This is the book that made me want to reboot my blog, so buckle up folks. I have a lot to say!
First, a little context. 2023 was the year I fell in love with audio non-fiction. I was doing a cross-stitch stitch-along (something else I fell in love with in 2023!), I was trying to complete the SAL/SPL Summer Reading Challenge, and I was tired of how many commercials there were on YouTube and podcasts when I tried to find something to watch/listen to while I stitched. Enter… audiobooks!
I quickly I found I didn’t necessarily like the audio format for novels, as in reading novels there’s a certain amount of skimming over things like dialog tags. Listening to a novel at a slightly increased speed* while the author used “said” for every single short sentence the characters uttered almost made me scream. So I stick with non-fiction, mostly of the lighter, more entertaining variety. Mostly about animals.
On a recent visit to the library to avail myself of printing services, I saw a copy of Cat Tale by Craig Pittman on the shelf, and I thought that the story of saving the Florida panther from extinction sounded like just my sort of thing. Some animal facts, some conservation efforts, and some good ol’ fashioned Florida hijinks. I borrowed the audiobook and settled in for a listen.
Pittman is a Florida-based journalist, and his book has the exact tone that a certain breed of journalist-turned-author adopts: clever, quippy, each person introduced with a short-hand description (“John was a balding man with a bristly, grey mustache that made him look a bit like a walrus” [not a direct quote]). And like a good journalist, he tracks down sources, conducts interviews, fact-checks, and brings all his research together in what feels like a pretty thorough story.
In this case, the story is the decades-long effort to prevent the Florida panther from going extinct. And what, exactly, is a Florida panther? It’s a subspecies of the same animal that we call a cougar, a puma, a mountain lion, or a catamount, depending on our region and dialect. Notably, the Florida panther is the only population of these wild cats still found east of the Mississippi.
I found this book entertaining, educational, and enraging in turns. My rage wasn’t at the author or anything about how the book was written, but rather at the indifference and greed that led to the panther almost going extinct, as time and time again people dropped the ball, shrugged their shoulders, or actively campaigned against efforts to save the cats. Throughout the course of the book we follow bureaucrats, conservationists, veterinarians, and a tracker, among others, as they all play their role in the story of the panther. We also do meet a few named panthers, though most of them are either just given numbers based on their tracking collars, or are more of a concept than a specific animal.
Over all, I enjoyed this book. I learned a lot about panthers. I learned a lot about conservation, including the establishment of the Endangered Species Act. I was able to connect to certain elements of the story due to my own experience working for management consulting firms (in a support role) and thus interacting with local government in ways that the average citizen doesn’t. But scroll down to the Book Bingo Prompts section for some ranting.
Depending on what kind of voice you like, I would probably recommend reading this rather than listening. Narrator Mike Chamberlain does bring a lot of wry humor into his voice in the cheekier sections of the book, but his voice is also just a little Kermit-y, and I could see that really amping up if you’re the sort of person who speeds up your audiobooks.
CWs/TWs: Like most books about wildlife, this one includes some animal death, animal cruelty, discussion of necropsies, etc, plus discussions of mating behavior and genitalia. There is some discussion of predation against pets and livestock. There may have been some salty language.
Format and Source: I listened to the audiobook, borrowed from Sno-Isle Libraries.
Book Bingo Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): On Power & Corruption. Look, I fully expected to use this for the All About Animals square. It’s about panthers! That’s perfect for that prompt! But the longer I read this book, the more I realized that it was also a story about power and corruption, on so many levels. So often, the people who had the power to make decisions that could help the panthers either made the wrong decision, or tabled the matter until it became a moot point. They made decisions based on pressure from higher-ups, campaign donors, or their own opinions about how and where panthers should live, science be damned. I found myself growing angry at people who had decided that their career goals or bank account or relationships with other agencies were more important than saving an entire subspecies from dying out.
But like many books that touch on conservation, I also found myself thinking about power and corruption in relation to humanity as a whole. This isn’t just about some bureaucrat deciding to let a rich developer destroy some habitat to build a new housing development. It’s about our desire as human beings to spread wherever we want. It’s about the people who want to live in that housing development, without thinking about who or what was displaced for them to be there. It’s about wanting to eat a burger without thinking about the amount of land given over to cattle farming. It’s about wanting panthers (or wolves, or bears, depending on where we live) to have a place to live, sure, but not in our cities and suburbs. Out in the wild. You know. But not too close to our campgrounds and hiking trails. The wilder wilds. Where we’ll never see them, unless we go looking.
I include myself in this, of course. I’m what I would consider a pretty average American. I live in the suburbs, in a house with a yard and a car in the garage, because even though I know that denser urban living without a car is better for the environment, I also know that I personally like having a little space between me and my neighbors, and having a yard for my dog, and lots of room for my stuff. I eat meat, even though I question the cruelty of how we raise and slaughter animals, and the environmental impact of the amount of meat we eat. And while I’m not bothered by the occasional coyote in my neighborhood, yeah, I might feel differently about a panther who could eat my dog.
Individually, we have the power to make a lot of decisions about how we live, and so often we take that power for granted and just make the easiest decision, or the one that makes us happy and comfortable, without taking into account who or what got/will get harmed along the way.
Brick & Mortar: Features an Animal. See, this is a more direct tie. The book is about Florida panthers.
Current Bingo Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 1 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 1 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.
Brick & Mortar: 2 out of 25 prompts complete. 0 bingos.
*I know some people speed their audiobooks way up to 2x or more in order to get through them faster. Hats off to people who can do that. Anything faster than 1.25x and the sound of the sped-up voice starts to irritate me. Plus I have an auditory processing delay, so I just can’t keep up if it gets too fast.