The 6 Biggest Assholes in the Animal Kingdom
Hippy types will often quote the famous line that "man is the only species that kills its own." Of course, any cursory glance at Animal Planet will tell you this is complete bullshit.
But it's not just that animals are mindless savages--and they are--it's that some of them are just straight-up douchebags. Such as:
Ants
Ants are famous for hard work and being able to lift many times their body weight, making them the perfect heroes of an Ayn Rand novel, or the perfect working drone of communism depending on who's telling the story.
Why Are They Assholes?
Ants are the only species besides humans that carry out wars and enslave their own. And by enslave we mean pulling out the ant whips and putting the other guy to work against his will.
When they're not doing that, they like to tear each other limb from limb.
Less violent ants prefer to fight their battles via choreographed display fights where specially chosen ants have something like a dance-off to decide which side wins. It's basically like the movie Bring It On, except it ends with the losing team in chains or eaten (which would have improved that movie massively).
The victors raid the other nest, capture any survivors and steal all the eggs. Survivors and newborn ants are then forced to work for the victors' nest as long as they live; or at least until their new masters get a craving for some fresh slave ant, and devour them.
Lions
Ah, the lion. The noblest of animals, always sitting majestically on top of some rock, overseeing his dominion and protecting the pride and so on. Lions are even used in reference to Jesus in the Bible, and Aslan is basically a furry Lion Christ in Narnia.
Why Are They Assholes?
In technical terms, lions are what Samuel L. Jackson would call "motherfuckers." If there is one thing lions love to do, it's moms. Unfortunately, female lions don't like to put out when they're raising a kid. So, when the lions want some but the kids are in the way, they walk up to the little brats and maul them to death. Then, to add insult to injury, they bone the mother ten ways till Sunday.
Pow!
This is how humans see the world.
This is how lions see the world.
Cuckoos
Why Are They Assholes?
Cuckoo bird parents like to use something called Brood Parasitism to raise their kids, which sounds like something involving alien monsters bursting out of their chests. The reality isn't all that much better.
What happens is female cuckoos lay their eggs in some other birds' nest, where the little baby cuckoo, already born in full-asshole-mode, will try to get rid of the nest owners' real chicks and eggs by kicking them out of the nest, sending them plunging to their doom. That way, the nest owner will feed the intruding little psychopath instead of actually raising their own young.
You may be wondering why a bird would raise a cuckoo chick that obviously doesn't look anything like his real chicks. Perhaps you're imagining the male bird suspecting that the female has been having an affair with an old high school flame, never daring to confront her about it as he slowly sinks into alcoholism before blowing his own brains out with his old army pistol.
Okay, honey, I am going to ask you just one more time. Have you been porking the UPS guy?
Well, no. Most birds are just really fucking stupid and they figure that if it's in their nest, it has feathers and it's asking for food, then it's probably theirs.
Some birds, though, are a bit smarter and try to refuse to raise cuckoo chicks by either throwing away cuckoo eggs or even completely abandoning their own nests if all that is left is a cuckoo egg inside. And that's when they get visited by the Cuckoo Mafia. Hey, don't look at us, it's actually called the Mafia Hypothesis.
If a bird refuses to raise a cuckoo, then it gets visited by some adult cuckoos who will beat the crap out of them, trash the nest and possibly kill a few of their young in the process until the other bird wises up and stops asking questions the next time one of his kids look a little bit different. Capisce?
African Bat-Bug
Is the bat-bug the tiny caped crusading defender of the insect kingdom? After watching his parents being murdered right in front of his eyes with a can of Raid did he swear a one bug war against crime and corruption? Well, no, obviously not, but trust us, we liked this bug better when we thought it was a pocket sized version of Batman.
Why Are They Assholes?
Let's put it bluntly: bat-bugs hate vaginas. Oh, they like the ladies, their race would have gone extinct quite a while ago otherwise. They just really hate vaginas.
"More like badginas, am I right, gang?"
Despite the fact that batgirl-bugs have perfectly working bug-vaginas -- not that we know from personal experience mind you, but the guys that study bug vaginas say so--bat-bugs just don't like to insert their penis there. So, what do they do?
They take their sharp hard-ons, stab the females in the abdomen, and inject their sperm into their bloodstream. They like to do that so much they sometimes even do it to other male bat-bugs.
Ha Ha! My semen runs in your veins!
You... you asshole!
Of course there must be a good reason they go through all that trouble, right? Well, not really. Scientist just say they evolved a form of sexual sadism, which is just a fancy way of saying they are gigantic dicks who like to make others suffer with their penises. Or maybe they just have extraordinarily poor aim.
Bottle-Nose Dolphins
After the messiah-like lions, the animal with the best reputation in the entire World is the dolphin, a sort of combination of Buddha and Aquaman. When dolphins are not rescuing swimmers from sharks, they are using their magical dolphin healing powers to make paraplegics walk.
Why Are They Assholes?
Besides also being among the smartest things on Earth, dolphins share another characteristic with humans: they're the only other animal that will kill for fun.
Back in the late nineties, marine biologists began to find lots of porpoise carcasses that had seemingly been punched in the gut until they died. After rounding up the suspects, putting them in the line up, the porpoise widow pointed at the guilty party: asshole bottle-nose dolphins.
Porpoises don't attack dolphins. They don't even eat the same food, so they can't be fighting because they hog all the good fish. And the fight is not for territory, since porpoises are't just chased away but actually stalked and then killed.
There are only two explanations left: either "Because dolphins think killing is freaking hilarious" or because "Dolphins kill porpoises as training for when they have to kill baby dolphins."
It turns out porpoises aren't the only animals turning up floating in the sea after meeting dolphins; the other ones being baby dolphins themselves. Some marine biologists believe adult dolphins kill babies for the same reasons lions do, to bang dolphin moms, except that there are reports of female dolphins also killing dolphin babies, which either destroys the theory or makes it much, much sexier.
To make matters sound even worse, scientist say dolphins use their sonar to pinpoint their victims' vital organs so that they can cause the most damage when they hit them.
Now, there aren't many cases of dolphins attacking humans, so at least there's that. But dolphins violently humping humans? Hell yeah!
Okay, that dude was asking for it.
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees are our closest relatives, and they have 95% of the same genes we do. So close that most people like to think they are hairier, kinder, funnier, smaller versions of us who like to test our space rockets.
It's apparently that other 5% that's the problem...
Why Are They Assholes?
Being almost people, it's no surprise chimps regularly kill other chimps for territory and natural resources, with entire chimp tribes going at it. But to make it onto this list, they had to do something that goes beyond regular animal savagery and right into horror movie stuff. The horror movie in question is of course Italian classic, Cannibal Holocaust.
We didn't make this movie up.
Chimps, you see, have a tendency to suddenly grab a baby chimp from its mother's arms and chow down, sharing the meal with the entire group. Well, except for the mom, who presumably prefers to stay in a corner screaming: "Holy shit! Holy shit!"
It's even freakier when you find out that chimps normally are not all that much into eating meat. Chimpologists have a few theories as to why (it almost has a ceremonial quality, some have said), but frankly they all sound like they're making half assed guesses.
Are you baby or food? I kinda forgot.
Perhaps we're over-thinking it, and it's simply that chimp-babies are delicious. Either way, baby-eating is sort of a dick move.
For some animals that are way more terrifying than you might suspect check out The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You. Or find out about The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World.
