ANIMALS DOWN THE SHOPS

Animals, what good are they? They just hang around making noises and doing shits on things. Let's put them to some use. Let's get them spending. Let's get animals down the shops. Let's train animals to buy and get them contributing to the economy. They aren't contributing in their own trivial little ecosystem so it's time to get them involved in the real system. Train them to work and earn and consume. They'll learn to love it. Magpies already like shiny things.

Just think of the business we could drum up: furniture for bird nests, shoes for spiders, wigs for bald eagles, contact lenses for bats, mittens for lobsters, lingerie for dogs. Enough with the feral, let's get financial! Creature consumers consuming creature comforts! I can see the cash flooding into our pockets now!

Let's make animals hate themselves so they'll buy stuff to like themselves more. Let's make birds ashamed of their wings. We'll make birds believe that flying is a lot of exertion and embarrassingly old fashioned. We'll get them to see their wings as ugly twitchy flaps. That way we can sell them airplane tickets and specially designed jackets that hide their foul feathery appendages. Let's make it so ants want to be individuals. We could make hats for ants and they could all get different types so that they feel unique - cowboy hats, bowler hats, baseball caps. They'll probably still behave the same way, all regimented and routined, but they'll perceive themselves to be free spirits and perception is all that matters in this post-reality age.

'Rhinos, reindeer and gnus of the wild, what are those horns and antlers upon your heads but elaborate head warts and cranial verrucas? Worry not, a pricy yet inexpensive procedure will be made available so you can be shorn of your unsightly shame.' 

That's the way we should be talking to beasts. The animal kingdom is an untapped market. The way to get them shopping is to make them ashamed of their fur and beaks and primitive abodes. We'll have them eating out of our hands and filling our bank accounts.

I think it's a great idea and I've been trying to get things up and running for a while now. Ten years ago I had a goldfish and I convinced it that it really should be silver, like other normal fish. I made him really ashamed of his crass and flashy colouring so he set about earning money to buy a form of scale dye I'd developed. He earned his money by doing tricks, allowing Steve-O from Jackass drink him and puke him back out into his bowl, that kind of thing. Sadly the acclaim the fish received went to his head. The combination of adulation and self-loathing made him a very confused little fish. He ended up spending all his money on drugs and passed away in a motel room. That's the danger of excess. What a waste of life. A potential consumer no more. I didn't know what to do with all the bottles of scale dye I was left with but then I had a bright idea and sold the stuff to chameleons. I told them they needed it to get themselves 'noticed'.

Oh yeah, and another time I sold a rasher sandwich to a pig. He didn't really enjoy it but apparently eating it made him feel more 'human'.