LUDIC LOG

Many people have written asking me, "Leonard, you have frequently voiced the opinion that it is okay for animals to kill people. I bet you're not so smug now that beloved homosexual lounge magician Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy has been mauled by a tiger, are you?"

Well, many people, the answer to this question is, yes, I am still so smug. In fact, if anything, I am more smug than ever before. Roy made his living taking huge, deadly wild beasts of the jungle and snapping whips at them in order to entertain corn-fed yokels vacationing in Vegas. He grossed tens of millions of dollars over the years taking majestic animals and making them balance on beach balls in between Arte Johnson and An Evening with Paul Revere & the Raiders. And I'm supposed to feel bad because one of the tigers got sick of getting smacked on the nose with a microphone and decided to put a crimp in his spine? Fuck Roy. I wish he was dead. In fact, I wish the tiger had also killed Siegfried, and then, having gotten an appetite for tangy human meat, gone to town on the gawkers in the audience and taken out a dozen or so of them. If it was up to me, that tiger would be let loose in the casino and only removed when he was too fat to walk.

However, it is true that it's not always funny or just when an animal kills a human. While I operate under the assumption that, given the fact that humans kill an uncountable number of animals every day to no one's great concern, it's perfectly okay for an animal to kill a human every so often, there are greater an lesser degrees of entertainment value to the activity. Most of the play comes in when the human is in some way hurting, provoking, teasing or exploiting the animal, which is pretty much all the time. In such situations, it is my belief that when the animal kills the person, the animal has won. Rather than being put down, it should be set free and, indeed, praised for defeating so resourceful an enemy. In the case of Roy's tiger, for example -- here is an animal who has defeated the most famous tiger-tamer in the world! It's like if a human beat up Mike Tyson! And we want to punish the animal for this? Hell, no. The tiger won. He's the king of all tigers now; he beat the man, so he should be the man. If anything, he should be put out to stud.

Now, I say this as the owner of domestic animals and an inveterate meat-eater. I am no PETAsan; but I do recognize the inherent truth of at least one of their arguments: that we are no better than animals, and the only reason we mistreat them so badly is because we can get away with it. We fetishize and rationalize all of our animal-killing, but thankfully, animals aren't sophisticated enough to do the same to us. We've arbitrarily sanctified human life to such an absurd degree that any human death is a tragedy, while simultaneously degrading animal life to a degree that we kill millions a day and don't even think about it. Well, I call bullshit on that -- not to the extent that I'll crusade against animal-killing; I love a good sausage, after all. But you won't find me crying false tears when once every blue moon, an animal manages to get us back.

Anyway, for future reference, I have put together a number of examples of animals killing humans, rated by positive value. Keep this entry handy for the next newsworthy animal attack.

SHARK EATS SWIMMER. There's not much cosmic justice at play here. The swimmer generally isn't trying to hurt the shark; she's just out for a nice dip in the ocean and isn't really doing anything to deserve having her legs bitten off. This is a mere 1 on the Scales of Animal Justice. However, we shouldn't be mad at the shark, either; eating people is what they do. Much more entertaining would be sharks eating the underwater photographers who film those omnipresent "Sharks: Nature's Most Perfect Killer" shows. They're just asking for it. The only reason anyone watches a shark show is to see someone get eaten, so I think at least one out of ever five shark cages should be defective. A National Geographic crew getting chewed to pieces by a great white would be a satisfying 5.

DOG MAULS HUMAN. Again, context is everything here. While a dog mauling a baby isn't particularly entertaining (unless there's some wierd aspect to it, like the baby's head is torn off, or the dog, or dingo, eats the baby and a Meryl Streep movie results), a dog mauling a child isn't always a bad things. There's a pretty good possibility that the child was teasing the dog. A dog killing a baby would be a miserable 1 on the Scales of Animal Justice, but a dog killing a child who was poking it with a stick would be a solid 3. Freaky scenarios, like a Nazi dog eating the face of a lesbian attorney or a dog that is trained to attack black people, will vary on the circumstance, but it's always good when specially trained dogs turn on their masters. Guard or attack dogs who injure their trainers get a 4, while dogs trained to fight who kill their owners get a robust 8. The time for this is past, but the Russian dogs in WWII who were trained to blow up German tanks and then turned around and blew up Russian tanks instead get a 9 as a particularly sweet slice of Animal Justice.

BULLS. In general, and particularly in light of the way humans slaughter cattle, there is no scenario in which a bull can kill a person that isn't entertaining. In ascending order: a person being gored by a bull at Pamplona is a 6 on the Scales of Animal Justice; a bull killing a rider in a rodeo is a 7; a cow crushing someone who was cow-tipping is an 8; a person dying of bovine spongiform encephalitis after eating infected beef is a 9; and a bull killing a matador during the organized animal torture of a bullfight rings up a perfect 10.

ANIMAL ENTERTAINMENT. Pretty much any situation in which an animal being put on display for the amusement of jaded humans lashes out and kills a bunch of them is good for a laugh. Aquarium deaths, because of the relatively harmless conditions and the rarity of injury, ranks the lowest, while circuses, easily the cruelest and most inhumane of all popular animal entertainments, is at the top of the list. Rampaging circus elephants are the second-best examples of pure animal justice at work (see below), and I'm not really satisfied unless the big fucker squashes at least half a dozen people. Zoo deaths are fairly rare, and people get all bent out of shape because they involve children, but fuck those people. They don't mind dragging their kids to throw peanuts at alligators and gawk at some poor lion snatched out of the wild and forced to live in a fucking box in Minnesota, then they have no right to complain if they drop their kid over the rail in the monkey house and it gets rogered to death by a bunch of randy gibbons.

HUNTING. The absolute pinnacle of the animals-killing-people entertainment genre, any instance of a hunter being killed by an animal rates a perfect 10 on the Scales of Animal Justice. Whether it's some ruralized asshole getting mauled to death by a bear, or someone on his way to his favorite tree stand crashing his car into a deer and running off the road into a light pole, it's good for a laugh. It's simpy ridiculous to complain when a hunter gets killed by an animal; this is exactly like crying for a murderer whose chosen victim fights back and blows his head off. Any animal who kills a hunter should be retired to a special habitat called the Bad-Ass Motherfucker Animal Preserve and given all its favorite treats of the rest of its natural life. It should also, needless to say, get to keep the hunter's head on a plaque on its favorite tree.