human: the other other other other other white meat (right after chipmunk)

I clap my hands in delight whenever some killer whale in a SeaWorld-type place eats part of some asshole tourist. It just seems like justice to me. Animals are not meant to be locked up like that and made to perform tricks; if I were a killer whale with my dorsal fin all flopped over because I've had the will to live drained out of me, and I had some jackass standing on my face because gee, what a cool picture that will be to show the guys at the office, I'd bat him around the tank for about 45 minutes before I ate his left foot.

So I was not sad at all when Timothy Treadwell got eaten by the bears he so loved. And by "loved," I mean "annoyed shitless." If I were a bear, I would have eaten him, too, and I don't think I'd have been able to put up with him for 13 years. I'd last a good week and a half. And if there were plenty of salmon, I'd just have killed him for the hell of it. Which brings me to my next point.

When wild animals attack people, why are we amazed? If you're sitting in an airport and a buffalo charges you, then you have the right to be astounded. But odds are that if you're currently being ripped apart by some animal, you were not supposed to be wherever you are. Sure, there are exceptions, but they're still animals. So are we. And yet people are so horrified when a cougar eats a person, as though we're something other than walking meat. Yeah, it's a terrible death, but I'm pretty sure those mountain goats don't enjoy being eaten while they're still kicking, either. We slaughter and eat all kinds of animals (or parts of them, anyway) but then we've got to go shoot down the "maneater" from a helicopter. It's a good thing cows don't have delusions of being at the top of the food chain.

Of course I'm on this rant because of what I captioned this evening. Some douchebag has taken it upon himself to go out and try to find a way to get himself mauled. If he feels the need to get himself torn into fleshy bleeding flaps, all he needs to do is show up on my front porch and remind me who he is. Of course, none of the animals care that he's there because he hasn't gone to poke them with sticks while they're half-starved, which seems to be a common denominator among animal attacks on humans. If a bear sees you while he has a mouthful of salmon and is standing next to a field full of berries, he won't care that you're there. I can't imagine that human would taste very good, especially because we live so long. (Usually.) We've got to be stringy and gross. I think salmon and berries sounds great. I will choose that over Random Hiker every time. One very big reason Treadwell was slurped up by Mr. Chocolate or whatever the fuck bear ate him is that there was no food. And when there's no food around, your definition of food becomes a bit broader. You know how you start sniffing at yogurt that expired last week and saying "Well, it smells all right..." We are the expired yogurt of the natural world. No one wants to eat it, but every now and again, someone has to.