As a rule, I don’t watch nature shows.  They all have the same plot.  This is how every single one goes:

(Footage of an adorable newborn seal)

Announcer: Here we see a baby seal.  Young, wide-eyed, and innocent, it looks so happy just to be alive.  In the distance, a hungry whale draws ever nearer, unseen by the other seals.  The dutiful mother of the baby seal must leave the baby seal for just a few minutes to get food.

(The background music begins to sound like a near copy of the Jaws music.)

Announcer: Unattended, the tasty…I mean, baby seal frolics, SO delighted in every precious moment, as it makes plans for a long and happy life.

(The whale jumps out of the water, terrifyingly large mouth open, splashing water and obscuring everything for a moment until it falls back into the water.  The baby seal is gone.)

Announcer: For seals, especially adorable baby ones that want nothing more than to be alive, nothing comes easy.

(The baby seal slowly emerges from its hiding spot behind a rock.)

Announcer: It seems luck was on the side of this baby seal THIS TIME.  It may have survived this attack, but when you’re an adorable baby animal, death lurks around every corner.

(The cameraman pulls out a bazooka and shoots the baby seal.)

~

The term “Nature documentary” is just a euphemism for snuff film.  They never show you an animal unless it is about to be killed by some other animal.  They never follow an animal just because it’s having a good hair day or has a striking resemblance to a member of the royal family.

Somewhere is millions of hours of footage of happy, frolicking baby animals that DON’T end in death.  I know for a fact that not every adorable baby animal gets eaten, or all animals would be extinct by now!  There must be footage of it somewhere.  Maybe Area 51 is actually a depository of nature films deemed unusable because the death toll is less than 100%.

But this blog post is not about the government fabricating alien spaceships as a cover-up for the fact that they are sitting on the most adorable baby animal films of all time with animals that live to a ripe old age.  Although that sounds exactly like something I’d write.

I recently heard about a documentary talking about a grouper fish and an octopus that team up to catch food.  The grouper fish can see tiny fish hiding in a coral and an octopus can reach the small fish, so the grouper fish finds them and points them out to the octopus, who either grabs them to eat itself or scares them out to where the grouper fish can eat them.

If animals are going to start teaming up, we’re all going to be in trouble.  Imagine the danger for all plains animals if a lion were to team up with a giraffe, who could scope out prey from 500 yards.  And imagine if that giraffe got its hoofs on a sniper rifle.

Which led me to come up with other dangerous animal pairings:

Skunks and Zebras:

Zebra’s black and white stripes are designed to make it hard to tell where one zebra ends and another begins.  Now imagine blended among that sea of stripes are some hidden skunks.  And because the skunks are riding on the zebra’s back, their tails are that much closer to your face!

Elephant and a Boa constrictor:

An elephant with a boa constrictor attached to its trunk could strangle something from so far away, it could have a convincing alibi across town when the murder happened.

Ostrich and Flamingo:

So much leg and so little actual bird.  It just wouldn’t be right.

Pangolin and Moose:

First of all, there’s the obvious difficulty in pluralizing both of these animals. (I had to Google it and it turns out the plural is pangolins, which is not intuitive.  For some reason, I feel like the plural should just be “pangolin”.)

Secondly, if you are unfamiliar with the pangolin, it is essentially chain mail armor that has become sentient.

So if you were to take a moose, which is approximately 80 to 90 feet tall, and cover it in pangolins, you would have a dinosaur.

And I’ve seen enough of those Jurassic Park movies to know that dinosaurs cause people to either be eaten or worse, have extremely inconsistent personalities.

Nematode and an actual Toad:

I don’t know, but it would be confusing.

Cheetah and Llama:

Really the only thing I know about Llamas is that they spit.

Now imagine that there was a llama on rollerblades being pulled along at 80 miles an hour by its cheetah buddy.  At those speeds, it could spit on a lot of people in a short amount of time, and at a certain point, I think humans would have to stop calling themselves the dominant species on the planet.

Dolphins and cats:

At first glance, you might not think this pairing would be dangerous.  But you take the second most intelligent species on the planet and pair them with one of the most maniacal species on Earth, and I guarantee only bad things will come of it!

Alligator and Crocodile:

You know you can’t tell them apart.  If they were constantly together, the social awkwardness alone would be fatal.

Humming bird and an Anteater:

Usually an anteater uses its long nose to inhale ants.  But imagine how fast it could shoot a hummingbird out of that nose.  And hummingbirds have those long, sharp beaks.  Somebody’s going to lose an eye.

Duck and a Beaver:

It would be like a deconstructed platypus, but with twice as many brains and slightly more feet.  The better to kill you with, my dear!

Baby Yoda and a Gorn:

I don’t have anything to say here.  I was just seeing if you were still paying attention.  You nerd.  (I mean me.  I’m a nerd.)

Koala Bear and a Lobster:

Picture it: you’re standing under a tree, admiring an adorable koala bear in the branches, when it suddenly throws a lobster at your face. (Honestly, given how dangerous everything in Australia is, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out koalas actually do this.)

Tarsiers and Quokka:

Look at these two!

Craig L Whiteside https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Quokka_-_Happy_Local_-_panoramio.jpg

Look at how they’re looking at you!  If you went anywhere and saw these two looking at you like that, you’d know something was up, and it would drive you crazy not knowing what.

Raccoon and a Great White Shark:

If you don’t leave enough scraps in your trash can, the next time you open it, there could be a great white shark inside.

Murder Hornets and Tom Cruise:

As if Scientology wasn’t scary enough already.