.