86 pages • 2 hours read
Carl HiaasenScat
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Fragile Environment
Carl Hiaasen’s works return again and again to environmental issues—particularly those facing his home state of Florida—and Scat! is no different. The plot focuses on illegal oil drilling in the Florida Everglades, a unique subtropical ecosystem supporting many rare and endangered species. Among these is the Florida panther, a species of big cat on the brink of extinction, one of the nation’s most endangered animals. Industrial development, driven by human greed—like the illegal drilling operation—directly threatens this irreplaceable creature and the entire vanishing ecosystem in which it lives. When the oil workers shoot at a mother panther to scare her away from the oil rigs, one of her cubs dies and the other is abandoned, leaving the novel’s characters in a race to reunite the cub with its mother.
Even beyond the predicament of the abandoned panther cub, the novel is full of reminders of Florida’s imperiled wildlife. One of the most eerie, atmospheric scenes in the book describes Mrs. Starch’s taxidermy collection of extinct animals; her demanding biology curriculum is shown to have real, life-and-death consequences in Black Vine Swamp and beyond. Morality in this novel means protecting the environment, and every character is judged by how they defend, or destroy, the Everglades.
Parental Abandonment
It’s common for young adult fiction to feature orphaned or otherwise ungoverned children; the absence of Nick’s father, for instance, forces Nick to rely on his own judgment and to take independent action rather than rely on his dad’s guidance; when they are reunited, both must learn to be a family again. But Scat! Also enlarges this common trope by drawing a connection between the human and animal worlds. The motherless panther cub, lost in the Everglades, offers a different interpretation of the wayward, unruly Duane Scrod Jr., whose own mother abandoned the family before the novel begins. And Duane Jr.’s dogged, protective efforts to reunite the cub and its mother are redemptive for him, too—just as Mrs. Starch’s motherly care of the abandoned cub reforms and humanizes her character. A familial, loving bond can (and should) structure a person’s relationship with nature and wildlife, and when human bonds are broken, the natural world can help with healing.
Books and the Real World
Although the book begins in a classroom, and much of the action revolves around the Truman School, most of the true “learning” in Scat! takes place in the world outside. It is a hallmark of Mrs. Starch’s excellence as a teacher that she refuses to separate the academic study of biology from nature or from real life: when Marta vomits from anxiety in class, Mrs. Starch assigns her a paper on the physiology of vomiting, and when the class takes a trip to the Black Vine Swamp, she describes the natural landscape in biological terms, as a “festival of photosynthesis.” By contrast, Wendell Waxmo, the magisterially incompetent substitute teacher, is so committed to “book learning” that he plans his lessons around a particular page number with no consideration of what the page contains.
One of the most important books referenced in the novel is The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Reading this book is gives Nick an epiphany, and he is powerfully drawn to the kind of environmental activism depicted in it; Twilly Spree and Duane Jr. also proclaim themselves followers of Abbey and his hero George Hayduke. The Monkey Wrench Gang directly inspired the creation of Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, and other eco-activist groups in the 1970s. Scat! is not exactly a work of environmentalist agitprop, but it carries on some of the message of Edward Abbey.
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