Animal Watch: Have Animals Escaped Our Control? 

You can scarcely turn on the news these days without being confronted by the troubling question: What are animals doing now?

Caught on camera: a dog, upon smelling the scent of a family’s new baby, vomits onto the floor of the family home. What happens when the dog vomits directly onto the baby? Another heartwarming video? We can hope.

In North Korea, a chimpanzee in a zoo passes his time by smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Who will pay for his habit? Society?

What did you do last Sunday? Watch televised sports? Or did you instead celebrate National Feral Cat day, a sick “Purge”-like orgy of hate that involves trapping cats, cutting off their balls, and then tossing them back out onto the street. I am going to be as sick as a dog that smelled a baby.

Monkeys can make stone tools. We, humans, can make cheap and easily accessible handguns. And a lot of good it will do us if a monkey attacks from above, when our attention is directed elsewhere.

If a hungry cobra will eat another snake whole, what won’t a hungry cobra eat? A baby? And then throw it up—on camera? Contact us if your cobra will do this.

How prepared are you to tangle with a dinosaur half the size of a basketball court? Savannasaurus elliottorum may have died off 95 million years ago, but I hope this little mental exercise has been an eye-opener for you about the flaws in your Jurassic combat preparedness—though I may have made a poor choice by asking you, Paleontologist Rambo.

People thought this cat was too ugly to find a home. When these aforementioned “people” find out that this cat did find a home after all, I hope they drop dead of surprise, and are buried in unmarked graves. When their souls at last arise to ascend to heaven, bad news—the cat is there waiting for them. With a few of his “little friends.” (Who are lions—not so little after all.) Together this feline crew uses a mix of claws and mystical sorcery to send the doubters’ souls to hell. This unlikely story gets optioned and turned into a blockbuster Hollywood film, and the ugly cat uses the proceeds on plastic surgery to look superficially beautiful. But the moral of this saga is muddled enough to make us all a bit uneasy. We tell our children soothing stories at night, but life is rarely so black and white. Years from now it turns out that the producer of the Hollywood film was heavily involved in dog fighting.