Mutants!

**What’s a liger? / It’s pretty much my favourite animal. It’s like a lion and a tiger mixed… bred for its skills in magic. – Deb (Tina Majorino) and Napoleon (Jon Heder), Napoleon Dynamite **

Let’s talk mutant animals!

It might be cruel, unnatural, an affront to God / Mother Nature / Gaia, but let’s face it hybrid animals are freakishly interesting. It’s like the owner of some rundown travelling circus or questionable genetic research lab was subbing for Mother Nature one day while she was off sick with the ‘flu and instead of just holding the fort down, he played about with something he shouldn’t have and bang! new creatures. Personally, I think the only thing cooler that one could invent is a new colour, a proper colour though, not just another shade of beige.

We can’t talk mutant animals without mentioning the daddy of them all: The Liger (and yes, it deserves capitalisation because, well… have you seen the size of one of those babies?!). With a daddy lion and a mummy tiger you knew they were gonna be big and scary, but this big and this scary?

It only gets better after the ligers, because after you’ve got a mutant animal why stop there? Why not breed it to create ti-ligers and li-ligers? (Or ti-tigons and li-tigons if you started with a tigon.) Of course, you do have to stop after that as playing with genetics will only go so far before genetics bitchslaps you, says “enough already” and starts making your mutants sterile and crazy.

The liger and its opposite the tigon set the president for mutant naming and you know it’s going to be good when a creature is named “Pizzly“. The scientists, after clearly listening to a little too much Snoop Dogg, came up with this portmanteau for the offspring of a polar and a grizzly bear. (Useless ursine fact: Ursus Arctos (literally (Latin) Bear (Greek) Bear) is actually the name for a Brown Bear, not a the polar bear and the big bit of snow and ice at the top of the world is named after the bear not the other way around.) What’s worse for the poor pizzlies is that they’re not just a science experiment with a funny name, but they occasionally exist in the wilds of Canada and Alaska and are perfectly natural creatures with their ghetto names and bling-bling (Okay, they possibly don’t have bling-bling, but they got dem ghetto names fo’shizzle).

We’ve also got wolphins – true story: while discussing this over family dinner on Friday night I mentioned the wolphin and in all seriousness my sister asked how they got a wolf into the water – which are half dolphin and half false killer whale; and the zebroid trio of zorses, zonkeys and zonys. We could include mules in here, but mules are, in the grand scheme of ridiculous mutant animals, very, very boring.

So what has this taught us, other than animals are obviously only named after much doobage had been smoked? Well, nothing really, but hee! look at all the funny words!