Felix Clay
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We live in a hell of an age. If I get hungry at 3 a.m., within minutes I can find a burger, a pizza, a shawarma, and probably 100 other things, including a meth sandwich and a hooker who makes her own artisanal peanut butter sex garnish. And if I get sick, I can probably find Tylenol or cough syrup at Adam's house.
But is it so simple for the rest of the world? No, especially if you don't have thumbs. Or, if you do have thumbs but you're still just a monkey. Indeed, if you're an animal, you're kind of screwed even when it comes to the most basic ailments. Not just because you can't buy a Viagra when you're a capybara with a hankering to bury your capy in a lady's bara but the plumbing just isn't working. No, you're mostly screwed because you also have to endure the embarrassment of looking completely ridiculous with even the simplest of conditions.
skeeze / pixabay
No one likes going bald. One in 100 people look good when they're bald, and that's pretty much just Captain Picard and Jason Statham in the world right now. That works out to one in 100, right? Whatever, I didn't take engineering in school -- I focused on the manly arts, like recess and skullduggery. But baldness in a human is infinitely more tolerable than a bald chimp. Look at this video:
Two bald-ass chimpanzees having a fight with some hairy dudes. And a chimp fight on its own is pretty frightening, because a chimp can and will turn your skull into a salad bowl in no time before ripping your arms from your torso and making you into an impromptu meat canoe, but a bald chimp? Fuck. It looks like Verne Troyer bulked up on bovine growth hormone and filled his ball sack with saline in some kind of weird tribal ritual to intimidate the rest of mankind. And it worked like a damn charm too, because you wouldn't dare make a Mini-Me joke around this beast.
brummigem / YouTube
Lest he crush all of your bones into a mini pile of fine powder.
Any bald human has endless options to deal with baldness. "Endless" being about four. You have four options. You can wear a wig, you can wear a hat, you can buy some Rogaine or other related hair growth slime, or you can get hair-replacement surgery. Now you're looking like Fabio. A chimp's only option is to maybe fashion a poop hat. Then, after trying on the poop hat, go back to that ripped-arm-torso boat I mentioned before.
Pexels / pixabay
I had to fight with Editorial about including a photo of this. My position was that it's integral to fully understanding just how insane this issue is. Their position was that the photo is an abject nightmare of grossness. I agree that, yes, it looks like a horse has somehow grown a beefsteak tomato inside its own asshole, but the world needs to see it for the same reason everyone shared "2 Girls 1 Cup" a few years back. They wanted to know why I'd made wallet-sized prints of that tomato-like asshole. I said, "What's that!" and pointed across the room as a distraction before I ran away. In the end, I think we all agreed the picture is grossly hilarious, but instead of using it we'll just show you an actual beefsteak tomato.
stux / pixabay
Be sure to point out this uncanny similarity to everyone you meet at the salad bar. Fun!
Now, your average hemorrhoid is a real pain in the ass. Eh? Eh? Anyway, it's unpleasant and annoying, but hey, sometimes your inner ass explodes into the outside world and you need to buy Preparation H. Now imagine you're a horse, and instead of hands you have this useless hoof that can't spread ointment anywhere. And instead of a decent, human-sized ass, you have a big ol' horse crapper under your tail that's the size of a laundry chute so that when you pop out a vein it looks like (say it with me) a beefsteak tomato in your asshole.
jarmoluk / pixabay
The worst is when they split open, uncontrollably oozing all over the place. Anyone for salsa?
I think a vet can fix this with relative ease, and by "relative" I mean they probably need to glove up and go elbow deep into the vastness of a horse's crap factory, but that's neither here nor there. Just imagine your own shame if you had to wait until someone took a look at your asshole on a whim one day, outside, and noticed it was bulging obscenely and then felt moved to consult with a professional about it on your behalf. That's one hell of a personal low.
Unsplash / pixabay
Pink eye is gross at the best of times. Did you see Bob Costas when he had pink eye? It looked like someone had slapped him in the eyeball with a dirty dick. He had dink eye.
NBCUniversal Television Group
The NY Post blamed Botox, because you can't work in old media unless
you think all readers are complete morons.
In animals they call it conjunctivitis because it's more dignified, and you need that dignity because it looks so much worse. Consider the hapless pug -- the pug came to Europe from Asia sometime in the 16th century. Monks used to keep them as pets in monasteries, and they were known to be the pets of Chinese royalty and high society. In Europe, the pug became the official symbol of the House Of Orange after a pug saved the life of the prince of Orange in 1572. They're squat little fellows with kick-ass dog smiles and bulgy eyes. They're walking piles of ugdorable, perpetually the cutest, ugliest thing you ever saw.
Until one gets conjunctivitis.
Toa Payoh Vets
Milo And Otis 2: Adventures In Bad Botox.
A pug with conjunctivitis looks like the height of late-1980s horror movie monster effects. A mixture of animatronics and expertly developed fluids meant to mimic living effluence, it's a 10-pound waking nightmare with a curly cue of a tail. Gone is the snuffly little mug that could hop on your lap and lick your face, instead replaced with the grim visage of a torn anus with a nose and a smile that drools too much.
I assume a vet has drops for this or pills you have to hide in tiny pieces of hot dog so your silly beast will be fooled into taking them. Until that time, though, suffer the fate of trying to pretend your glurpy-eyed critter is still cute.
FrankWinkler / pixabay
A snake is a semi-sentient meat sock. It's autonomous, it likes to lick the air a lot, and maybe it will spit venom in your eye if you try to charm it at a sideshow. Who's to say? In general, though, it's just a tube with a face on it and people seem to fear them. Imagine that. Imagine feeling cold dread in your gut when you see a sock or a loose condom. In fairness, my heart does skip a beat when I see an errant road condom, because I'm struck with the paranoid-yet-unreasonable belief that, somehow, a wind will lift it up and get it on me. Like it will just twist into the air and splat, oozey opening first, right against my lips, right at the corner where no matter how hard I try to squeeze my mouth shut, a little will creep in. And the absolute worst part will be identifying some kind of passion fruit-flavored lubricant and a cold, salty, oily something. And no amount of puking and washing will ever make it go away.
Fears aside, the issue with a snake is, due to its design flaws, it has nowhere to hide or even try to manage unsightly physical ailments. Like if I start growing a parasitic Adam Brown on my thigh, uncomfortably close to my junk, I could start wearing baggier pants and walk slightly hunched over to disguise my ailment while secretly making tiny Adam wrangle my wiener whenever I say so. Sound gross? Well, he's my parasitic twin, so I'll be the judge of what's gross or not in our relationship. Point is, I could manage. Snake can't manage. Snake's a tube.
martinlyon / pixabay
Snakes don't have comfort sweatpants for bloated days.
Being a tube means when you have an issue like constipation, you suddenly take on the aspect of a bonbon, all thick in the middle and flappy at the ends. It's a lot like the way a snake looks when it's well-fed, which is equally revolting when you think about it. This tube just stretches and bulges around whatever the hell is inside. If you did that, you'd be disgusted by yourself. You'd burn up every mirror in your home out of angry shame, you would, for fear you'd see a couple of Slim Jims and White Castle sliders pressed against your insides for all the world to see.
There's an old joke about a constipated mathematician who worked out the problem with a pencil that's relevant here. No matter how good that poor snake is at quadratics, he's never going to be able to try to fiddle his poop chute in the hopes of dislodging a landslide and alleviating his issues.
Long Beach Animal Hospital
This was the original plot of Good Will Hunting.
A constipated snake is entirely at the mercy of the universe, while all you need to do is take a quick laxative and wait for the reckoning down south. Think of that poor snake next time you're backed up, full of cheese and mashed potatoes.
kozorog / iStock
Remember the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I was always mildly terrified by that film. I had half a chub too, thanks to Jessica Rabbit, but I was never comfortable with the implications of a world in which cartoons are living beings. Living beings that are apparently made from sentient ink of some kind. Had they all been drawn into existence? Had some men -- because it was back in the day, we can assume they were all men, no offense intended, ladies -- found a way to create life from their very imaginations? And not just life but a bizarre kind of indestructible life? The cartoons can take no end of punishment and come back for more later -- they are invulnerable and they are fake, yet alive. What kind of nightmare would such a world be? What if you offended one of these people and he doodled a Voltron into existence that had a cock made of living fire? And it stomped your neighborhood to the ground before feeding you to its fire cock, and you had to die inside a cartoon dick oven?
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
The right of the people to keep and bear Dip shall not be infringed.
Now, has your dog ever been stung by a bee? Or your cat? Or any wee beast you take responsibility for? If so, you may already understand my Roger Rabbit connection. Your pet instantly becomes a living cartoon once they've been stung by a bee. And that's terrifying.
Look at some pictures and you may be tempted to titter or guffaw about the whole situation -- aren't they adorable? No. No they aren't. They're creepy. Living cartoons are not adorable. It's the same premise as a living doll like Chucky, something over which man should have dominion that was conceived in our minds but that somehow has come unbound. It's devilish, is what it is. A cat with a bee sting is devilish. But slightly hilarious at the same time.
frazdt / reddit, drew_anywhere / flickr, Fiaxko / reddit, marklyon / reddit
"I know what you're thinking: Did we lose all nine lives, or only eight?"
"Well, to tell you the truth, we're all dead inside, so does it matter?"
It doesn't seem to be too dangerous for the average pet to have a bee sting -- they just swell up like balloons and instill in all of us an existential dread. Not a big deal.
Check out other animal freaks of nature in 9 Animals That Are Just Lazy Combinations of Other Animals and learn how best to avoid fish with human faces in 13 Real Animals Lifted Directly Out of Your Nightmares.
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