Dear Vice,
Your posts have been sucking lately so I thought I’d let you in on a this interesting theory I’ve been working on. It is this: the animal kingdom has a way wider spectrum of happiness than we do. At one end of the spectrum there are animals like deer and pygmy shrew that live in a level of hell only the bible can describe and at the other end there’s animals (mostly birds) that live a life of pure euphoria. All of our experience (all 6 billion of us) have lives that fall well within the confines of these two extremes. None of us have lives that are as shitty as a pygmy shrew (not even close) and none of us, no matter how high we get, will never comprehend the joy a turkey vulture has. This subject is considered taboo by most animal folks because they think it will lead to less animal rights for the losers.
But the truth of it is inescapable. Shit, we only discovered happiness very recently. Go back two generations and happiness was barely in the human vocabulary. They just worked their fingers to the bone through two world wars and a depression, had six kids and died at 60 knowing they are going to get it all paid back in heaven (yeah right). Is it so hard to accept that most animals would kill themselves if they only had the brains to do it?
I have chosen a few random animals and placed them on my happiness chart.
Pygmy shrew: these little losers have to eat something like three times their body mass every day just to survive – no thanks! Talk about high-strung. All you have to do is fart in China and this guy does a triple back flip in panic. And look at mice. Ever see one of them lounging around enjoying the sun? They are constantly whipping back and forth trying to live another day.
Happiness: -50
Human equivalent: none
Wolves: all these guys do is fight. Only one of them gets to breed (the alpha male) and every other male devotes his life to wiping this guy out (which one of them will inevitably do one day). There’s only 9,000 of these in all of America. Their reproduction rates suck because even when an alpha male does finally get to the point of fuck worthy the female is usually too stressed out to ovulate.
And hunting is way shittier than you think it is. Something like 1 out of every 20 moose they attack actually goes down. Odds are similar for most of their prey. Only beavers have a steady rate of return.
Happiness: -30
Human equivalent: starving African
Lions: same shit different animal. If they don’t have other alpha male contestants biting through their skin they have motherfucking hyenas literally tearing them a new ass every ten minutes. There is never a day of rest and life is about 100% fighting for your life.
Happiness: -25
Human equivalent: starving Romanian
Deer: they look cute and everything but do you want to wander through the woods all winter hoping for one morsel of one leaf to eat? You see them in the spring with fuckin’ open sores all over their bodies that are FILLED with maggots. Nice.
Happiness: -20
Human equivalent: starving Cambodian
Moose: I used to go tree planting in Northern Ontario and moose were everywhere. During black fly season they would charge out to the delivery roads and start bucking and shaking and making these weird animal pleas trying to get the wind to blow off at least one black fly. Just to get a two-second break. Please God. It was watching this that made me start my theory in the first place.
Happiness: -17
Human equivalent: guy who’s spent his whole life in jail
Dogs: yeah they seem happy but those poor bastards are perpetually hungry. You see, the way we made dogs is we took the most puppyish of the wolves (floppy ears, non-violent, always happy to see us) and kept breeding them until we had perpetual children like that black hunk form Baby Boy. Then we fed them sawdust and carbs until we got a stomach that could never be full. Those fuckers will eat everything you give them, then barf it up and eat some more. Wolves will eat a deer carcass and then not get another bite for a week and a half. And they’re fine with that.
Happiness: -4
Human equivalent: rural Canadian drug addict
Cats: who cares?
Swallows: most people agree birds have the best life there is. Who doesn’t have flying dreams? But a lot of birds still have shitty lives. Barn swallows for example live their lives totally covered in bloodsucking blowfly maggots. There’s hundreds of them in every nest and most young would be very fortunate to make it to adulthood without being bled dry.
Happiness: 3
Human equivalent: mentally ill guy on a farm
Turtles: they seem to have it pretty easy. Lots of sunbathing.
Happiness: 5
Human equivalent: guy who works at Wal-Mart
Grouse: in your article Animals are Gay you talked about a lot of different animals experiencing joy. I agree. In the winter in Ottawa once I saw grouse (or was it pheasants- not sure – I’m not really an animal expert) lining up behind each other to go tobogganing down a small hill on their ass. They waited patently for their turn, went to the top, jumped on to their ass and slid down. Step and repeat.
Happiness: 30
Human equivalent: rich guy that gets laid a lot
Monkeys: they spend an average of about 2 hours a day working on food and water. We spend an average of 8 and that’s after European lazers like Italy pull the average down from 9 or 10. Sorry but if you are devoting 22 hours a day to sleeping and fucking around you have a happy life. Do they even have any predators?
Happiness: 40
Human equivalent: none
Turkey vultures: if you’ve ever seen a turkey vulture riding the thermals in Costa Rica you can maybe begin to understand how shitty your life is compared to these animals. They flap like, once a day, and then go round and round scoping out the scenery for some carcasses to munch on. Sure, that sounds gross to you because you prefer veggie burgers but don’t impose your taste on the animal kingdom. When most predators nail their prey they go for the steaming organs and leave our favorite parts for the end. They like the stink.
Happiness: 40
Human equivalent: none
So yeah, the scary part of all this talk is it seems to justify mass meat farming and leaving cows in these tiny cages so they can’t walk. I’m not saying that. Nobody thinks it’s OK to go galloping through Africa beheading starving children just because their lives are hell.
I’m still a vegetarian. But I’m also a hunter and I think we tend to over humanize animals. I won’t eat a cow that’s been tortured in a tiny holding cell its whole life but there’s nothing wrong with me wiping a deer off the map and munching away at it’s delicious body. Is there?
PS if you see a pygmy shrew be a mensch. Step on its head.
Sincerely,
Corey Stillman
New York, NY
Reader Comments
August 22nd, 2006
terrific
August 22nd, 2006
you’re hired.
August 22nd, 2006
but still, give this guy a page vice.
August 22nd, 2006
fucking comedy!
August 22nd, 2006
Wow!
Excellent article!
Great example of why I love VICE.
Show anyone this article and convert them on to VICE.
August 22nd, 2006
Hilarious. He’s wrong about lions though. The y sleep about 16-20 hours a day in the sun, and usually its the women who do the hunting while the men just sit around. Also, during mating season the men fuck for like 4 days strike.
August 22nd, 2006
I’m no animal expert but isn’t the life of a lion the same as any hierarchic animal like that? Only the alpha male matters so male life is about fighting and fighting for that spot. Even if you make it there’s a sword of Damocles over your head where someone could want to throw down at any given moment any time of the day. (that’s why you can never have a wolf as a pet. it will see you as the alpha male and devote its life to wiping you out so it can move in to the top spot).
Then, outside of that you have hyenas. Your arch enemy. Determined to steal your shit and kill you the second you show weakness. Sounds like being a kingpin druglord or something. Your rich for a second and then BOOM bullethole in your head. No thanks.
i didn’t know about the leisure though. Are you sure that’s not starving leisure. Monkeys hang out surrounded by food. Lions seem less spoiled.
August 22nd, 2006
great article
August 23rd, 2006
“Only beavers have a steady rate of return”??????? WTF
August 23rd, 2006
tops!
August 23rd, 2006
yes Lunar, he means beavers with teeth, not crotch beavers. they are very easy for a wolf to kill.
August 23rd, 2006
Thanks Gav
August 23rd, 2006
Excellent! Pay this man!
August 23rd, 2006
Who is this guy?
Whoever he is.. absolutely fucking excellent!
August 23rd, 2006
i like what this hippie is trying to say, still it’s fucking dumb to say that ‘we tend to over humanize animals’, and then write a text that assumes that animals are smart enough to have feelings like happiness. maybe a monkey can feel happy when he has a wank, yes, but i dont think the average pigeon is crying with joy just because it can fly.
August 23rd, 2006
what is it about hyenas and ass? they love it.
August 23rd, 2006
Stillman 4 president
August 23rd, 2006
holy fuck, does this guy have a PhD in animology or something? his article made me wet myself a little bit… rural canadian drug addict, seriously. well played. vice, this is the kind of stuff you should be posting.
August 23rd, 2006
You dummies. this post is so obviously gavin mcginnis you’d have to be a retard not to notice.
August 24th, 2006
i really dont give a fuck about this shit.
its gay and irrellevant.
i like the vice journalism where they teach you about really fucked up things you really should be knowing about.
that serves a purpose, and makes the baby boomer attacks worthwhile.
this guys just not funny and silly and too clever and he ingests too much sugar from the sounds of it.
yo man we need your help - we dont want to smell your poo-finger.
August 24th, 2006
gavin gavin gavin
August 24th, 2006
I’ve been reading up on the back issues for a while now and so I know what i’m saying when i say this: this is some of the best shit I’ve seen in Vice ever.
Get more jewish writers LOL!
August 24th, 2006
I’ve been reading up on the back issues for a while now and so I know what i’m saying when i say this: this is some of the best shit I’ve seen in Vice ever.
Get more jewish writers LOL!
August 24th, 2006
fuckin’ genius article.
August 24th, 2006
yes! i despise cats aswell!
yo corey. i want your email add. help me out on my research paper on osama.
August 24th, 2006
i think monkeys are threatened by snakes, esp in trees.
apes - gorillas - they just rip those shits apart, or drink a 4.0.
birds only have one downfall (haha), they are ugly as fuck when they are young..but so are some humans at infant stage and 8yo snotnose stage so i dont know what im saying.
August 24th, 2006
This is obviously contrived for Vice and isn’t some random ideas some guy was fleshing out. It sounds like Gavin…the cat thing gives it away.
August 24th, 2006
I like cats! :(
August 25th, 2006
John Gray’s “Straw Dogs” attempts to present a world view in which humans are not central and which argues against the humanist belief in progress. The heart of the book is summed up in the idea that modern humanists have still not come to terms with Darwin, still not come to terms with the idea that humans are like other animals. Christians and modern humanists in the Platonic-Cartesian tradition typically think of humans enjoying a special relationship to God, or a special status in nature in a way that other animals do not. Even the great debunkers–philosophers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger–end up making human beings the centre of things or the end point of some world-historical process. By contrast, in a Taoist, Shinto, Hindu or animist culture Darwin’s discovery would have been easily accommodated since these faiths see humans and other animals as kin.
In short, for Gray, humanism is nothing more than “a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth”. Gray champions James Lovelock’s view of the Earth as a self-regulating system whose behaviour resembles, in some ways, that of an organism. The Gaia hypothesis is the backdrop to Gray’s apparently relentless pessimism about the fate of humankind. What it teaches us is that this self-regulating system has no need of humanity, does not exist for the sake of humanity, and will regulate itself in ignorance of humanity’s fate.
August 25th, 2006
Once again the Ivory Tower academics try to convince us that the world we see right before our eyes is not real. Sorry philosphers we ARE different than animals. We are smarter and we can convey knowledge better. You can tell me I’m 99.9% the same as a monkey but I’ve seen monkeys and apparently there’s a lot going on in that 0.1% of difference.
August 27th, 2006
yeah dude, you lead a higher existence in your eight-hour-a-day shitty desk job writing copy for some japanese car/furniture/whatever company and then going to some shitty irish pub run by scots so MAYBE some stupid quasi valley girl can MAYBE suck your dick for a few minutes in a bathroom that smells like ajax, vodka and diarrhoea than a gibbon does in its two hours, maybe three during a massive drought, spent looking for a couple bananas, maybe some berries or whatever and some water, then spending the rest of the fucking day leaping around in the vines and whatnot. seriously, have you seen those motherfuckers? someone get on the yeller to william blake, ’cause that shit’s poetry. there sure is a lot going on in that 0.1% of differerence. lucky bastard monkey.
December 21st, 2006
Wow! I just saw the comment I left back in 08/22/2006
Man, I RULE!
Did this get get a job or what?
December 22nd, 2006
Some animals would have enviable lives if we didn’t get in the way… I’d put bonobos in this category. If a female Bonobo is in heat and sees male bonobos eating bananas in a tree, she’ll get it on with each of the males (including the adolescents) before taking a bite. It’s estimated that a bonobo gets its primate dick wet 2000 times for every time it concieves. Trouble is, they live in one of the most hellish human habitats on Earth - Congo-Kinshasa. Since 1997 something like 6 mil people have died there (not that I’m crying - they were more or less savages by suburban US standards) leaving only 10,000 left.
December 23rd, 2006
Well, this explains reincarnation. Karma makes a lot more sense now.