You Might Be a Zombie . . . (9 page)

IF
animals could talk, they’d spend most of their time cal ing us dicks and tell ing us to get off their land. The traits we think of as cute are often simply tricks animals have developed to get tourists to throw food. Here are six animals that you’l probably want to steer clear of, no matter how adorable they look on that wall calendar.

6. HIPPOPOTAMUS
(HIPPOPOTAMUS AMPHIBIUS)

How cute!

Hippos are the very definition of Disney cute. There is no way you could look at a big, fat, squishy, huggable hippo and not think, “If she could talk like a human, she would sound just like Jada Pinkett Smith and be oh so sassy.” You would totally name her Sassy-baskets, and she would be your tutu-wearing, bal et-dancing, strut-walking pal for life. Just you and Sassy-baskets against the world!

Oh shit! Run!

The next time you settle in for a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, take a moment to reflect on the fact that hippopotamuses kil more humans per year than any other animal in Africa.

See, there’s this word
territorial
that nature takes pretty seriously, especial y when it’s applied to a two-ton animal with teeth the size of bowling pins. It’s the sort of word you either pay very close attention to or ignore and end up with “Kil ed to death by hippo” on your tombstone.

“Come on, kid. Just a little bit closer . . .”

A hippo attack usually consists of two phases. The hippo first smashes its giant head into your boat, tossing you into the water. Spencer Tyron is a good example of what happens in stage two. Tyron was hunting on an African river when, according to a 1974
Science Digest
article, a bul hippo flipped his canoe, and then for good measure “bit off his head and shoulders.”

That’s probably why the late Steve Irwin, a man who used to tackle twelve-foot crocodiles for fun and wave angry snakes filled with kill-you-before-your-next-heartbeat poison at a camera, considered a five-minute sequence where his camera team had to cross a river filled with hippos to be the single most dangerous moment ever filmed on his show.

The man who
toyed with crocodiles
was scared shitless of hippos.

5. DUCK-BILLED PLATYPUS
(ORNITHORHYNCHUS ANATINUS)

How cute!

We don’t even know where to begin.

This is an animal so deliriously ridiculous, biologists refused to believe it could possibly be anything but an elaborate hoax when it was first discovered.

And we honestly can’t blame them. There’s the thick, furry body with a flat, beaverlike tail and otterlike feet. Then there’s the matter of the big leathery duck bil and the fact that they lay eggs, and it’s suddenly more than a little weird, because that’s . . . that’s not really supposed to happen to mammals.

There are less-apparent sources of ridiculousness, like the very high degree of electroreceptivity in that bil , which helps the platypus find food buried in the silt. Like a hammerhead shark’s head, only instead of being terrifying-looking eye protrusions, it’s a goofy-looking duck bil . Maybe that’s a little weird, as in creepy, but so? Their babies are usually referred to as platypups or puggles!
Puggles!

Oh shit! Run!

And, they are poisonous.

Male platypuses have a pair of spurs on their hind legs that they use when dueling other male platypuses for mating rights. They deliver a brutal dose of venom that will put a human being into the emergency room and, according to an article in the
Journal of Neurophysiology
, can leave you writhing in muscle-impaired agony for months.

In other words, the platypus is Mother Nature’s way of saying, “I made this thing out of spare parts I found on the workshop floor,
and it can still cripple
you
.”

4. DINGO
(CANIS LUPUS DI
N
GO)

Dingo! What a silly name! It’s like a Warner Bros. cartoon character or what a baby might cal his penis before he knows the word.

And they’re adorable. If a dingo was behind a clear plastic wall at a pet shop, we’d take him home in a heartbeat. We’d name him Bandit and put a red bandanna around his neck. We’d take him out to the lake in a pickup truck, and he’d hang his head out the window as we drove.

If we died, he’d lie down on our graves and just howl away for the rest of his life.

Bandit would be the best dog there ever was.

Oh shit! Run!

We can practically feel you trying to reach out to give Bandit a scratch behind the ear so he knows what a good boy he’s being but, seriously,
stop!

As much as he looks like a puppy, and as sil y as his name is, that is a wild, as in untamed, as in feral, meaning “thoroughly and completely a dangerous and unpredictable,” animal.

Wild dogs are inquisitive, intel igent predators that travel in packs, which means there are several of them and they all think
fair fight
means “we outnumber the hel out of you.” If you do a Google search for
dingo
, you’l notice the results all repeat the same sentiment ad nauseam: Do not attempt to pet the dingo. Do not attempt to play with the dingo.
Do not let a dingo play with your infant!

Fraser Island in Australia’s population of 160 dingos has generated four hundred documented attacks on humans, kil ing a boy in 2001.

One other number to keep in mind when you go to pet that dingo: seven thousand. That’s how many years of breeding and training it took to make your pet dog a tame and cuddly canine. This is not your pet dog.

3. CHIMPANZEE
(PAN TROGLODYTES)

How cute!

It’s that grin, that huge, toothy grin they flash for the cameras. It makes them look like devilish little scamps, like they have some great and hilarious secret they cannot wait to share. If you put a chimp in front of a camera with an action star, you have no choice but to prepare for a wild, wacky romp that will tug your heartstrings and tickle your funny bone until you vomit your entire digestive system in pure laugh-a-minute glee.

Oh shit! Run!

That is not a grin. That is a mouthful of very large teeth being bared. The chimp is attempting to inform you that you are invading his space. If you do not understand this, the chimp would be happy to elaborate—smashing his very long and extremely strong arms about your head and shoulders, grabbing your hair and slamming your head into things, all while shrieking a vicious symphony of noise that is cal ing all his buddies over to beat you until you cannot grow anymore. Then they pelt you with feces.

On four recorded occasions in the past fifty years, chimpanzees have abducted, kil ed, and eaten human babies. That’s human with an
h
, as in a human baby getting wrenched out of its mother’s arms, dragged off into the forest, and devoured by a chimp.

Wil you please stop dressing them in cowboy outfits now?

2. SWAN (
CYGNUS OLOR
AND SEVERAL OTHER SPECIES)

How cute!

Such poise. Such grace. The way they glide effortlessly across the water. That unmistakable curve to their necks that forms a perfect heart when they nuzzle with their mates, which they will stay with for the rest of their lives.

Oh shit! Run!

Getting chased through a park by a furious bird that will not stop trying to rip the skin off your bones is only funny until it happens to you. Yes, swans are aggressive as hell. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources had to issue a swan warning in 2008 after “rogue swans” began attacking people on jet skis and motorboats. In Ireland, it is not uncommon for university rowing teams to cancel practice because there is a swan in the river. Rowing teams tend to be composed of men who are built like very large trees.

Among the useful information in the Michigan report: Swans will “fly up over and try to keep something underwater if they perceive it as a threat.” Swans cannot be shooed away like mal ards, preferring instead to “defend their territory forever.” It’s not all bad news though! Of the many swan species, the only one that hates you is the mute swan, which you’l be able to identify by its ability to sneak up on you without a sound.

Just like that girl in history class who you thought was the single most beautiful woman you’d ever seen, who you mooned over for months and left little notes for, it turns out swans are now and have always been vicious bitches who will not hesitate to snap your fingers off one by one for daring to pol ute their presence before going off to laugh with all their friends about what a huge loser you are.

1. BOTTLENOSE DOLPHIN
(TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS)

How cute!

No way. These guys save humans. Every other year or so, some diver or swimmer gets lost out sea and these adorable creatures bring them home.

Hell in November of 2004 a bunch of these guys banded together and saved three lifeguards from a great white shark off the coast of New Zealand.

This is the only animal in the world that Americans feel proud of not eating. This is Flipper.

Oh shit! Run!

And it turns out they’re sex-crazed thril kil ers. How’s that for a plot twist?

For the last seventeen years or so, marine biologists have been finding dead baby dolphins and porpoises washing up ashore, “mangled in unexpected ways.”

The discovery that bottlenose dolphins were occasional y viciously reconfiguring their own children wasn’t really all that much of a big deal. It was what the dolphins were doing to the porpoises that entered the domain of the seriously messed up.

Thirteen-foot male bottlenose dolphins were hunting down and beating porpoises to death and then playing with their corpses, all for no apparent reason. At the time of this writing, the majority opinion in the marine science community is that this breathtakingly savage interspecies homicide is for—and this is science—shits ’n’ giggles.

And then there’s the case of Tião, the male bottlenose that lived off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil, and was noted to be fond of humans. People flocked to the beach to swim or have their picture taken with him, until he suddenly went berserk, injuring a handful of humans and kil ing a grown-ass man.

Sure, some accounts say the man was drunk and was actively trying to shove a stick into the dolphin’s blowhole at the time. And several locals had apparently first tried to drag it out of the water so they could take a picture with it, maybe first dressing it up with a top hat and monocle.

And here, of course, we have arrived at our lesson: When dealing with animals, you need
to forget everything you learned from cartoons
. Otherwise, the results can be deadly.