Down in the Swamps, a ‘Natural’ Death for a Frog Is, Well, Just Not Natural

It is apparently going to be a very long time before Jenifer Graham gets her diploma from Victor Valley High School. Jenifer, you may recall, sued her school district for requiring her to dissect a frog, on the grounds that such a requirement grossly violated her moral beliefs about the sanctity of life. U.S. District Judge Manuel Real, chastising Jenifer’s counsel about taking things “to absurdity,” tossed out her suit, but, with a Solomonic touch, told the school to find a frog that had died of natural causes and have Jenifer identify its internal organs from photographs. The school’s lawyer leaped on the compromise, saying: “If we have to station somebody down at the swamps or wherever it is they live to see them die, we’ll do it.”

I hate to disillusion the U.S. District Court, but as anyone possessing a post-high school familiarity with basic Darwinian principles will tell you--fat chance.

Frogs are probably known in the Wild Kingdom as “meals on wheels.” Raccoons, coyotes, birds, snakes, cats, dogs, alligators--anything else cavorting in and around the swamps or wherever--make short work of any amphibian that has lost its competitive chops. The nearsighted, the gimpy, the just plain lazy--all will end up in the alimentary canal of some vertebrate higher on the food chain. Frogs don’t keel over and die, they get eaten, and at the first sign of slippage.

I can back this up with empirical observation. Twenty years ago I spent most of my summers hanging out with the other kids at the neighborhood “frog pond,” a ditch of water that ran by the local turkey farm. Not once did I observe the creature in question miss a jump and dash its head on a rock, forget to hold its breath under water or pass peacefully on in its slumber. The turkeys, on the other hand, were being dispatched with astounding regularity, and in a manner not at all “natural.”

All of which should make Jenifer Graham highly skeptical about any dead frog that the school claims to have found. Clearly, Judge Real meant “not human-related” when he referred to “natural causes.” That rules out road kills, BB guns, sharp sticks, M-80s and the “whoops” factor (school official poking through the swamps or wherever “accidentally” steps on one). Chances are, even the one-in-a-million lone frog found floating in the water got that way by ingesting unnatural chemical effluents from a nearby factory.

Conceivably, intrepid school representatives could track a predator through the swamps or wherever and snatch a frog from its jaws at the last possible moment--after death, but before disappearance. Even so, the likelihood of harm to the predator--a missed meal at the very least--represents morally treacherous terrain.

In any case, Jenifer Graham ought to insist on an autopsy. And Judge Real ought to take a field biology extension course at the local junior college. Or wherever.