Curb Your Human

I've developed this habit lately of contextualizing activities human beings put their domesticated animals through, and imagining how those activities would seem if done to human beings. Presumably by gigantic dogs or snakes wearing goth makeup.

Think about the whole deal with getting your pet its periodic medical checkups. I can imagine giant dog-owners constantly scratching their heads (presumably still with hind legs in some adorable fashion, while wearing a sweater vest and smoking a pipe) in confusion upon finding that a human pet's medical needs becomes a laborious task. For example, they'll be befuddled upon finding that their human's root canal can't be treated by an injection of adrenaline into the gonads. Or that a severe case of human cancer (which they'll give a cute name like mancer to make it easier to deal) can't be dispatched by several afternoons of running around playing frisbee and fetching sticks repeatedly. Particularly callous dog owners will probably submit their fast balding human's photo to a Lolhumanz website with a hilarious caption like "I CAN'T HAZ WHITE T CELLS?"

Maybe we have no idea how severe the emotional damage a whimpering dog or wailing cat may have suffered to express itself so. I'd imagine the tortured howls and guttural sounds a human would make upon being raped in an alley by 5 other non-spayed humans, or being separated from its young immediately after birthing, would keep our anthropomorphic owners up all night. I'd imagine a stray human belting out some Delta blues on top of a fence at 3am, only to be socked in the head by a shoe from an irate dog who has an early morning conference call at a fire hydrant.

Whenever I watch animals in movies, especially those in large, chaotic scenes, I really wish I could see a recognizable facial expression to gauge how they're handling it. They have no idea that they're in a movie, that everything around them is make believe. As far as they're concerned, when the Persians use their elephants to mow down a bunch of greased up man-humans, that shit is on. It'll probably take some amount of coaxing and elephant-therapy afterwards to convince them that everyone is still alive, and that they are not to take swift, deadly revenge when the cast is taking a snack break between shots. If horses could show facial expression, I'd imagine we'd see one of sheer panic and exhiliration on the faces of every horse in every epic battle scene in a movie. They're probably thinking "WHAT THE FUCK 2 MINUTES AGO ALL THESE HUMANS WERE SHARING WATER AND MINGLING NOW WE HAVE TO KILL THEM OH JESUS MARY WHY WHY WHY...!"

I think humans would make terrible animal extras in movies. At least horses and elephants are simple minded enough to follow directions and probably equate any dumb task with being rewarded by food at the end anyway. Humans would probably start reasoning and deconstructing why they're being used as attack beasts against random hordes of bears, while a crew of cats films it all. Every shot would be ruined by humans either weaseling their way out of it, freaking the hell out, getting their faces inconveniently slashed off by a bear, or somehow managing to unionize. They'd have to CGI every human attack animal in post.