Teaching the Article
Exercise 5: “Scramble a Nut?”
Squirrels may have provided opportunities to celebrate the extension of charity to the weak and vulnerable, but they could also be used to reinforce existing hierarchies and even to help exclude certain people (and animals) from the community. Squirrels arrived on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1890s. Within a few years they were being fed regularly by students and were provided with nest-boxes and food by the university. In a 1903 cartoon in the Harvard Lampoon, a student named Laurence Freeman Peck linked attitudes toward the squirrels to attitudes toward the poor local boys derogatorily known as “muckers.”
Questions
- Look carefully at the different poses taken by squirrels in the cartoon. What do they suggest about the range of human attitudes toward squirrels?
- By implicitly comparing squirrels to poor local boys (who were known for sometimes begging students to “scramble a cent”) what was Peck saying about the squirrels? About the boys?
- Does the cartoon suggest that the squirrels were part of the Cambridge community? How would you define “community”? Can an animal be part of a community?
Sources
- Laurence Freeman Peck, “Hi Mister! Scramble a Nut?,” Harvard Lampoon, Dec. 17, 1903, p. 121, available at Harvard Magazine: http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/01/squirrely
Local copy of image (JPG)