The Jungle Book

“Now this is the Law of the Jungle —
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”
– Rudyard Kipling, The Law Of The Jungle

The Law of the Jungle is an analogy for the code of conduct in order to survive in a ruthless world.  In Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the Law of the Jungle is the law book of the Wolf Pack who call themselves the Free People.  A man’s cub, Mowgli, is adopted by a wolf family to be protected from the lord of the jungle, the tiger Shere Khan.  Even though a human, he is raised as if he were a wolf, according to the Law of the Wolf Pack.  Mowgli’s adventures make up the stories throughout The Jungle Book.

It is evident the author takes man’s code of conduct to describe the animal world, where the animal’s persona is the archetype of man.  The black panther Bagheera is cunning as the jackal, bold as the wild buffalo, reckless as the wounded elephant, but with a voice soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.  The tiger Shere Khan, the Lame One, hunter of little naked cubs – frog-eater – fish killer, is all long tail and loud talk, like Mao the peacock.  And man’s cub Mowgli, naked and bold, is hated by others because their eyes cannot meet his; because he is wise; because he has pulled out thorns from their feet.  “What is the Law of the Jungle?  Strike first and then give tongue,” says Bagheera.  Thus he must go down to the men’s huts in the valley and take the Red Flower so that when the time comes, he may have a stronger friend than the Black Panther.  The Red Flower means fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name.  Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and invents a hundred ways of describing it.

In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the animal’s persona also becomes the archetype of man, made apparent at the end of the story, when the Bengal tiger Richard Parker is revealed to be Pi Patel’s alter ego.  It is then evident that the author takes the animal’s environment, which is a zoo owned by Pi’s father in Pondicherry, as the medium to depict the world of man.  We think that animals in the wild are “happy” because they are “free,”  that being denied “freedom” for too long, the animal’s spirit is broken and becomes a shadow of itself.  But this is not the way it is.  The wild environment is an unforgiving social hierarchy where food is scarce and fear is constant, where territories must always be defended and parasites forever endured.  Animals in the wild are, in practice, free neither in space nor in time, nor in their personal relations.  On the contrary, a good zoo provides everything the animals need.  A good zoo is a place of carefully worked-out coincidence: exactly where an animal says to us, “Stay out!” with its urine or other secretions, and we say to it, “Stay in!” with our barriers.  Under such conditions of diplomatic peace, all animals are content and we can relax and have a look at each other.  In literature can be found legions of examples of animals that could escape but did not, or did and returned.

As for how to train an animal, a circus trainer must always enter the lion ring first, and in full sight of the lions to establish that the ring is his territory, a notion he reinforces by shouting, by stomping about, and by snapping his whip.  Notice how the animals keep to the edges of the ring, which is always round so that they have no where to hide.  So they open their jaws wide, sit up, jump through paper-covered hoops, crawl through tubes, walk backwards, roll over.  The lion most amenable to the circus trainer’s tricks is the lowest social standing in the pride.  It has the most to gain from a close relationship with the super-alpha trainer, for extra treats and extra protection from other members of the pride.  But the trainer better make sure he always remains super alpha.  Much hostile and aggressive behavior among animals is the expression of social insecurity.  The animal in front of you must know where it stands, whether above you or below you.  Social rank is central to how it leads its life.  Until it knows its rank for certain, the animal lives a life of unbearable anarchy.  It remains nervous, jumpy, and dangerous.

Early in the morning of Time before the golden trees covering the Sahara had crumbled into the yellow dust called sand, there lived a cultured, finely bred, and sheltered young lion – so the story goes in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.  One day a goose recounted to him a blind nightmare without pictures, where a voice whispered of man-kin, the Enemy of Animals.  “We must find a champion who will defend us against this cruel and merciless beast,” the goose said in fright.  So the lion set out to destroy man-kin.  On his journey to find man, he met other animals who were all terrified of man, but he was unfazed.  Finally he met man, but he did not know it was man-kin.  The man introduced himself as Carpenter.  Carpenter was about to build a cabin to keep his master, the Leopard, safe from man-kin.  Inflamed with ego, the lion commanded Carpenter to build a cabin for him.  Thus Carpenter made the cabin for this sheltered Prince of Beasts.  The lion squeezed in, leaving only his tail outside.  With a flick of the wrist, he twisted the tail, packed it in with the rest of the beast, and nailed up the caged door.  Setting it alight from end to end, Carpenter shouted, “Yellow dog of the desert!  Man-kin may be ugly and weak but he has enough lies and cunning in his heart to drown all courage and strength and beauty – and to burn all Cats!”