Zitidars

Zitidars are immense draft animals that haul the Green Martians’ decorated chariots across Barsoom. Their strength supplies the labor behind the community’s ordered processions and military mobility, while the contrast between customary force and John Carter’s gentler animal handling makes them part of the narrative’s broader question of whether power must depend on cruelty.

Appearance, Role, and Use

The novel identifies the animals as mastodonian in scale and appearance. In one community procession, about 250 large, three-wheeled chariots were each drawn by a single animal that seemed capable of pulling the entire wagon train when fully loaded. The vehicles carried ornamented female passengers, while young Martian drivers rode on the animals’ backs. Like the mounted animals, the heavy draft animals wore neither bit nor bridle; their drivers guided them by telepathic instruction.

Zitidars also appear in a much larger military caravan bound for Zodanga. That column included 250 chariots and fifty additional heavy draft animals, as well as hundreds of warriors and spare thoats. The animals helped sustain a force that eventually numbered 150,000 after Tars Tarkas recruited warriors from several smaller hordes. Their presence ties animal labor directly to the scale of Green Martian movement and warfare: chariots, mounts, and provisions could be assembled into a mobile force across the open landscape.

Marches Across Barsoom

The caravans moved through terrain that offered little surface water. During one march, Tars Tarkas explained that the animals had gone without drinking for nearly two months, since shortly after leaving Thark. They could survive on the moss covering Barsoom, whose minute stems retained enough moisture for their limited needs. The detail makes the moss more than a feature of the landscape: it was part of the system that allowed animals and their riders to cross dry sea bottoms.

The march toward Zodanga was deliberately timed for night. The army camped by day in deserted cities, keeping people and animals indoors, then resumed its route after dark. This was a vast undertaking, and the cohesion of the assembled Green Martian hordes was precarious; Tars Tarkas’s political skill helped bring the force to the city without allowing its internal rivalries to erupt into open fighting. Zitidars were among the working animals that made this exceptional mobilization possible.

Handling and the Alternative of Kindness

The Green Martians’ ordinary dealings with their mounts were coercive. When a thoat failed to obey telepathic commands quickly enough, its rider struck it between the ears with a pistol butt; if the animal resisted, the treatment continued until it submitted or threw its rider. A thrown rider might face a struggle for survival, while the body of one who failed to prevail was gathered by the women and burned according to Tharkian custom. The account describes a social order in which an animal’s compliance was sought through force and the consequences of failure could be severe for both rider and beast.

John Carter developed a different practice after his experience with Woola, his faithful Martian hound. He first established that his thoats could not unseat him, using a sharp blow to make his authority clear, then gradually won their confidence through kindness. In a few days, they followed him, rubbed their snouts against him, and answered his commands readily. Their behavior astonished the community, which attributed their responsiveness to an unknown power from Earth.

Carter explained the practical as well as humane value of the change to Tars Tarkas. Reliable obedience, he argued, improved a warrior’s fighting efficiency, whereas uncertain temperaments could turn victory into defeat if a mount threw its rider at a critical moment. Kindness therefore was not presented as a retreat from martial competence: it made the animals more dependable and their rider more effective. The contrast also distinguishes familiarity with animals as living partners from the community’s default reliance on punishment.

Narrative Significance

Zitidars are not individualized in the account, but their labor gives material form to the Green Martians’ social and military scale. One animal can draw a laden vehicle; dozens can accompany hundreds of chariots; and the resulting train can travel across a water-poor landscape on sparse vegetation. Their bodies are essential to the movement of people and goods, even as the narrative gives greater attention to human control than to any distinct personality or perspective of the draft animals themselves.

The scenes involving Carter’s thoats sharpen that tension. His approach treats trust as both a relation and a practical advantage, while the customary method treats resistance as a problem to be subdued. That contrast complicates the claim that harshness is simply necessary to survival: within the story’s own martial terms, a less violent form of command can produce greater reliability. Zitidars belong to the same animal economy of labor and transport, making them part of the setting in which this alternative is demonstrated.