Humans -- Chock Full of Vitamins and Other Essential Nutrients

Mack Hall

In Hawaii a tiger took a walk on the mild side last week, escaping its catdominium and strolling around the human parts of the zoo, checking out the sights, maybe taking a few snapshots, and looking for a snack.

This follows another escape by a tiger in a San Francisco zoo on Christmas Day, a back-to-nature event in which one man was killed near a snack bar. One imagines the survivors running and screaming in fear while text-messaging on their cell ‘phones and chugging bottled water.

And then the souvenirs: “I Survived the San Francisco Tiger Massacre” and “My Parents Watched a Guy Get Eaten by a Tiger and All I Got Was This Lousy tee-shirt.”

Many people question how big cats can escape their enclosure, but the real question should be why cats bother to do so. In the zoo tigers spend their days lying around in the sun while being given free medical care, free housing, and free food according to their dietary wants and needs, and occasionally eating some of their benefactors. Give them a holy book they can’t even read and their lives would be pretty much complete. The reader may now deconstruct the metaphor for himself.

Hundreds of television viewers hundred of miles from any zoo are probably filing disability claims, suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome involving nightcats, and thus unable to work. O Lord, send Thy grief counselors among us.

What, exactly, is a grief counselor? Is that what we used to call a busy-body?

The smart tiger will lurk at the updated watering hole, the bottled-water machine, waiting for its thirsty prey.

Unfortunately, PETA members are out of their cages too, terribly concerned lest Fluffy suffer from a human femur caught in his throat.

A house-cat is a tiger writ small, insolent and carnivorous, lounging on the windowsill and dreaming of killing mice and birds, and through its heavy-lidded eyes perhaps measuring its human companion and pondering the nutritive possibilities. To a pussycat the living room is the African veldt, and the cat’s pet human little more than a large, munchable monkey with opposable thumbs.

Sure your kitty purrs when you stroke his chin; he’s fantasizing about eating you.

Human – it’s what’s for dinner.

Even harmless-looking animals on the loose are dangerous; an innocent zoo visitor could be trampled to death by sheep stampeding to some presidential candidate’s rally.

And then the snakes – they might escape to become editors at The New York Times, swallowing whole the few remaining specimens of another endangered species, real reporters.