A Whole New Meaning to Orwellian

Bear game recognize hog game

George Orwell's Animal Farm is widely understood to be an allegory for the arc of certain human revolutions, from their incarnation in idealistic purity to their eventual descent into betrayal of that idealism in the name of power.

A couple of recent events have me wondering if it's more of a warning, or at least more of prediction. Humans, it must be said, aren't exactly covering ourselves in glory at the moment. And I think the animals are planning something.

In Italy, a pack of feral hogs stole $22,000 worth of cocaine from a dumb group of traffickers and stashed it in various places around a forest in eastern Tuscany. Feral hogs are bad enough - those fuckers are mean as hell, and dangerous to boot - but if they're training elite commando units (with 30-50 feral hogs in each) and feeding them coke, we're gonna have a problem on our hands.

Moo, motherfucker

Meanwhile, closer to home, another apparent four-legged training mission took place on the Outer Banks. In May, as Hurricane Dorian hammered the Eastern Seaboard (and what better cover for a training mission than a hurricane), three feral cows slipped silently in the water near Cedar Island and swam the four mile distance to Cape Lookout National Seashore. Since then, the trio has been seen grazing on local sea grasses and lounging in the shade - both of which activities are the kinds of things they'd want us to think they were doing while they were really sending secret messages to Italian feral cows.

"Four legs good, two legs bad" may have been corrupted in Orwell's original manuscript, but if we know what's what, we'll keep our eyes on the four-legged in our midst. It doesn't take much imagination to conjure a scenario where the planet's decided that we're a fucking menace, and that it's done waiting for us to listen to our better angels. Feral cows, indeed.