A New Wild Cat, and the Old Question: Who May Claim It?

That men in your century should celebrate the finding of a new wild cat, rather than a new weapon, is itself a sign of some health in the commonwealth of learning. In Bolivia’s lush Yungas forest, in those clouded mountains where the air is thick with moisture and, it seems, with secrets, observers have at length distinguished a diminutive spotted feline as a species of its own. Smaller than many household cats, long mistaken for its tiger-cat relatives, and known as tilcayo by local communities, it has now been formally named and described by researchers, who report that only one living member is presently known. A small creature, yet it raises large questions.

When I wrote my Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I laboured to persuade men that knowledge is not stamped upon the mind at birth, nor conferred by authority, but gained by experience, carefully examined. Here, the understanding proceeds as it ought. Men watch the animals of South America’s forests; they compare forms, markings, and habits; they find that what was once taken for a mere variety is in truth a distinct kind. They publish their observations. Others may repeat or correct them. Assent is thus proportioned to the evidence, and not to the loudness of the speaker. This is philosophy, not superstition.

There is, moreover, a small but notable point of justice in the very word tilcayo. Local communities, long acquainted with this cat, had already distinguished it by a proper name, while those at a distance took it for something else. It is a common fault of learned men to suppose that knowledge travels only from the university downward, when in truth it often runs upward from those who live close to the thing observed. If the understanding is to be cleared, the words of such men must be heard, not merely harvested and then forgotten when the Latin label is affixed.

So much for knowledge. Yet whenever a new creature, forest, or mineral is described, I have learned to look next for the claims of power that may follow close behind. In the Second Treatise of Government I argued that men are naturally free, equal, and independent, subject only to the law of nature, which forbids harming another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Governments are set up by consent, to preserve these civil interests, not to despoil them. If now some authority, under colour of protecting this rare cat or its Yungas habitat, should lay hands arbitrarily on the lands or livelihoods of those who dwell there, the matter would cease to be purely philosophical, and become political at once.

Property, as I used that word, is not bare land measured on a map, but the whole of a man’s life, liberty, and estate. When a people have long lived in a cloud forest, hunting, planting, naming the creatures, and ordering their actions under customary rules, they have mixed their labour with that place in a way your law ought to respect. If a distant legislative should now declare, without their free consent, that in the name of science or conservation they may not tread where their fathers walked, nor take what their subsistence requires, then power has forgotten it is held on trust. It would be, in effect, a stranger making himself judge in his own case.

Some will say that the rarity of this cat, with only one known living member reported, justifies almost any restraint; that the public good of preserving a species outweighs the claims of those particular men and women who must bear the burden. I will not deny that communities may, by common agreement, bind themselves to strict rules for the sake of future generations; that is a proper use of political power, when truly grounded in consent. But it is one thing for a people to impose such rules upon themselves, being persuaded; it is quite another for distant rulers or patrons of learning to impose them upon others, without hearing them, and then to call that imposition benevolence.

I do not here condemn any particular measure, for I am not informed what, if anything, has yet been done beyond the act of naming. I say only this: the same reason that teaches us to distinguish one species of cat from another should also teach us to distinguish just government from usurpation. Knowledge, to be sound, must rest on experience; power, to be lawful, must rest on consent. If the tilcayo’s discovery leads to arrangements that preserve both the creature and the natural rights of those who already knew its face, then this little cat will have done more for the honour of reason than many a long train of human statutes.