🔭 The Animal Essay

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I regret eating the whale. Not a whole whale — I'm not that French guy who wolfed down a Cessna or some beardless, Mirror World Jonah. It was just four pieces of sashimi. I wasn't moral enough to brave vegetarianism in Japan and my host brother catered it as a birthday delicacy. Also I'm a monster. Later that night I got caught tanuki-ing through the garbage for non-existent puffer fish poison sacs to get high on.

If it's any consolation, that whale died for science. The government said so. (You trust the government, don't you?) That was Japan's Get Out of Jail Free card at the time. (The fuck-you-whale, fuck-you-dolphin revelations of South Park were a few years off.) That might be their excuse today, too. I didn't check.

But science is not a valid excuse for animal abuse.

How many Draize-test-blinded rabbits go on to become Make Up Artist influencers? How many Muscovite mutt astronauts summer in leash-free parks in Siberia? How many retired sauropods go hog wild on Jurassic stud farms? That's why I'm against “de-extincting” dire wolves.

Context: Back in April, Colossal Biosciences (official motto: “Franken-who?”) introduced the world to dire wolf pups. Kinda. They tweaked the genes of gray wolves to match ancient DNA, and, in an effort to fulfill some Weird Sisters prophecy, birthed them via cesarean section from domestic dog surrogates. Is that the same thing as bringing them back from the dead? I'm seriously asking, is that the same thing? Regardless, those poor pups don't have enough acreage for regular wolves, let alone resurrected mega-predators.

Cue “Biotech is Godzilla” by Sepultura.

Cue TOHO lawsuit.

The company cops to playing god and their excuse is that everyone’s already doing it. I'm taking liberties, but not that many. Check out that cover piece in Time Magazine (motto: We're extant!).

Look, I don't mean to give eugenics a black eye, but we've got a decidedly iffy track record with application. And I'm not just talking about pugs so cute they struggle to breathe and connect-the-hundred-and-one-incest-dots dalmatians.

As long as there are responsible, down-to-Earth people at the helm, we'll be fine. Right…? (That's the American way!) They named two of the wolves Romulus and Remus? Cue Lovecraftian laugh track.

Romulus? Fucking Romulus? You mean the mythical fratricidal self-made king whose actual empire is the poster child for imperialism and cultural hegemony?! Well, hopefully they picked a less problematic name for the third pup…

Khaleesi?! Okay, these folks have that Elon Musk, I-really-really-hope-they-understand-satire-and-are-just-trolling vibe. (DON'T PANIC!)

Let's skip to the end:

foofaraw's Guide to Überwolf Self-Defense

Step 1. Die.
Step 2. Repeat as necessary.
Step 3. George R. R. Martin is currently working on Step 3, and has provided detailed notes about sibling pairings and dragon names.

 Hey, remember Dolly the sheep? Cloning isn't an unrelated topic. Forcing genetic manipulation on babies is the name of the game, baby! Dolly died young of an unrelated lung disease (thanks Internet), but her siblings … wait, what? She was cloned from breast tissue and her name is an explicit reference to the famously breasted Dolly Parton.

Wow.

No, sit with that a minute.

I'm serious.

I hope we all learned a valuable lesson today.

In the near future, we can expect lookalike woolly mammoths, dodos, and thylacines. And that's just from Colossal.

The hope is that genetic tinkering helps endangered species make comebacks or eradicates disease by force-sterilizing vectors like mosquitoes and (insert “Jersey Shore” reference here, or some modern equivalent). Thus, we can restore the world to an imaginary pure, natural state, whatever that means. I'd like to point out that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, human influence be damned.

Also not unrelated: It's been a century since the Scopes Monkey Trial and we still haven't settled on teaching Evolution in public schools in America, let alone offering Natural Selection as a driving force.

We are a superstitious, horny lot.

In an effort to do my part for the human race—C'mon, ya'll!—here are some common sense guidelines for gene hacking:

1. Lay off the animals. If you can't manage your own shit, you've got no business meddling in someone else's.
1a. That includes people, human exceptionalism or not.
2. Lay off the clones. If you don't think rich people aren't already doing this … .
3. Lay off the mycelium. (Now there's some exceptionalism!)
4. Leave the plants alone, too. Just in case. (Oh no, not again.)

So, what's left to tinker with?

Well, you can go tinker yourself!

Remember that old Joe Rogan bit about what would happen if dick pills really worked? That. In reality, I expect something between Alan Dean Foster's The Tipping Point trilogy and Japan's children show “Butt Detective.”

Probably more “Butt Detective.”

At the risk of clarity, please don't take this as a Luddite rant. We absolutely should do genetic experiments. On ourselves. Like all the greats — Dr. Jekyll, the main character in “The Invisible Man,” the guy from that black-and-white version of “The Fly,” to say nothing of Jeff Goldblum — put your science where your mouth is. That's the end goal anyway.

Look what happened to Cobra Kai alumnus Oroku Saki. His folly is well-documented in the 1991 documentary “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.” And his revelation and remorse are more salient than ever: “Babies! They are babies!”

Coda: A human baby got CRISPR gene editing for the first time the day after I drafted this. Chaos reigns.