TOP KATS

When I was a child, Sunday night television meant two shows: The Wonderful World of Disney and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. This was standard kid fare of the time and one show balanced the other. The first gave us animated animals that talked and wore clothes and conducted symphonies. The second gave us real animals that neither talked nor wore clothes but would on occasion eat their young. My parents encouraged my sister and me to take special note of that.

Looking back, Wild Kingdom was the more memorable show. It had a simple format: Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler would go into the wilderness to observe ferocious beasts in their native setting. When the going got tough, Perkins would retreat to the safety of a helicopter or lead-lined bunker while Fowler would go into the underbrush to tag and collar a lion or perform a root canal on a tiger. Perkins would then make some sort of off-camera narration of Fowler's struggle against the beast. The narration was always flat and unemotional and so comically at odds with Fowler's struggles.

But the format was limited and bound to get stale sooner or later, unless every so often Fowler emerged from the underbrush sporting an ear tag, radio collar and a dart gun shoved up his butt. In time, Wild Kingdom lost its hold on my interest, and nature shows in general tumbled down my viewing list.

Enter Meerkat Manor. This is a show about the daily lives of meerkats in the South African Kalahari, but it is more soap opera than nature show. It is oddly addictive.

First of all, despite the name, meerkats are in the mongoose family and so have nothing in common with this cat or others:


The show features a meerkat clan called the Whiskers and their struggles both inside the group and with other clans. There is loads of scheming, betrayal, bloodshed and trysts both licit and illicit. Sure, it's the sort of stuff that you can get by meandering over to History Channel and watching something like Those Wacky Borgias, but the Borgias just lack the goshdarned cuteness of the meerkats. Check out this side-by-side comparison.

The images on the left and in the middle are Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, a brother and sister from Renaissance Italy who left more dead bodies in their wake than Al Capone at a machine gun sale. On the right are meerkats. Even if they had taken part in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the meerkats would still be just too adorable.

The Borgias have earned a fearful place in history because of their ruthlessness and conspiring, but perhaps history might have been kinder had they looked like this:

Or this:

The meerkats' awww-que factor lets people overlook a lot of deplorable behavior on Meerkat Manor. For instance, in the most recent episode an adolescent male and an adolescent female must protect three pups after becoming separated from the Whiskers. The pups are deep in the territory of a rival clan, and if it were to find the pups it would shred them to pieces. (Meerkats, it would seem, have slight regard for cuteness.) So there is mortal peril all about, and what does the young male do? He scampers off to mate with some roving female. Such a dereliction of duty in my family would have gotten me shot, no matter how hot the temptress. But in this case, the meerkat is welcomed back (after a successful rescue mission by the Whiskers) and not even told to wipe the disgustingly sated leer off his face.

It's not hard to relate to the meerkats. They have good days and bad days at work, too, and when they get home, they often face a pain-in-the-ass family. Take Frank, leader of the Zaphods. The Whiskers invade the Zaphods' territory at the start of season three and drive them off pretty easily to less desirable feeding grounds. The Zaphods are again routed in a second showdown. A bad stretch for Frank all around, and all he probably wants to do is kick back, eat a few grubs and geckos and get a little shut-eye. But no. Lola, the dominant female in the clan is only too happy to remind Frank of his recent failures. Every time he begins to burrow for food, she jumps in and forces him away with an "Oh, you're so weak!" shrewishness.

Imagine how you would feel if you had such a partner. Imagine having to go home and tell your spouse that you had been chased out of your corner office by a band of meerkats and now were working in a cubicle -- at a reduced salary. Then see if you get a nice dinner or a can of Cheez-Whiz and a box of Ritz crackers.

This is great stuff to watch, and we don't have to worry about the actors falling into off-camera embarrassments. Flower is not going to crash a Porsche in Hollywood and be bundled off to rehab. She is going to die, but hey, c'est la vie on the veldt.

Each week, we can get our fix of jockeying for position in the hierarchy, killing of helpless rivals, banishing of difficult children and the fighting of rivals for foraging territory without spying on our neighbors or relying on actors who look like they've been cut from the herds that roam Malibu beaches.

There have been a lot of arguments about the need to roll back global warming recently, mostly of the save-the-humans variety. That's all well and good, but there are several people that I wouldn't mind seeing bumped off this rock and if I have to go with them, then so be it.

However, if we frame the argument around the survival of the meerkats, we might actually get something done.

Art work by Karen Ludwig