Nurture Versus Nature

Nature and human interaction make for thoughtful mind wanderings. I put together a factual article because a bullfrog sat on the water's edge at McNary National Wildlife Refuge when students came to learn about nature. It was one of the real animals children could observe as it sat patiently waiting for lunch to pass by. But for my blog I wanted a different spin.
Of all things an old song came to mind that pitted a bulldog on the bank against a bullfrog in the water. The song was the interactive type where high tenor voices sang: Oh the bulldog on the bank--- and the low bass section would chime in with: and the bullfrog in the pool. This musical exercise was a joy to hear. Imagine a dialogue between the two unlikely conversants where the bulldog goes on to call the bullfrog a green old water fool. I will eventually remember what transpires in the song but for now I am interested in the less obvious difference between the two animals.
The green old water fool, Rana catesbeiana, is a voracious predator that migrated from east to west across the United States within the past few centuries thriving in stagnant waters eating any smaller animal that came its way. However the amphibian has been on earth in its present form since soon after the disappearance of the dinosaurs. I didn't count the millions of generations it bred true.
The bullfrog is the largest true frog in North America with a life span of up to ten years. It can grow to 8 inches in length, affording it a leap of up to 3 feet. Because of these features bullfrogs may travel overland up to a mile, greatly expanding their range from the source where they were introduced. Adult bullfrogs have thickset bodies, large, exposed eardrums, and are green, tan, or dark brown above with dark spots. To add excitement, each female releases a jell based basketball sized mass of up to 20,000 very small eggs. That makes for more expansion than excitement except for the prey they eventually eat.
The superior bulldog on the bank is something else. In taxonomy it has no place of its own. It is one of many breeds with the wolf as sole ancester when domestication began about 135 thousand years ago. Canis familiaris refers to the domestic dog. The bulldog breed is descended from the ancient Asiatic mastiff, developed by the human species for human enjoyment during medieval times (1200s). The name bulldog refers not only to the robust look of a little bull, which this aggressive dog has, but also to the power with which this dog attacked bulls in arena combat before that practice was prohibited by law in the nineteenth century.
The international kennel clubs give arbitrary specifications a bulldog must have to be duly registered. I won't begin to describe the jowls and body of the breed. Many varieties abound that resemble the breed but are tainted with a bit of canine adultery over the years. Humans decided on the features of the bulldog and when purchasing one, you are told of its physical inadequacies, so beware of an owner's nightmare. A bulldog can become a veteranary's dream because of its health.
And we pay no attention to the hardy bullfrog that merrily eats its way through our native species of frogs and molluscs.
Naomi Sherer