Thoats

Thoats are the formidable riding beasts used by the green Martians: dangerous and difficult to control, but capable of becoming useful mounts. Their place in the story shifts from instruments of warfare to participants in relationships of trust. John Carter’s treatment of his own thoats challenges the customary use of force, while Woola’s repeated choices to guard and follow him give the animals a consequential presence beyond the saddle.

Nature and Use

The green Martians use thoats as mounts for their warriors. Tars Tarkas teaches John Carter the customs and arts of Thark warfare, including how to ride and guide these powerful beasts. Carter acquires two thoats from warriors whose armor and weapons he wears, and soon learns to handle them as well as the native riders.

The customary method relies on force when a thoat does not promptly answer its rider’s telepathic instructions: the rider strikes it between the ears with a pistol butt. If the animal resists, the blows continue until it submits or throws its rider. A rider unseated in this way must fight the beast to survive; if killed, the body is gathered up by the rider’s women and burned according to Thark custom. Control is therefore precarious, and the beast’s temper can turn a military asset into an immediate danger.

Carter recognizes that familiarity with animals offers another way to secure control. His experience with Woola shapes his experiment: he establishes that the thoats cannot throw him and asserts his authority, but then gradually wins their confidence as he had with mounts on Earth. His approach does not reject mastery; it joins clear limits to patient, humane treatment.

Trust and Practical Consequences

Within a few days, Carter’s thoats become a spectacle to the community. They follow him, rub their great snouts against him, and answer his commands with a promptness that astonishes the warriors. The green Martians attribute the result to some earthly power unfamiliar to them, treating a relationship built through consistent care as if it were an unexplained ability.

Tars Tarkas asks how Carter has bewitched the animals after seeing him reach into one thoat’s jaws to remove a piece of stone lodged between its teeth. Carter attributes their behavior to kindness and argues that gentler handling also benefits a warrior: mounts that obey reliably improve their rider’s effectiveness in battle and on the march. He points to a danger Tars Tarkas himself has described—that a thoat may choose a critical moment to throw and attack its rider, turning victory into defeat. In this account, care is not sentimental decoration but a practical alternative to a system in which force produces uncertain obedience.

The thoats also expose the limits of that bond. During the journey with Dejah Thoris and Sola, Carter’s mount stumbles and collapses after prolonged travel and exhaustion. He initially considers killing the animal rather than leaving it helpless, but Sola believes the night’s coolness and rest may revive it. Carter removes its trappings and leaves them beside it as the party continues with their remaining mount. The scene places the animal’s condition and the travelers’ urgent need side by side: attachment does not remove the constraints of survival, and the thoat is left behind because the journey must go on.

Woola and the Bond of Companionship

Woola is a distinct and especially important animal in Carter’s life among the green Martians. During Carter’s captivity, the creature guards him carefully and never voluntarily leaves him; twice, Woola saves his life. The first description of this vigilance establishes a continuing relationship, not merely a single act of protection.

When Carter and his companions become lost after riding through the night and much of the following day, they are weakened by hunger, thirst, and fatigue. In the morning, Woola has tracked them across the trackless waste and presses close to Carter. Carter embraces him, moved by the dog’s loyalty and by the thought that it has followed him to share whatever fate awaits. Woola’s arrival turns a moment of isolation into a reunion, but it also confirms that his fidelity has carried him into the same peril as the humans he follows.

The bond is tested again when Carter becomes separated from Dejah Thoris and Sola and wanders alone. At night a many-legged creature pins him down; Woola suddenly attacks and kills the assailant before it can kill Carter. The moonlight reveals the rescuer’s identity. Woola is now only a shadow of his former self, and his immediate need to eat the carcass shows the cost of his long pursuit: he has endured hunger while searching for Carter. Carter is glad to see him but worries that Woola has left Dejah Thoris, because he knows the animal to be so faithful to his commands. The rescue therefore brings relief and raises a new fear about the companion Woola may have left behind.

Wider Role and Significance

Thoats connect the ordinary demands of travel to the violence and hierarchy of Thark life. The green Martians’ customary training treats obedience as something imposed through blows, and a failed attempt at control can become a fatal struggle. Carter’s success offers a contrast: the same animals can become more responsive when their rider combines authority with trust. The contrast is made concrete in the thoats’ behavior and in the tactical reliability Carter says their obedience provides.

Woola’s story carries that contrast further. Unlike a mount treated chiefly as a means of transport, Woola repeatedly acts in ways that shape what happens: he keeps watch over Carter, crosses a desolate region to find him, and intervenes in a life-threatening attack. His depleted condition also registers the physical cost of that loyalty. Through the difference between the force-trained thoats and the independently acting Woola, the narrative presents animals as vulnerable, responsive beings whose conduct affects both practical survival and human attachment.