Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

October 2, 2007

Mourning the Hero of ‘Meerkat Manor’

Despite her name, Flower was no pushover. Just 12 inches high on her tiptoes, she was smart, strong-willed, courageous and capable of making tough decisions on the run. She also possessed an uncanny knack for taking action on scant intelligence that turned out to be just the right thing to do at just the right time.

She died on the latest episode of “Meerkat Manor”, prompting much sniffling and sniveling at my house. We had become attached to Flower, her extended family – known as the Whiskers gang – and even their rivals during the past two-plus seasons of the most captivating television I have ever watched.

Flower was a take-charge gal in an age when many human beings are desperate for leaders of their own kind. We can all learn from her.

First, she relied on her instincts, and they rarely failed her. Instinct is another word for gut feeling, hunch or intuition. Human beings tend to second-guess or start analyzing their intuitive gleanings, and often regret it. When the fur starts flying, it’s best to pay heed to those survival impulses. There are people alive today because they followed their own hunches and evacuated the burning towers on 9/11 instead of waiting for help that could not arrive in time.

Second, she was never unnecessarily cruel or vindictive even as she set clear boundaries on her followers’ behavior. As the dominant female of her gang, Flower, like all meerkat matriarchs, reserved the sole right to bear pups. When some of her daughters became pregnant, Flower cut them some slack the first time. She could have killed their litters. Instead she allowed the babies to grow up and take their places in the family. That was a rare act of compassion on the Kalahari.

Flower dealt more harshly with her daughters’ subsequent pregnancies, evicting them from the gang several times each, or leading the family to a new burrow after one of the daughters had just given birth. Eviction is tantamount to a slow death sentence, because meerkats are intensely social creatures who need each others’ attentions to feed safely and keep healthy. Forced by their mother to choose between their pups and their family, the daughters invariably chose the latter, and Flower generously let her daughters back into the group, although sometimes she made them wait in painful isolation for a while.

In another rare act of meerkat mercy, Flower did not kill the abandoned pup of a rival gang that had retreated rapidly after facing the 40-strong Whiskers and realizing they could not win a fight. When son Mitch, who had heard the lost pup’s cries and gone to investigate, returned and dropped the tiny meerkat at her feet, Flower accepted it, even though it had a rival gang’s scent on it.

Flower and the other members of her family were taking the pup back to their burrow when they encountered a deadly snake encroaching on their territory. The group managed to force the reptile to retreat, and it slithered straight into the Whiskers’ home, where Flower’s newborns were completely vulnerable.

A leader to the end, Flower didn’t hesitate or send other members of her family on the perilous mission. Instead, she pushed her way past the others and charged into the burrow, determined to rescue her babies. The snake bit her on the head, killing her.

As Texans like to say, Flower died with her boots on, defending her last litter of pups. And, in a little patch of heaven suited to her kind, Flower no doubt is rounding up all the other meerkats for group grooming or a food foray in an ever-happy hunting ground.

Farewell, little brave heart. We’ll miss you.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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