Word: rodents
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Known to the western world chiefly through Rudyard Kipling's story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," Herpestes griseus (or mungo) is a dingy grey-brown rodent about 30 inches long including a pointed tail. When excited, its long stiff hairs stand erect. This bristling hair, together with thick skin, is one of the mongoose's protections against the fangs of serpents. Contrary to hearsay, the mongoose is not immune to snakebite except by dint of its intuitive agility. With uncanny timing it dodges thrust after thrust of the serpent, gradually exhausts its enemy, then darts in, bites the nape...
...pessimistic about reported cures of leprosy. He was for long director of the Leprosy Research Station at Molokai. As others, he injected chaulmoogra oil into the veins of lepers. The oil caused the lepers terrific pain. Often they fought against its use. Yet it seemed to stop the rodent, rotting, eating course of the disease. Chaulmoogra oil and its esters are the only medicines doctors know to treat leprosy. It is not a cure...
...Valley Road toward high, unflooded Epping Forest. Pedestrians and cyclists on the road did not pause or hold their ground as the pattering squealing rats approached. Frightened they retreated into neighboring fields and circumstancially related afterwards that the rats were led by an immense bull-rodent-his eyes (aa^ording to one gifted witness) "rea land glaring." While dogs bayed, horses bolted whinnying, and even motor cars were turned around for flight, the rats scurried on-turning the road into an undulant brown snake. At last the snake reached Epping Forest, slithered in, dissolved into rat-families which fought...
Another Wilson, this one C. A., in Houston, Tex., put a white rat in his pocket and got into a cage with a Bengal tiger. The enormous feline, striped with jungle shadow, smelled the trembling rodent in Trainer Wilson's pocket. Wilson was his friend, the rat his enemy. He stalked the rat, knocked Wilson down, struck savagely at the rat, wounded Wilson's side, tore Wilson's shoulder, was shot by zoo assistants. Wilson, wounded, recovered. The rat, unhurt, died of fright...
...ever wrote is called "Game-Eating Adventures," beginning with the hump-backed whale luncheon given by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn and Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews at the American Museum of Natural History (Manhattan), and running a terrific, far-flung menu of elephant, loggerhead turtle, capybara (large South American rodent), howling-monkey, armadillo, iguana (lizard), Orinoco crocodile, diamond-back rattlesnake, stewed octopus, argus pheasant and muntjac ("barking-deer") in Borneo, sambar and gaur (deer) and manis (scaly anteater) in India...