A bunch of little snippets about how immoral, depraved, unfair, conniving and murderous animals can be. If you tend to think nature is full of beautiful, noble, innocent creatures living in perfect balance and harmony, and that your cute cuddly pet would never bite you, well this book is out to prove you wrong. Vicious hummingbirds, drunk bees, cheating songbirds, deceptive apes, bullying and abusive dolphins, faithless penguins, uncooperative elephants, thieving animals of all kinds, and the list goes on. I think the author has a good point- most animals are out to get what they want (food, sex, etc) and sometimes a dog really will bite the hand that feeds it. Just because a panda is cute doesn’t mean it wants a hug (yes, someone climbed into a zoo enclosure and tried this). The book is a breeze to read through, and kinda funny, but also dissatisfying. I’d heard most of these stories before- or very similar ones. They’re related so briefly you feel some important details must always have been left out. The formatting is kind of strange, with the regular narrative text broken up by other text boxes that just tell other stories, interrupting the flow of reading. And some of the stories were really dumb, to be honest. A dog that steps on a gun and kills its owner- pure accident. Not intentional on the dog’s part. So how is that “behaving badly”? On the other hand, the stories about people trying to help animals who didn’t actually need, or evidently didn’t want their help, really made me laugh.
One Response
> and that your cute cuddly pet would never bite you, well this book is out to prove you wrong.
A few months ago I got a kitten. I’m bitten or scratched nearly hourly, so that line made me laugh.