Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

COUNTRY NOTEBOOK: M.Krishnan: THE 'WATER DOG' :The Sunday Statesman: 6-July-2014
__________________________________________________ _______________________________________

The 'WATER-DOG'
(Otter)

"Someone told me recently that he had read in some magazine (you know how vague people are about these things) that the Otter's original home was in Bengal, somewhere in the Sundarbans. That man came from Calcutta and I, who am frequently and powerfully moved by parochial feelings, know how polite and tactful it is to let some remarks pass. Nevertheless, I felt constrained to contradict him, for Otters are of worldwide distribution. In fact, barring Australia and a few other geographically insular places, there are otters in every country, different specifically and even generically it is true, but all unmistakably otters. Nor is their distribution limited to land. There is an authentic sea otter.

And wherever there are otters, men have felt fascinated by their grace in water and gameness on land, and their obvious enjoyment of what man lacking it so often and in envy, terms "animal spirits". Most men can feel, in a rather undefined and intellectual sort of way, the charm of wild creatures, but when you see an otter the feeling becomes quite tangible and personal.

Otters are not specially good-looking, as animals go, if you can bring yourself to look at them analytically and forget their vivid entities. The round bullet-head, the fierce, bristling whiskers, the sausage-shaped body, the thick, Labrador-tail, and the short stout limbs ending in broadly-webbed feet - none of these features in itself suggests grace or charm. But put them together and you have the otter, whose vivacity on land and swift, smooth grace in water is beyond question.

Otter lives mainly on fish and like other fish-eaters, has a prodigious appetite. It is by diving and swimming under water faster than its prey that it lives, so that its sheer speed is not, perhaps, remarkable - but the flow and easy grace and dexterity of its passage through water is captivatingly remarkable. One could say, without exaggerating simile or sentiment, that an otter swimming is the poetry of underwater movement - except that at times, when it twirls and twists and literally effervesces in water, mere metrical elan can provide no comparison.

Many animals play when they are young, but by the time they are adult the preoccupations of life and survival seem to sober them up. By the time a puppy is a dog or a kitten is a cat, it has lost much of its gawky or skittish exuberance. However, quite a few animals - many more than armchair naturalists realises - do find the time not only "to stand and stare", but also to play. But few of them are so devoted to fun for its own sake when adult as the otter.

It has been said that the otter's mode of play, tobogganing down smooth banks into water only to run up again for a fresh slide down, is strange for an animal so well adapted to aquatic gymnastics. Not at all. No doubt the otter does enjoy sliding down banks, but it is given to play in water as well. Like other aquatic animals, it likes to sustain something flat and bright on its nose and go twisting and tumbling through the water. I remember "borrowing" a new four-anna bit from a friend to throw to an otter in a zoo, so that it might be provoked into play by the coin's shine. My friend, who was somewhat utilitarian, was quite taken aback to see what I did with the coin, but in a minute he had forgotten all about the money worth of that disc of twinkling nickel that went bobbing up and down, weaving in and out, twirling round and round through the water, balanced on the otter's nose. I expect the keepers get such coins in the zoos, in the end - they are never slow to suggest the game to the visitor.

In our country, we have no less than three different kinds of otter - the Common, the Smooth Indian and the Clawless. They are all creatures of rapid streams and rivers and are said to have a rather peculiar distribution, being found in Kashmir, the Himalayas, Assam and Bengal, and then only South India (a rather vague specification, the last) - the Smooth Indian being also found in Sind.

Otter belongs to the Weasel tribe, but in practically every Indian language they are called "water dogs". That is a perfectly sound name, though, and logically justified, not because the otter is any sort of dog (except when it is a "dog-otter") but since it is the rule that when the first part of a compound name is adjectival, that name connotes a thing different from what the noun part of it means: "French-leave" and "German-silver" explain what I mean. The hippo, which is no sort of a horse, is the "river-horse", the muntijac (a deer!) is the "jungle-sheep", and the gaur is the "Indian Bison". No wonder, then, that the otter is the water-dog."
-M. Krishnan

This was first published on 17 March 1957 in The Sunday Statesman

#Two photographs not reproduced here.