You may recall the Monty Python sketch involving a
mouse
organ, where mice were trained to squeak at different
notes and their tails were then hit with hammers in
order
to produce a melody. A demonstration of said keyboard
was swiftly interrupted by a swarm of irate audience
members who
pursued the miscreant relentlessly. I can't
remember if the sketch ended or how it did, if it did. I
hereby pre-empt a similar reaction to this.
Also, I really, really miss Pina Collider.
This is not the kind of thing a vegan should think.
Nevertheless I have, and it can be made vegan.
There is a nature reserve in Greater London referred to
as
the London Wetland Centre, and it' sounds really good.
However, it can be abbreviated to LWC, which appears at
first glance to stand for Large Wildlife Collider. This
could
be done. I'm not saying it should be done, merely that it
could be.
In order to construct the Large Wildlife Collider, a
hitherto
relatively unspoilt corner of Greater London must be
cleared and replaced by two linear induction railguns
facing each other. A pair of large organisms should then
be magnetised in some way, perhaps by giving them
malaria, tattooing them all over with iron-based inks or
implanting large subcutaneous lumps of iron. They
should
then be placed in evacuated tunnels in the railgun and
accelerated towards each other at speed until they
collide
at the centre to produce a hybrid organism.
Examples:
A sheep at one end and a kangaroo at the other could be
electromagnetically combined to produce, well, a woolly
jumper.
A parrot and a cat could be fired at each other to
produce
either a carrot or a pat.
A blue whale and a redwood tree could be shot at each
other to produce a purplewood treewhale.
Two cats could be propelled towards each other to please
[8th of 7]. Possibly a lion and a tiger because after all
this
is a _large_ wildlife collider.
Ah well [nineteenthly], I hear you say, this idea is not
very
vegan at all is it? In fact it's decidedly non-vegan. This
is
true and it worries me somewhat. Therefore I propose a
solution: only do it with non-animals or cadavers of
animals, perhaps recently killed. Send people out to
observe megafauna which is about to die, then airlift it
to
the LWC, tattoo it appropriately and twang it into a tree
proceeding rapidly towards it in the opposite direction.
If the creatures concerned are merely brain-dead, it
would
be possible to investigate the results of combining their
anatomy suddenly in order to see their immune systems
fighting it out until only one survives, rather like Robot
Wars.
Alternatively, non-animal matter could be involved, so
maybe an enormous colony of honey fungus could be
catapulted towards that colony of sea grass in the
Mediterranean. In certain circumstances, the individual
cells of the organisms concerned could become combined
in such a way as to produce a mosaic or chimera of two
different species, and if the species are sufficiently
invasive and non-animal, fewer people would see this as
cruel.
I suspect the most successful results would be achieved
by
the combination of sponges and other extremely soft
organisms such as slime moulds. Apparently there's a
sponge the size of a van off the coast of Hawai`i, so if
two
sponges around that size of different species could be
found, this would be instructive. Also, a slime mould
and
a sponge would be genuinely interesting, perhaps a
freshwater sponge.
Alternatively, maybe we should just shoot dinosaur
fossils.