Interlude Two Page 3
Year 196X.
Middle Manager: Why, if it isn’t the “boss”! What can I do for you, little lady?
Ann: You can read some of the entries in this book to my associate here. One at a time. And let him look at the pictures.
Middle Manager: Well, all right . . . “Leopards are the smallest of the big cats that roar. They have a wide range in Africa and tropical Asia. Most have fur with a beautiful rosette pattern.”
Ann’s Being: Success! It is quite a nice pattern.
. . . ??
Ann: He’s a Being, my good man. The list of known Beings includes a Dog and a Wolf — even though these are not distinct species. I called up the Master of the Dog. She reported her Being was unable to turn into a wolf form. If my Being’s limits aren’t biological, I intend to find out what they are.
Ann’s Being: I can do this lynx! Not sure why I couldn’t do the Canadian one.
I can’t manage a lion. Would you accept a very fluffy panther?
The tiger is a success. And, Boss, now I match your hair!
hmmm, interesting.
the wolf is Canis Lupus, the dog, Canis Lupus Domesticus, essentially the same species (in that they are the same species, the dog is basically a sub-species that can fully interbreed with the wolf. Behavior and environment being the only dividers that prevent interbreeding).
loving everything about this page.
I would totally accept a very fluffy panther by the way.
Since we have Wolf and Dog, it would make sense that we have the feline subfamilies Pantherinae and Felinae. Reseda would represent Felinae since the animal form we’ve seen her in the most is a domestic cat. If Ann’s Being represents Pantherinae, why can’t he turn into a lion?
Because there is a lion being out there somewhere. We know this from that chapter cover that was a plushie pile, some of which predicted future or minor beings.
Hmmm … would the tiger be able to take form of lion when lion would die?
The problem between wolf and dog vs tiger and lion is backwards.
Dogs and wolves are genetically the same species, able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring in every case of healthy parents.
Lions and tiger can interbreed but 99% of the time the offspring will be infertile. Only one documented case of a fertile offspring exists, and it was neutered. But that last part was more the owners thinking breeding even by accident supersized ligers was a bad idea.
so if it was genetic it would make more sense for a wolf and dog to change into the other’s form than a tiger and lion.
There can be only one!
Other interesting question.
It is entirely possible that the separation between the Maltese lines and the other domestic dog breeds is older than that of many larger dog breeds and the european wolf. Can the dog-being do the more ancient small breeds? (It would give a timeline for how much separation makes ‘speciation’ in a Being.
This is interesting — do you have a source for it? A quick look around Wikipedia found a lot of analysis regarding when dogs were domesticated, but it all suggested that every domestic dog breed shares common ancestry, rather than separating different breeds into separate lines of descent.