Animal waves through the hazy dreams full of pain

Here at collegial Riddled Laboratories we do not regard ourselves as invertebrate-rights extremists. Unlike the fanatic activists of the Gastropod Liberation Front we are comfortable with (for instance) the humane and sustainable "milking" of Murex molluscs for their hypobranchial gland secretions, though of course we denounce the industrial-scale slaughter of the Mediterranean murex populations* for the sake of Tyrean-purple togas.**

But this is an outrage: Multi-headed planarians. This is real, not a Bonsai Kitten-style hoax. We urge our readers to resist the allure of false exoticism and eschew the "Freaks of Nature" microscope side-shows at the touring Protostomic Carnivals. Displays of anaerobic lociferans (such as can be viewed in the back room of the Old Entomologist for a purely nominal fee that barely covers expenses) are equally exotic and far more ethical.




Remember, these are not natural phenomena; they are laboratory artifices, wrought to order by unscrupulous unfeeling vivisectors in conditions of unspeakable cruelty to profit from a public craving for novelty and sensation. It is a vicious trade that serves no scientific purpose. Swell the demand for these grim travesties of legitimate research and you share the responsibility for promoting mutilation.

Is there no end to the wrongness? I see no scientific value in constructing a planarian Goatse.

Nor do we rate for Flea Circus sideshows.

Yes, he had the flea. For safety, he had it locked in the interior of his broken Hunter watch. The price? Fifty pounds.
Chapman was aghast. Fifty pounds?
"I don't care how strong and ferocious he is," he expostulated, "how can you justify paying fifty pounds for a flea?"
"He was in the Movement," Keats said.

-------------------------------

There is no way cat fur could have found its way into the Level-3 Biological Confinement Biohazard Facilities during our experiments to create multiheadedness by blocking the typhon gene with antisense DNA. The cat door was definitely shut and all the taq-polymerase was accounted for despite some irregularities with the punch at the annual Riddled "Come as your favourite Hox gene" costume party. It is a mystery.


I do not think this will end well.

* Also the North Atlantic dog whelk Nucella lapillus. The expert is Carole Biggam, whose seminal investigations into Dog-whelk dye technology: Known in Anglo-Saxon England as well as in Ireland? may some day provide a blogpost.

** As documented in the scholarly work of T. Robinson.