5 Adorable Animals That Are Turning to the Dark Side
Let's face it, animals are bastards. With all of the ant slavery, ape war and duck rape in the world, it's easy to decide nature is something best left to the wild. But there are those animals that -- thanks to Disney and The Far Side -- we tend to think are more likely to dispense witty one liners than bite our face. But while we've been busy rooting for them, they've been quietly revealing their true colors ...
Squirrels
The Good
Squirrels are Exhibit A in what a cute face and a bushy tail can do for your cred among humans. As a species, we risk bodily injury and spikes in insurance rates whenever one dashes in front of our cars, because it is impossible not to feel like an asshole if you crush one. Hell, in Ice Age, the cutest character was the squirrel, and he had fangs.
The Evil
The animal kingdom is like prison. If you don't try the softest guy on your cell-block, you become the softest guy on the cell-block. Unfortunately, this is a difficult lesson to teach children, because among the squirrels at Cuesta Park in Mount Park, Calif., word seems to be getting around that humans, unlike the Wu-Tang Clan, are something to fuck with.
"Come on, take the first swing. I don't even care."
Between May 2006 and March 2007, multiple squirrels attacked 13 people, mostly children. One four-year-old boy thought he was being hugged by his furry little woodland friend until it started digging its fingers into his scalp. At this point the boy started screaming and rolling in the grass, which we've found is usually enough to scare away anything within 20 feet of us. But in this case, the squirrel just dug in that much harder, playing scalp rodeo until a grown-up came over and broke things up.
Sure. Teach him to associate your fingers with food. Good plan.
Fish and Game declared the squirrels in the park a "threat to continued public safety" and began trapping and killing them. Not by using a cage with a bunch of nuts in it, but by using a decoy baby stroller. See, a number of the attacks had occurred when the squirrels jumped into baby carriages -- presumably to suck the infants' souls from their lips for some dark squirrel harvest. They'd been doing it so frequently that it was apparently the only way the park rangers knew to trap them. The day after the first squirrel was captured in a baby carriage, another squirrel jumped onto a four-year-old girl's face, leaving scratches to both cheeks and her forehead that likely would have spelled out "snitch" if squirrels knew how to spell.
This is not an isolated incident. A squirrel attacked six people in the U.K. before being captured, and the town of Bennington, VT, is currently being terrorized by a rogue gray squirrel. You might start thinking that our dogs and cats have the right idea, with their much more hostile stance toward inter-species relations, but that's just because you haven't heard what happened in a Russian park in 2005. A stray dog was barking at a gang of local squirrels, as dogs are wont to do. Likely former Spetsnaz agents, the squirrels became irritated and decided to shut the dog up in much the same way the Russian Mafia shuts people up: by killing it.
Not pictured: Baseball bats and a lot of lye soap.
According to eyewitness testimony, the squirrels descended and tore the dog to pieces. The linked BBC report notes that one Russian scientist questioned the authenticity of the report, and goes on to note that "squirrels without sources of protein might attack birds' nests," because Russian scientists are bad at being reassuring.
Cows
The Good
Between Gary Larson and those California Cheese commercials, they generally come off as good-natured, friendly herbivores. We tend to assume cows are content to eat grass and wait around to get killed by the gun from No Country for Old Men.
"Won't you please help me become a plate of hamburgers?"
Sure, we think of bulls as being large, dangerous idiots that will kill you simply for not being grass or a cow, but cows are considered about as harmless as a 1,500-pound creature can be, which is good, since there are nearly 100 million of them in America alone.
"We are legion. Also, moo."
The Evil
In England, where both zombies and cows are more aggressive, the giant bags of hamburger meat went on a creepy, The Happening-style killing spree that left four dead in June and July of 2009.
Now, this was not an outbreak of mad cow disease or the result of a single farm where a farmer treated his livestock badly; these were four separate incidents, in four separate towns, over the course of two months.
Beware the Ides of March. But mostly beware the Cows of Summer.
In all the cases, the victims of the attacks were walking their dogs near cow fields where there were calves, and like any mother animal, cows are wary of predators near their kids. The problem is that cows don't know that Nibbles the Pomeranian is not a tiny, furry wolf. That, or they're just looking for an excuse to kill us and figured they'd get by on a technicality with the dog thing.
It's worth noting that in every case, the cow had to come charging out of the field, abandoning its child to kill an animal that was minding its own business and likely tethered to a nonthreatening, fangless human.
That mustache and those chaps won't be enough to save you.
A fifth person, former British House Speaker David Blunkett, was attacked but not killed while he was out walking his guide dogs. This is sobering news, considering the fact that in America, we have 77.5 million dogs that need walking and 96.7 million cows just waiting for an excuse.
Last week, a Texas deputy was called to get a stray cow out of the street. He was directing traffic around the cow when it charged him and tossed him into the air and then continued attacking his unconscious body. So apparently, sometimes they slip up and kill us for no reason at all.
You'd think they'd be more honored that we use the skulls of their loved ones to decorate our living rooms.
Deer
The Good
When we hear "deer," we automatically think Bambi.
We aren't talking moose here, just regular old deer. They are beautiful and graceful, with huge eyes (where do you think we get the term "doe-like?") and long, slender limbs. If there is any one forest creature that we as a race feel like we could walk up to and make friends with, it's deer. If Snow White can do it, why can't we?
No doubt there is a DIY site for seducing forest animals with song.
The Evil
If you have cable, there's a chance you caught the episode of Animal Planet's Fatal Attractions covering an incident between a deer and a prison guard named Ronald Donah. Donah kept deer as pets, raising them from fawns. The problem was that when rutting season started, the males saw him as competition.
This isn't altogether uncommon among deer, who are apparently the irrationally jealous boyfriend of the animal kingdom. In 2005, USA TODAY reported on a rash of attacks by horny male deer. According to one biologist they interviewed, "as suburban homes encroach on deer habitat, deer that are fed by admiring humans -- or that browse on lawns and garden vegetables -- lose their natural fear of people." Fortunately, since 2005, mankind has learned their lesson about suburban expansion ...
That lesson: keep doing it, but scream loudly and brandish a handgun at every wild animal you encounter.
You might view that as animals just being animals, and not inherently evil. Which is probably why scientists couldn't figure out who was to blame when baby birds started showing up decapitated and legless all over Scotland's Rum Island after every full moon. While they searched for the tiny, mentally disturbed werewolves responsible, someone witnessed a deer chewing on a baby bird.
Soon, it was determined that the deer were using the light of the full moon to treat the island's baby bird population like a spread of hors d'oeuvres. Deer need lots of calcium to grow their antlers (or head knives, if you've ever been attacked by one).
Since milkmen rarely deliver to the forest, the deer started raiding the nests of Manx shearwaters and eating the heads and legs of their babies. Now mind you, a herbivore eating a baby bird whole would have been awful enough, but what the Rum Island deer are doing makes Jigsaw look like Dr. Kevorkian.
They specifically target the heads and legs, and then only the bones, spitting out the meat and skin like watermelon seeds. That sounds less like a friendly Disney critter and more like some dire alien ruminant.
This right here is definitely not Disney material.
Bunnies
The Good
Oh, Jesus, look at the bunnies!
Bunnies are what you get when a cotton ball has sex with a stuffed animal. There is no possible way a bunny could do anything that isn't precious.
The Evil
Armando Del Manso believed his dog was responsible for the dead snakes showing up with teeth marks all over them each morning. They were brown snakes, after all, which are what you would expect an Australian snake to be -- huge, poisonous and freaking everywhere. Then one night he heard something being horribly murdered nearby and pointed his spotlight in the general direction of the horrible gurgling. That's when he saw two wild rabbits attacking a king brown snake, which are presumably discernible from regular brown snakes because they are huge and played by The Rock.
Finally, a role that matches his emotional depth perfectly.
Apparently, living on an island filled with spiders, crocodiles and terror can turn even the Easter Bunny into Freddy Krueger. But those rabbits were more "evil genius" than the disturbing, lurking sociopaths that have made up the rest of this list so far. In Linz, Australia, however, a hare, presumably after watching too much Monty Python, decided to attack an elderly woman while she hung her laundry.
The little bastard made hit-and-run attacks at the woman's ankle, causing her to fall. When her husband came to see why she was screaming, he was attacked as well. He fought off the crazed rabbit with a stick, and police later reported that when they arrived, the hare was winning. Even in the face of an armed cavalry, the bunny did not relent in its attack, and in order to stop the furry insanity, they had to shoot it.
In their defense, that rabbit was dynamite.
And then there's the story of the hick out on a canoe, fishing, when a hissing rabbit swam to his boat, teeth bared, and attacked until the brave yokel beat it away with his oar and some well-placed splashing. Since things don't get much more ridiculous than amphibious assault bunnies, everyone pretty much called bullshit, and that was that. Well, until a few years later, when a White House photographer produced images of the event. What was he doing there? Well, the yokel happened to be Jimmy Carter, then president of the United States, and apparent battler of what he referred to as "swamp rabbits."
Apparently there are aggressive, angry rabbits that are so terrifying, we won't believe they exist even after they attack our president.
Mice
The Good
Without exception, every last iteration of mice in popular culture has been adorable. Mickey Mouse? Jerry? That little blonde Rescue Ranger we all had an odd furry crush on as a kid? Sure, they can destroy our furniture and poop in our food, but it's not like they are vicious monsters.
It's an all-in-one home and bathroom!
The Evil
A few years back, scientists noticed the mice of Gough Island in the South Atlantic were getting larger and more aggressive. They also noticed that the bird population was taking a nosedive. But these were regular house mice. The kind you catch with a piece of cheese. That live in the little half-circle hole in your kitchen wall. Surely the two phenomena couldn't be related.
Actually, they were. The mice were eating birds 300 times their size. They were burrowing into their nests, straight through the feathers and skin and on into the sweet, sweet innards.
As illustrated by this adorable little present.
The scientists even captured this video. Be warned, this is likely the most disturbing video you will ever see of mice outside of some bizarre niche hentai featuring Mickey and Minnie.
What you see there is an albatross, resigned to its fate of being devoured alive by a swarm of giant mice. Mice that are giant because they've figured out that the birds don't have the energy to stop all of them, and that they can feed off of, and even inside of the birds for months before they keel over.
Fortunately, this is a tiny isolated island off in the middle of the ocean. Unfortunately, in both Australia and Russia, mice have started viewing the elderly in much the same way: tasty, succulent and ill-equipped to defend themselves.
"All right, Mitch. As soon as she pulls out the coupon book, we rush."
In a southwest Queensland nursing home, an 89-year-old veteran was found bleeding from his hands, ears, neck and head. The mice had become bold because the government had banned the spraying of mouse-killing agents around health facilities. That's apparently all it takes to bring on a population explosion and apparently the rapid evolution of massive mouse balls.
In Russia, in the city of Tver, the mice and rats became so plentiful that they needed a new source of food, and sleeping humans were just the sort of thing they could include on the menu. Unlike the Australian rodents, the ones in the former Soviet Union are plenty happy attacking healthy adults in their sleep.
In former Soviet Union, mouse traps you! Why do you laugh? I was being serious.
My aunt is missing and my children fear the night.
Apparently mouse traps and yearly spraying are all that's stopping us from being living, breathing, screaming edible housing for mice.
Sweet dreams!
David blogs at Death and Other Funny Stuff, writes for Funnycrave, and is the author of the ridiculous unedited sci-fi novel, Shorty.
Now learn about some animals that used to be awesome, in 11 Modern Technologies That Are Way Older Than You Think. Or check out some more tiny terrors in The 6 Deadliest Creatures (That Can Fit In Your Shoe).