Why Your Favorite Animal Sucks and Mine is Better

Welcome to the very first, non-book related post on Biology for Bastards!

Enough of that shit, here's why you're wrong and I'm right.

According to a SUPER scientific Google search, Americans' top five favorite animals are:
1. Tiger
2. Dolphin
3. Dog
4. Horse
5. Lion

Now it's my expert opinion that those animals suck and everyone is missing the real hero/heroine out there. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up, proving why those animals are undeserving of the title before I tell you about your new favorite animal.

5. Lion = Nature's The Beatles (Fine, but definitely overrated)

Lion's are frickin' chumps. First off, the females are expected to do all the hunting and taking care of the children while the male just sits there and licks his balls. Secondly, is there anything less cool than that mane? Male lions all look like a bunch of rejects from the CATS musical or, even worse, some 80s hair band. Then there's all the lies... King of the Jungle? What jungle? Lions live in the damn savanna, which is definitely NOT a jungle. And before you bring up the Lion King (which, I remind you, is a children's movie) did you know that lions suck so much they didn't use lion roars in the movie, they had to use tigers instead? Yea, you got kicked out of your own movie. Next.

4. Horse = Helpful Jerks

...How...?

Without horses, the world wouldn't look or work the way it does now...probably. Super important for a lot of stuff but also kind of annoying. Walking around on those hooves which are really just their middle fingers so they're in a constant state of flipping everyone off (that's science). Sure they can run and pull stuff and whatnot, but they also let people ride them. I don't know about you, but if someone wanted to ride me, we would have to have a long talk before it happened and a safe word would have to be established. Not with horses though; you just jump on and they take you wherever you want to go. Are they helpful? Yes. Are they worthy of being your favorite animal? Fuck no.

3. Dogs = Man's Best (Needy) Friend

Yea...that's about right

I love my dogs. I have two of them. But there are also days I want to let them loose into the wilderness because they're so god damn needy. You know how human babies do nothing but eat, shit, and cry? Wouldn't it be great if we could have an infant for fifteen years? Let's get a dog. Sure, they're fun to have when they want to go on a walk, or play, or snuggle, but then they eat shit, vomit on your bed at 4 am, bark at absolutely nothing, and can't make up their mind to save their lives.

 Also, I'm pretty sure the evolution of dogs goes like this: 

Human: Hey dumbest wolf out there, want to be my friend? You can eat my garbage...

Wolf-Dog: Um...sure!

Human: Wow, you really are dumb

Wolf-Dog: Um...sure!

2. Dolphins = Rapists of the Sea

Sweet porn stache 

Dolphins rape people. Argument over.

1. Tigers = Pretty cool, but not cool enough

Neither of us knows what is happening here

I'll admit it, tigers are pretty cool. They eat people, and swim, and actually live in the fucking jungle unlike those liars at number five. But let's be honest with each other, how likely are we ever to see a wild tiger? They might as well be a unicorn as far as we know. And at the rate they're disappearing, give it fifty years and they'll be as real unicorns (sad, but true.) 

So what should your favorite animal actually be?

THE MOTHER FUCKIN' VIRGINIA OPOSSUM (Didelphis virginiana)!!

Don't believe me? Tough shit, you're wrong. Good God these creatures are amazing. Where do I even begin? Nipples? Penis? Fire? The 27th President of these United States? Rabies? Teeth? The Joy of Cooking? 

So the opossum (don't you dare forget the "o") has the most teeth of any North American mammal (50), one of the shortest gestation periods (science for pregnancy) out there at 13 days, is North America's only marsupial (mammals with a pouch), need I go on? Even if I don't, I will.

Notice that scary dick on the left

As North America's only marsupial and therefore the American kangaroo, it can give birth to up to fifty babies, affectionately called joeys, at once using its magical pseudo-vagina. I'm not kidding. Boy opossums have a terrifying-looking two-pronged penis and as a result, lady opossums have two vaginas. But when it comes time to have its babies, a magical portal between the two vaginas opens and the babies come out of this third pseudo-vagina (also known as the Central vaginal canal in the image below)

Once born, only thirteen babies get to survive because lady opossums only have thirteen nipples. Twelve are arranged in a circle and then lucky number thirteen is right in the middle. Like a bull's eye of teats.

Ok, enough talk about opossum sex (which I'm sure tickled some of your fancies a little too much). On to how they're resistant to a shit ton of stuff. Snake venom? No problem. An opossum doesn't give two shits, or even a shit for that matter, if it's bitten by a venomous snake. The amount of fucks it gives about snake venom is so low, people are actually studying it to see if we can make a universal antivenom out of its blood. It's that bad ass.

Good job on this one Disney

On a slightly different note, remember Old Yeller? The book and movie about the dog that goes rabid and the family had to kill? If you had a pet opossum and not a stupid dog (see point three above), you wouldn't have to shoot your pet because OPOSSUMS ARE IMMUNE TO RABIES! Suck it Old Yeller. An opossum's body temperature is too low for the rabies virus to survive so the likelihood of you running into a rabid opossum is less than the likelihood of seeing a tiger that isn't in a cage (see point five above). In other words, opossums are indestructible.

Which happens to bring me to my next point. If you're familiar with the story of Prometheus but not the story of the opossum and fire, you need to stop being so "I only learn about white people stuff" and get your brain into some Mazatecan folklore. The Mazatecs were a group of people indigenous to Mexico and as their legend states, the opossum stole fire and carried it on it's tail, which is why opossums today have hairless tails. When's the last time you heard of a dolphin bringing fire to humanity? Never? Exactly.

From the 1962 version of The Joy of Cooking

Last point of today (believe me, I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and...) has to do with William Howard Taft and how he liked to eat. So around the turn of the 20th century, eating opossums was a big deal. There were recipes on how to properly prepare the glorious animal in the Joy of Cooking all the way up until the 1960s. The way President Taft works into this story is he was a big dude; the man liked to eat. At a fancy state dinner in the south during his presidency (which ran from 1909-1913), the President was served the classic dish of "Opossum and Taters" which was a roasted opossum served on a bed of sweet potatoes. It was a huge ass opossum and Taft ate the whole thing. After this, his marketing team tried to get the Billy Opossum to be a thing to compete with the Teddy Bear (named after Theodore Roosevelt, Taft's predecessor) but people liked Roosevelt more so the Billy Opossum (sadly) never took off.

So there you have it, the short version of why you have shitty taste in animals and why the Virginia Opossum should be everyone's favorite. Still disagree with me? Doesn't matter, because I'm right and you're wrong.