You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [22]
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 bill 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 bill, 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 bill. 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 DINGO)
Dingo! What a silly name! It’s like a Warner Bros. cartoon character or what a baby might call 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 silly 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, intelligent predators that travel in packs, which means there are several of them and they all think fair fight means “we outnumber the hell out of you.” If you do a Google search for dingo, you’ll 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, killing 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 calling all his buddies over to beat you until you cannot grow anymore. Then they pelt you with feces.
On four recorded occasions