See, stuff like this is why I love this site so muchFranklin wrote it in a private letter to his daughter and never publicly said it at all. He was making fun of the Society of Cincinnati and saying that their bald eagle emblem looked more like a turkey. He disliked the way its members seemed to be creating a quasi-nobility and was drawing a comparison between the nobility's lazy ways of and what he considered the more honest nature of the common man.
I, too, like the rattlesnake, especially when contemplating alternate versions of those anti-colonial, black-and-white, political satire cartoons. Imagine a cartoon with a giant rattlesnake spawled across the Pacific Ocean, tightening its coils around Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, Panama, Guam, etc.
isn't the bald eagle also unique to the Americas, or does it range over into Siberia? One problem with using animals unique to the Americas is that a lot of them aren't all that interesting... the biggest and neatest animals have counterparts in Europe. So what's unique? the rattlesnake, the hummingbird, the turkey, prairie dogs, mountain lion... all in all, I prefer the bald eagle. At least it's a magnificent looking bird...