I was on my daily walk around the lake.
A smallish older woman with white fluffy hair was holding onto the lead of her small white fluffy dog – a West Highland terrier.
She was standing at a bend in the path talking to someone. Her little dog was straining to get to the next bush. The older lady was talking to a serious looking man in his 40s. He was very tall and was wearing a floppy hat as naturalists and bird watchers often do.
I was sure he was talking to the woman about her little dog. It’s a common pastime around the lake to admire someone’s dog and offer a guess as to what mix of breeds it contains.
As I walked by I heard the earnest looking tall man saying to the older woman
“I think it’s related to …. (pause) …. an iguana”.
I was dumbfounded. That small fluffy white dog was related to snaky South American reptiles….
Iguanas have horrible sharp spikes along their spines and can be 5 or 6 feet long. Iguanas are green and scaly and have nasty long whip like tails. What do they have in common with dear little Westies?
I stumbled away along the path too shocked to speak. Could that cute little teddy bear of a dog really be a cold hard reptile underneath its woolly exterior?
At home, I considered the evidence. The tall serious man in the floppy hat was someone I knew. He was Rod, the president of the local naturalists’ association and a renowned local expert on wildlife. If we had an Indian cobra resting in our heating ducts or an American bald eagle nesting in our gables then we immediately called Rod for helpful advice. If Rod said it was so, then I took the connection between West Highland terriers and iguanas very seriously. But how could it be?
At high school I had heard of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution so I thought that perhaps the answer lay there. First of all I considered which way the evolution had occurred. Westie to iguana or iguana to Westie? Spiky lizards look decidedly like small dinosaurs, so my gut feeling was that the iguana had evolved into the adorable terrier and not the other way around. But what was the process?
Below is the result of my extensive hour of internet research and finely judged unsubstantiated speculations.
Firstly there must have been a migration from South or Central America to the west highlands of Scotland. But I realised the journey must have been in very slow stages. Didn’t Mr Darwin say that these evolutionary changes took years or even decades to occur? The first voyage of an iguana family was probably as medieval stowaways on board a ship heading back from South America to Spain or Portugal. Perhaps they hitchhiked in Christopher Columbus’s fleet or one of Richard Branson’s balloons. Once there, I can imagine iguanas surviving quite well in the jungles of Spain. But obviously they didn’t settle there. This is what I think happened.
Full of upwardly mobile ambition, the iguanas moved on. The internet fossil records show the lizard boys and girls travelled northwards, bit by bit, year by year. Perhaps the iguanas were seeking better employment and education opportunities and so they headed north, as many people do today. It must have been a tough decision. Moving into cooler climates meant that only the hairier, better insulated iguanas survived the cruel cold winters. I postulate that cross breeding with the great hairy lizards of Hungaria transformed those spinal spikes into tufts of bushy hair. Through deliberate adaptive breeding, the long lizard tails were reduced to stumps to reduce heat loss in the cold winters. I’m sure all evolutionists would agree with this theory.
Once in France, the iguanas undoubtedly bought or stole numerous white powdered wigs to cover their inadequate crop of scales and hair. This mock evolutionary step contributed enormously to their transformation into Westies. As we all know the more you look like what you want to become, the faster you will become it and the white wigs did the trick. It is possible that at this point they began to give their offspring Westie names like Angus and Dougal and Fiona.
The evolution from cold blooded egg laying reptiles to warm blooded mammals was a key evolutionary process and is still shrouded in biological mystery, but I’m sure Mr Darwin could explain it.
Moving on, I would like to think that those pioneering iguanas of the Napoleonic era took to heart Mahatma Gandhi’s advice: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”.
I think these migrant iguanas concluded as a clan that having more cute, fluffy white dogs in the world would dramatically enhance world peace. As a result of their collective democratic decision making and by pure will power, I believe they forced that fur to grow and willed their tails to shrink and their legs to lengthen and their cute little ears to pop up out of the top of their ugly reptilian heads.
Tolstoy once said “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”. Leo would have been proud to know that the rapidly evolving iguanas did think of changing themselves and by sheer hard work, determination and unified goal setting, they achieved their aim. In France it is highly likely they interbred with poodles to develop curly coats. Diaries record how they eventually reached England in the bilges of Royal Navy ships. Then in the green fields and farms of southern England, they made a determined push for middle class respectability. They evolved and bred through many winters and moved north by habit and finally reached the west Highlands of Scotland, where they infiltrated their way into dog loving households by pure cuteness.
Their evolution was complete.
They had transformed themselves from ugly iguanas into modern cuddly Westies complete with shaggy white coat, cute little furry tails and prick ears like highland sheep and a jaunty little trot instead of a sinister slither.
I am truly inspired by what these pea-brained canine reptiles achieved over many generations of determined reproduction. Perhaps motivational speaker Madonna was thinking of Westies when she said:
“No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you’ve come from, you can always change (and) become a better version of yourself.”
