Years ago, I read that scientists in Japan were going to try to clone prehistoric animals. And I’ve got two words for these guys:
JURASSIC PARK!
Did anyone on this research team even see the scary Spielberg dinosaur movie? If so, didn’t they get the point: bringing dinosaurs back—Bad! Leaving things the way they were—Good!
Yes, I know it was a movie. But it was a darn realistic one. And it’s being released again—in 3-D! Like I wasn’t freaked out about the dinosaurs enough. Now I’ll get to feel like they are reaching out into the audience to bite my head off. That will be enough for me.
I really don’t want to have to worry about is whether there will be a traffic jam on the highway because a T-Rex has gotten loose from the lab.
There was a reason, I believe, for all the dinosaurs dying out before we human beings got here—because they would kill us. Sure, there may have been some “missing link” humans around when some dinosaurs were still stomping across the earth, but they had big, flat foreheads, walked with their knuckles dragging the ground, and ate raw meat. So they were used to dealing with misfortune. Today, some homo sapiens practically have a heart attack if they have to wait more than five minutes for their fast food—no hunting and gathering here.
Suppose they are able to bring back the dinosaurs one day? You know what would come first? The Tyrannosaurus Rex. And although I’ve been interested in dinosaurs since I was a kid, and admittedly, the T-Rex was my favorite, I sure don’t want one for a pet. Nor do I want to see one on the street. I like them right where they are now—dead and reconstructed in the dinosaur section of museums.
What about the velociraptors? We all saw what they did to those people in the movie. I don’t want them running around with their scary, little beady eyes and their claws ready to rip out my throat.
Life as we know it would turn into a Godzilla movie—but without the guy in the goofy costume fighting Mothra.
Perhaps though, the obesity ratio in the United States would greatly decrease—because all we would be doing is running for our lives 24/7. Forget wanting to go back to the times of slower living, where you could take time to smell the roses or talk to your neighbor over the back fence or when the biggest problem of the day was if your kid forgot to take his lunch to school. With dinos running around, we’d have to worry that we’d be lunch.
And don’t think that they can easily keep these cloned dinosaurs sequestered in the lab. All we need is Newman from “Seinfeld” to show up and—boom!—a bunch of dinosaur DNA would be stuffed in a fake shaving cream can, and people would be selling baby dinos on E-Bay faster than you can say “Argh! I’m dead!”
Kids would no longer use the excuse, “The dog ate my homework” in school. No, I’m not thinking of “The dinosaur ate my homework.” I’m thinking more along the lines of kids saying, “The dinosaur ripped the roof off my house with its teeth and then stepped on it, crushing it into the ground. So now that I’m homeless, and they haven’t found the cat yet, could we just please forget about algebra?”
I have to admit that would be a pretty good argument for no homework. But, I digress…
I’m not against change, though. No, not me. If they want to clone things, go ahead. But clone small things. Small, fuzzy things. Small, fuzzy, cute things that don’t have six-inch teeth and a mouth the size of my dining room table.
Go back to cloning lambs. We can never have enough wool sweaters, right?
Gasp! I just made the connection—wool…wooly. Wooly mammoth!!!!
These scientists are planning to take over the entire wool garment industry. Think about it; they’d probably have to clone 7,000 sheep to equal all the fur on a wooly mammoth. With the mammoths, they’d also have those tusks that they could sell to former elephant hunters seeking ivory. And the meat, well, they could sell that to Japanese restaurants as a new dish—mammoth chow mien.
At least maybe with that meal, you wouldn’t be hungry again in an hour. In fact, you probably could live off it for the winter.
But these still aren’t good reasons for raising the dead. Sometimes it’s best to just let sleeping dogs—and big, scary, killing machine dinosaurs—lie.
After all, that way they can’t eat me.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not freaking out about the idea of dinosaurs once again inhabiting the earth, writes Wojo’s World ® from Baltimore.