Animals Which Should Get Extinct, Part 1: Domestic Riversystems

I love nature, I really do. Almost nothing makes me happier than wandering the tracks and footpaths of my native Isle of Wight, amid the dusky whispers of the evening breeze and the chill crunch of a walked in Hunter on twigs and moss, spotting our noble friends brock and reynard going about their ancestral ways so blissfully ignorant of the hubbub of our soul-less modern world. Or perhaps the silent kestrel, floating ethereally on the downy winds; maybe the powerful stag beetle, enforcing the laws of the copse unto his quadropoid bretheren. I find it all totally magical.
Which is why, I wonder, the world must also be home to some of the most unspeakably sickening creatures ever to avoid the big chop. Perusing the internet for my daily dose of wildlife anecdotes, I came across the Alligator Snapping Turtle. Regular Snapping Turtles alone are pretty bad. Think of a Tortoise; pretty good, no? They’re slow, sort of chubby, they eat lettuce, and they sit in the front baskets of bicycles in the lanes of Northern France. Snapping Turtles are like the disgraceful working class cousin of the Tortoise. They’re moody, they stink bad, and they bite when aggressed instead of just nobly cowering away like any half sensible humanities undergraduate. For the Alligator Snapping Turtle, times this by about a thousand. There is just no need for them to be alive. They’re massive, can weigh easily over 200 pounds, terrifying looking, and they can kill and eat alligators. A TURTLE EATING AN ALLIGATOR. What else is there to say? They will devour basically anything you put in front of them. This could include a baby, or a priest. They have no qualms about their shocking guzzling, and even have a peculiar red protrudence in their mouths to act as bait for unwary prey. How incredibly cowardly. They will think nothing of comitting the most abhorrent waterway atrocities with their curved bird-like beaks. Once they have their demon spawn (luckily the only reason they venture onto land), they have basically no parental care system, somewhat like their humanoid equivalents again. Oh and they live for around 70 years. THE WORLD HAS CHOSEN THAT THIS MONSTER COULD LIKELY LIVE LONGER THAN ANYONE READING THIS. Horrific.
But perhaps not as bad the Snakehead, or a member of the Channa family of fish. These little bastards are carnivorous and destructive to the eco-systems of waterways they invade. “Surely a human error!” I hear you cry, “Who are these rogues spreading them about the rivers of North America like some kind of conscious nightmare fish epidemic?” Wrong. In their adolescent phase, Snakeheads are obligatory air-breathers. This literally means that they have to breath oxygenated air, and they can survive on land for up to four hours. They can also move about out of the water, and can thus leave their natural habitats to join other natural waterways, potentially infesting and destroying unprepared permacultures. The Sun, that bastion of high journalism, even reckons they can devour people, but they also cover Britain’s Got Talent with more fervour than the North Korean nuclear farce so that’s about that.

Next up: Jumping spiders, barking tarantulas, sea scorpions, and dinosaur sharks. Seriously. Til then wildlife haters! TH